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.

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• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘Mom? Mom – you’re breaking up, I can’t hear you. It’s like a tornado out here. I’ll call you back when I’m out of the city,’ said Jerome, which was childish, but for the moment he and his siblings formed an inviolable gang of three, and he would not be the one to break the delicate bond into which a little coincidence had delivered them. The Belsey children repaired to a nearby cafe´. They sat on stools lined up against the windowpane, looking out over the blasted heath of Boston Common. They caught up with each other’s news casually, leaving long, cosy gaps of silence in which to go to work on their muffins and coffees. Jerome – after two months of having to be witty and brilliant in a strange town among strangers – appreciated the gift of it. People talk about the happy quiet that can exist between two lovers, but this too was great; sitting between his sister and his brother, saying nothing, eating. Before the world existed, before it was populated, and before there were wars and jobs and colleges and movies and clothes and opinions and foreign travel – before all of these things there had been only one person, Zora, and only one place: a tent in the living room made from chairs and bed-sheets. After a few years, Levi arrived; space was made for him; it was as if he had always been. Looking at them both now, Jerome found himself in their finger joints and neat conch ears, in their long legs and wild curls. He  On Beauty heard himself in their partial lisps caused by puffy tongues vibrating against slightly noticeable buckteeth. He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away. ‘Remember that?’ Jerome asked Zora, nodding at the Common across the way. ‘My big reconciliation idea. Dumb idea. How are they anyway?’ The scene of that family outing was presently stripped of all its leaves and colour in such a radical fashion it was difficult to imagine any of it growing green again. ‘They’re doing OK. They’re married, so. They’re as good as can be expected,’ said Zora, and slid off her stool to get some more half and half and a slice of cheesecake. Somehow if you ordered the cheesecake as an afterthought it had fewer calories in it. ‘It’s hardest on you,’ said Jerome, not looking at Levi but referring to him. ‘You have to be there all the time. It’s like you’re in the belly of the beast.’ Levi glossed over this accusation of stoicism: ‘Eyeano. It’s all right, man. I’m out a lot. You know.’

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Let me therefore primly limit myself, in describing Annabel, to saying she was a lovely child a few months my junior. Her parents were old friends of my aunt’s, and as stuffy as she. They had rented a villa not far from Hotel Mirana. Bald brown Mr. Leigh and fat, powdered Mrs. Leigh (born Vanessa van Ness). How I loathed them! At first, Annabel and I talked of peripheral affairs. She kept lifting handfuls of fine sand and letting it pour through her fingers. Our brains were turned the way those of intelligent European preadolescents were in our day and set, and I doubt if much individual genius should be assigned to our interest in the plurality of inhabited worlds, competitive tennis, infinity, solipsism and so on. The softness and fragility of baby animals caused us the same intense pain. She wanted to be a nurse in some famished Asiatic country; I wanted to be a famous spy. All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other’s soul and flesh; but there we were, unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do. After one wild attempt we made to meet at night in her garden (of which more later), the only privacy we were allowed was to be out of earshot but not out of sight on the populous part of the plage. There, on the soft sand, a few feet away from our elders, we would sprawl all morning, in a petrified paroxysm of desire, and take advantage of every blessed quirk in space and time to touch each other: her hand, half-hidden in the sand, would creep toward me, its slender brown fingers sleepwalking nearer and nearer; then, her opalescent knee would start on a long cautious journey; sometimes a chance rampart built by younger children granted us sufficient concealment to graze each other’s salty lips; these incomplete contacts drove our healthy and inexperienced young bodies to such a state of exasperation that not even the cold blue water, under which we still clawed at each other, could bring relief. Among some treasures I lost during the wanderings of my adult years, there was a snapshot taken by my aunt which showed Annabel, her parents and the staid, elderly, lame gentleman, a Dr.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  After all, we have bred dogs to be human companions, so they, like us, are truly social creatures. If any non-human animals were to be capable of emotion, dogs would seem to be prime candidates. Just a couple of decades ago, it took the Russian scientist Dimitri Belyaev only about forty generations to transform wild foxes into something that approximated domesticated dogs. Each time female foxes gave birth, Belyaev chose the fox pups who were most interested in and least aggressive toward humans and selectively bred them. The experimentally bred beasts looked like dogs; their skulls were shorter and they had wider muzzles, curly tails, and floppy ears, even though Belyaev did not select for these features. Their chemical makeup was closer to dogs than foxes. And they had a strong motivation to interact with humans. Modern dogs also have long been bred for certain desirable characteristics, like attaching to a human caregiver, and other characteristics surely have come along for the ride, perhaps even something like human emotion concepts. 28 One of those inadvertently bred characteristics, I speculate, is a certain kind of dog nervous system. We can regulate a dog’s body budget, and dogs can regulate ours in turn. (I wouldn’t be surprised if dogs and their human owners even synchronize their heart rates, the way close humans do for each other.) We also probably selected for dogs with eyes that we perceive as expressive and facial muscles that move easily to serve as a canvas upon which we can paint complex mental states. We love dogs so much that we bred them to love us back, or at least to see them as loving us. We treat them as little almost- humans with four legs and a fur coat. But do dogs experience or perceive human emotion? 29 Dogs, like other mammals, feel affect. No big surprise here. One way they appear to express affect is by wagging their tails. They apparently make larger tail-wagging movements to the right during pleasant events, such as seeing their owner, and to the left for unpleasant events, such as seeing an unfamiliar dog. The choice of side has been associated with brain activity: wagging to the right is said to mean relatively greater activity on the left side of the brain, and vice versa. 30 Dogs also appear to look at each other’s tails to perceive affect. They’re more relaxed when they view movies of right-wagging tails and more stressed for left-wagging tails, as measured by heart rate and other factors. Dogs also appear to perceive affect in the faces and voices of humans. I haven’t come across any relevant brain-imaging experiments on dogs, but if they have affect, it stands to reason that they have some sort of interoceptive network. Just how large their affective niche is no one knows, but given their social nature, I’ll bet it is yoked to their owners in some way.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  And I, lighter than by the other passages, went on so that without any toil I was following the fleet spirits upward, when Virgil began: “Love, kindled by virtue, hath ever kindled other love, if but its flame were shown forth: wherefore from that hour when Juvenal,2 who made thy affection manifest to me, descended among us in the limbo of Hell my good will towards thee hath been such as never yet did bind to an unseen person, so that now these stairs will seem short to me. But tell me, and as a friend forgive me if too great confidence slacken my rein, and talk with me now as with a friend: how could avarice find place in thy breast, amid so much wisdom as by thy diligence thou wast filled with?” These words first moved Statius a little to laughter; then he answered: “Every word of thine is a precious token of love to me. Truly many times things appear that give false matter for doubting, because of the true reasons which are hidden. Thy question proves to me thy belief to be, that I was avaricious in the other life, perchance because of that circle where I was. Now know that avarice was too far parted from me, and this excess thousands of moons have punished; and were it not that I set straight my inclination, when I gave heed to the lines where thou exclaimest, angered as ’twere against human nature: ‘Wherefore dost thou not regulate the lust of mortals, O hallowed hunger of gold?’—at the rolling I should feel the grievous jousts.3 Then I perceived that our hands could open their wings too wide in spending, and I repented of that as well as of other sins. How many will rise again with shorn locks,4 through ignorance, which taketh away repentance of this sin during life and at the last hour! And know that the offence which repels any sin by its direct opposite, here, together with it, dries up its luxuriance.5 Therefore if I, to purge me, have been among that people who bewail avarice, this hath befallen me because of its contrary.” “Now when thou didst sing of the savage strife of Jocasta’s twofold sorrow,” said the singer of the Bucolic lays, “by that which Clio touches with thee there, it seems not that faith had yet made thee faithful, without which good works are not enough.6 If this be so, what sun or what candles dispelled the darkness for thee, so that thou didst thereafter set thy sails to follow the Fisherman?”7 And he to him: “Thou first didst send me towards Parnassus to drink in its caves, and then didst light me on to God. Thou didst like one who goes by night, and carries the light behind him, and profits not himself, but maketh persons wise that follow him,

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  College girls who recognized him there would besiege him for autographs, and he would put them off with witty remarks. In the summers he would retire to his country house in Vermont, composing at a Bechstein under a slanting skylight, emerging from his studio to make clever conversation with the poets and young composers who followed him there. He would devote three hours a day to writing his autobiography—in a style he described as somewhere between Proust and Evelyn Waugh (his favorite authors). And then there would be women. Wagnerian sopranos with great dimpled asses out of Peter Paul Rubens. (Charlie had a great partiality for plump—even fat—women. He always thought I was too skinny and my ass too small. If we’d stayed together I probably would have become elephantine.) After the fat sopranos came the literary ladies: women poets who dedicated books to him, women sculptors obsessed with having him pose in the nude, women novelists who found him so fascinating they made him the central figure in their romans à clef. He might never marry, not even for the sake of having children. Children (as he often said) were boring. Boring (pronounced as if in italics) was always one of his favorite words. But it was not his ultimate condemnation (nor was banal though he favored that too). Vulgar was his ultimate word of scorn. People, of course, could be vulgar, as could books and music and paintings—but food could also be vulgar with Charles. As he once said when his famous uncle took him to Le Pavillon: “These crepes are vulgar.” He pronounced it with a great gap between the two syllables—as if between vul and gar he was trembling on the brink of a revelation. Pronunciation was also a big thing with Charles. After all this, I have neglected to say the most important thing of all—namely, that I was madly in love with him (with the accent on the mad). The cynicism came later. To me he was not a pompous, pimply young man, but a figure of legendary charm, a future Lenny Bernstein. I knew that his family (with their champagne-silk, decorator-decorated living-room-under-plastic-covers) was a hundred times more vulgar even than mine. I sensed that Charlie was more snobbish than he was intelligent. I knew he never bathed, never used deodorant, and wiped his ass inadequately (as if he were still hoping his mommy would come to the rescue), but I was crazy about him. I let him condescend to me. After all, he was a devotee of the most universal of the arts: music. I was a lowly, literal-minded scribe. Most important, he was a piano player like my piano-playing father. When he sat down at the keyboard, my underpants got wet. Those continuos! Those crescendos! Those sharps! Those flats!

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  It never occurred to him that he was part of any pattern. “I’m the only man you’ve ever met you can’t categorize,” he said triumphantly. And then he waited for me to categorize the others. And I obliged. Oh I knew I was making my life into a song-and-dance routine, a production number, a shaggy dog story, a sick joke, a bit. I thought of all the longing, the pain, the letters (sent and unsent), the crying jags, the telephone monologues, the suffering, the rationalizing, the analyzing which had gone into each of these relationships, each of these relationdinghies, each of these relationliners. I knew that the way I described them was a betrayal of their complexity, their humanity, their confusion. Life has no plot. It is far more interesting than anything you can say about it because language, by its very nature, orders things and life really has no order. Even those writers who respect the beautiful anarchy of life and try to get it all into their books, wind up making it seem much more ordered than it ever was and do not, finally, tell the truth. Because no writer can ever tell the truth about life, namely that it is much more interesting than any book. And no writer can tell the truth about people—which is that they are much more interesting than any characters. “So stop philosophizing about bloody writing and tell me about your first husband,” Adrian said. “OK. OK.” NINE Pandora’s Box or My Two Mothers A woman is her mother. That’s the main thing. —Anne Sexton O f course it all began with my mother. My mother: Judith Stoloff White, also known as Jude. Not obscure. But hard to get down on paper. My love for her and my hate for her are so bafflingly intertwined that I can hardly see her. I never know who is who. She is me and I am she and we are all together. The umbilical cord which connects us has never been cut so it has sickened and rotted and turned black. The very intensity of our need has made us denounce each other. We want to eat each other up. We want to strangle each other with love. We want to run screaming from each other in panic before either of these things can happen. When I think of my mother I envy Alexander Portnoy. If only I had a real Jewish mother—easily pigeonholed and filed away—a real literary property. (I am always envying writers their relatives: Nabokov and Lowell and Tucci with their closets full of elegant aristocratic skeletons, Roth and Bellow and Friedman with their pop parents, sticky as Passover wine, greasy as matzoh-ball soup.) My mother smelled of Joy or Diorissimo , and she didn’t cook much.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Yes, they’re largely the same.” 1 Figure 12-1: Rowdy Some scientists are not so sure. They suggest that emotions in animals are just illusions: that Rowdy has brain circuits that trigger behaviors for survival but not for emotion. From their perspective, Rowdy can approach or withdraw in dominance or submission, to defend his territory or to avoid a threat. In these instances, the argument goes, Rowdy might experience pleasure, pain, arousal, or other varieties of affect, but he does not have the mental machinery to experience more than that. This latter explanation is deeply unsatisfying because it denies our own experiences. Millions of pet owners would bet money that their dogs growl in anger, droop in sadness, and hide their heads in shame. It’s hard to conceive that these perceptions are illusions built around some general affective responses. 2 I myself have succumbed to the allure of animal emotions. For years, my daughter has maintained a herd of guinea pigs in her bedroom. One day, we acquired a small baby, Cupcake. Every night for the first week, all by herself in a strange pen, Cupcake sounded like she was crying. I’d carry her around in my sweater pocket, all warm and cozy, which made her chirp with happiness. Whenever I approached the cage, the other pigs would squeal and run away, but little Cupcake would sit still as if waiting for me to pick her up, and then immediately crawl into the crook of my neck for a nuzzle. In those moments, it was very hard to resist the belief that she loved me. For many months, Cupcake was my late-night companion. She would nestle in my lap, purring, as I worked at my desk. Everyone in our house suspected that Cupcake was actually a puppy trapped in a guinea pig’s body. And yet, as a scientist, I knew that my perceptions did not necessarily reveal what little Cupcake was actually feeling. In this chapter, we’ll systematically explore what animals are capable of feeling, based on their brain circuitry and on experimental research. We’ll have to set aside our fond feelings for our pets, as well as the essentialist theory of human nature, to look carefully at the evidence. Scientists pretty much agree that many of the earth’s animals, from insects to worms to humans, share the same basic nervous system plan. They even agree, more or less, that animal brains were built according to the same general blueprint. But as anyone who has renovated a house has learned, the devil is in the details when translating a blueprint into reality.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  The moment, the death I had kept conjuring up for three years was as simple as a bit of dry wood. She was frankly and hugely pregnant. Her head looked smaller (only two seconds had passed really, but let me give them as much wooden duration as life can stand), and her palefreckled cheeks were hollowed, and her bare shins and arms had lost all their tan, so that the little hairs showed. She wore a brown, sleeveless cotton dress and sloppy felt slippers. “We—e—ell!” she exhaled after a pause with all the emphasis of wonder and welcome. “Husband at home?” I croaked, fist in pocket. I could not kill her, of course, as some have thought. You see, I loved her. It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight. “Come in,” she said with a vehement cheerful note. Against the splintery deadwood of the door, Dolly Schiller flattened herself as best she could (even rising on tiptoe a little) to let me pass, and was crucified for a moment, looking down, smiling down at the threshold, hollow-cheeked with round pommettes, her watered-milk-white arms outspread on the wood. I passed without touching her bulging babe. Dolly-smell, with a faint fried addition. My teeth chattered like an idiot’s. “No, you stay out” (to the dog). She closed the door and followed me and her belly into the dollhouse parlor. “Dick’s down there,” she said pointing with an invisible tennis racket, inviting my gaze to travel from the drab parlor-bedroom where we stood, right across the kitchen, and through the backdoorway where, in a rather primitive vista, a dark-haired young stranger in overalls, instantaneously reprieved, was perched with his back to me on a ladder fixing something near or upon the shack of his neighbor, a plumper fellow with only one arm, who stood looking up. This pattern she explained from afar, apologetically (“Men will be men”); should she call him in? No. Standing in the middle of the slanting room and emitting questioning “hm’s,” she made familiar Javanese gestures with her wrists and hands, offering me, in a brief display of humorous courtesy, to choose between a rocker and the divan (their bed after ten P.M.). I say “familiar” because one day she had welcomed me with the same wrist dance to her party in Beardsley. We both sat down on the divan. Curious: although actually her looks had faded, I definitely realized, so hopelessly late in the day, how much she looked—had always looked—like Botticelli’s russet Venus—the same soft nose, the same blurred beauty. In my pocket my fingers gently let go and repacked a little at the tip, within the handkerchief it was nested in, my unused weapon. “That’s not the fellow I want,” I said.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I suppose I am especially susceptible to the magic of games. In my chess sessions with Gaston I saw the board as a square pool of limpid water with rare shells and stratagems rosily visible upon the smooth tessellated bottom, which to my confused adversary was all ooze and squid-cloud. Similarly, the initial tennis coaching I had inflicted on Lolita—prior to the revelations that came to her through the great Californian’s lessons—remained in my mind as oppressive and distressful memories—not only because she had been so hopelessly and irritatingly irritated by every suggestion of mine—but because the precious symmetry of the court instead of reflecting the harmonies latent in her was utterly jumbled by the clumsiness and lassitude of the resentful child I mistaught. Now things were different, and on that particular day, in the pure air of Champion, Colorado, on that admirable court at the foot of steep stone stairs leading up to Champion Hotel where we had spent the night, I felt I could rest from the nightmare of unknown betrayals within the innocence of her style, of her soul, of her essential grace. She was hitting hard and flat, with her usual effortless sweep, feeding me deep skimming balls—all so rhythmically coordinated and overt as to reduce my footwork to, practically, a swinging stroll—crack players will understand what I mean. My rather heavily cut serve that I had been taught by my father who had learned it from Decugis or Borman, old friends of his and great champions, would have seriously troubled my Lo, had I really tried to trouble her. But who would upset such a lucid dear? Did I ever mention that her bare arm bore the 8 of vaccination? That I loved her hopelessly? That she was only fourteen? An inquisitive butterfly passed, dipping, between us. Two people in tennis shorts, a red-haired fellow only about eight years my junior, with sunburnt bright pink shins, and an indolent dark girl with a moody mouth and hard eyes, about two years Lolita’s senior, appeared from nowhere. As is common with dutiful tyros, their rackets were sheathed and framed, and they carried them not as if they were the natural and comfortable extensions of certain specialized muscles, but hammers or blunderbusses or wimbles, or my own dreadful cumbersome sins. Rather unceremoniously seating themselves near my precious coat, on a bench adjacent to the court, they fell to admiring very vocally a rally of some fifty exchanges that Lo innocently helped me to foster and uphold—until there occurred a syncope in the series causing her to gasp as her overhead smash went out of court, whereupon she melted into winsome merriment, my golden pet.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Vulgar was his ultimate word of scorn. People, of course, could be vulgar, as could books and music and paintings—but food could also be vulgar with Charles. As he once said when his famous uncle took him to Le Pavillon: “These crepes are vulgar. ” He pronounced it with a great gap between the two syllables—as if between vul and gar he was trembling on the brink of a revelation. Pronunciation was also a big thing with Charles. After all this, I have neglected to say the most important thing of all—namely, that I was madly in love with him (with the accent on the mad ). The cynicism came later. To me he was not a pompous, pimply young man, but a figure of legendary charm, a future Lenny Bernstein. I knew that his family (with their champagne-silk, decorator-decorated living-room-under-plastic-covers) was a hundred times more vulgar even than mine. I sensed that Charlie was more snobbish than he was intelligent. I knew he never bathed, never used deodorant, and wiped his ass inadequately (as if he were still hoping his mommy would come to the rescue), but I was crazy about him. I let him condescend to me. After all, he was a devotee of the most universal of the arts: music. I was a lowly, literal-minded scribe. Most important, he was a piano player like my piano-playing father. When he sat down at the keyboard, my underpants got wet. Those continuos! Those crescendos! Those sharps! Those flats! You know that awful expression “tickle the ivories"? That was how Charlie drove me wild. Sometimes we even used to fuck on the piano bench with the metronome going. We met in a funny way. On television. What can be funnier than a poetry reading on television? It isn’t poetry and it isn’t television. It’s “educational"—if you’ll excuse the expression. The program was on Channel 13 and it was a kind of salad of the seven arts—none of them lively. Why it was considered educational was anyone’s guess. There were seven young “artists” each of whom had four minutes to do his (or her) stuff. Then there was a puffy-eyed, pipe-smoking old fart with a name like Phillips Hardtack who interviewed each of us, asking us incisive questions like “what, in your opinion, is Inspiration?” or “what influence did your childhood have on your work?” For these questions (and about ten others) another four minutes was allotted. Apart from hosting shows like this, Hardtack hacked out his living writing book reviews and posing for whiskey ads—two occupations which have more in common than appears on the surface. The Scotch was always “light” and “mild” and the books were always “stark” and “powerful.” All you had to do was crank Hardtack up and out came the adjectives. Sometimes, however, he got them confused and called a book “light” and “mild” while he called the Scotch “stark” and “powerful.”

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  And nought availed her the report that she was found unterrified together with Amyclas,13 when sounded that man’s voice, who struck all the world with terror; and nought availed her to have been so constant and undaunted, that she, when Mary stayed below, mounted the cross with Christ.14 But, lest I should proceed too covertly, Francis and Poverty as these two lovers now accept in speech outspread. Their harmony and joyous semblance, made love and wonder and tender looks the cause of sacred thoughts; so that the venerable Bernard first cast off his sandals and ran to follow so great peace, and as he ran him thought him all too slow. Oh wealth unrecognized, oh fertile good! Unsandals him Egidius, unsandals him Sylvester, following the spouse, so doth the bride delight. Thence took his way, this father and this master, together with his lady, and with the household already binding on the humble cord;15 nor abjectness of heart weighed down his brow, that he was Pietro Bernadone’s son, nor that he seemed so marvellous despised. But royally his stern intent to Innocent revealed he, and from him had the first16 imprint upon his Order. When the poor folk increased, after his track whose marvellous life were better sung in heaven’s glory,17 then was the holy will of this chief shepherd circled with a second16 crown by Honorius at the eternal inspiration. And when, in thirst of martyrdom, in the proud presence of the Soldan, he preached Christ and his followers; and because he found the folk too crude against conversion,—not to stay in vain,—returned to gather fruit from the Italian herbage; then on the harsh rock18 between Tiber and Arno, from Christ did he receive that final16 imprint which his limbs two years carried. When it pleased him who for such good ordained him, to draw him up to his reward which he had earned in making himself lowly. to his brethren; as to his right heirs, his dearest lady he commended, and bade that they should love her faithfully; and from her bosom the illustrious soul willed to depart, turning to its own realm, and for its body would no other bier.19 Think now what he was, who was a worthy colleague20 to maintain the bark of Peter in deep sea towards the right sign! And such was our patriarch; wherefore who followeth him as he commandeth, thou must perceive, loadeth him with good wares. But his flock hath grown so greedy for new viands, it may not be but that through divers glades it strayeth; and the more his sheep distant and wandering depart from him, the emptier of milk they return foldwards. There are of them, indeed, who fear the loss and cleave close to the shepherd, but they are so few that little cloth doth furnish forth their cowls. Now if my words have not been faint, if thy listening hath been attent, if thou call back to mind what I have said,

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  not because merely I distrust my speech, but for my memory which may not re-ascend so far above itself unless another guide it. So much anent this point may I re-tell, that as I gazed upon her my affection was freed from every other longing, whilst the eternal joy which rayed direct on Beatrice was satisfying me with its derived aspect from the fair face. O’ercoming me with the light of a smile, she said1 to me: “Turn thee, and hearken, for not only in my eyes is Paradise.” As here sometimes we read the affection in the countenance, if it be so great that all the mind is taken up by it, so in the flaming of the sacred glow to which I turned me, I recognized the will in him yet further somewhat to discourse with me. He began: “In this fifth range of the tree which liveth from the summit, and ever beareth fruit, and never sheddeth leaf, are spirits blessed, who below, ere they came unto heaven, were of a great name, so that every Muse would be enriched by them. Wherefore gaze upon the horns of the cross; he whom I shall name shall there do the act which in a cloud its swift flame doth.” I saw a light drawn along the cross at the naming of Joshua, as it was done; nor was the word known to me ere the fact. And at the name of the lofty Maccabee I saw another move, wheeling, and gladness was the lash unto the top. Thus for Charlemagne and for Orlando two more were followed by my keen regard, as the eye followeth its falcon flying. Then drew my sight along that cross William and Rinoardo and the duke Godfrey, and Robert Guiscard.2 Thereon amongst the other lights, moving and mingling, the soul which had discoursed to me showed me his artist quality among heaven’s singers. I turned to my right side to see in Beatrice my duty, whether by speech or gesture indicated, and I saw her eyes so clear, so joyous, that her semblance surpassed all former usage and the last. And as by feeling more delight in doing well, man from day to day perceiveth that his virtue gaineth ground; so did I perceive that my circling round together with the heaven had increased its arc,3 seeing this miracle yet more adorned. And such change as cometh in short passage of time over a fair dame, when her countenance unburdeneth shame’s burden, was presented to my eyes, when I turned me, because of the white glow of the temperate sixth star4 which had received me into it. I saw in that torch of Jove the sparkling of the love which was therein signalling to my eyes our speech. And as birds, risen from the bank, as though rejoicing together o’er their pasture, make themselves now a round, now a long, flock,

• From On Beauty (2005)

  It was a kind of blissful un-selfing; a summer of un-Belsey; he had allowed the Kippses’ world and their ways to take him over entirely. He had liked to listen to the exotic (to a Belsey) chatter of business and money and practical politics; to hear that Equality was a myth, and Multiculturalism a fatuous dream; he thrilled at the suggestion that Art was a gift from God, blessing only a handful of masters, and most Literature merely a veil for poorly reasoned left-wing ideologies. He had put up a weak show of fighting these ideas, but only so that he might enjoy all the more the sensation of the family’s ridicule – to hear once again how typically liberal, academic and wishy-washy were his own thoughts. When Monty suggested that minority groups too often demand equal rights they haven’t earned, Jerome had allowed this strange new idea to penetrate him without complaint and sunk further back into the receiving sofa. When Michael argued that being black was not an identity but an accidental matter of pigment, Jerome had not given a traditionally hysterical Belsey answer – ‘Try telling that to the Klansman coming at you with a burning cross’ – but rather vowed to think less of his identity in the future. One by one the gods of the Belseys toppled.  kipps and belsey I’m so full of liberal crap , Jerome had thought happily, bowed his head low and pressed his knees into one of the little red cushions provided for kneeling in the Kippses’ pew of the local church. Long before Victoria arrived in the house, he was already in love. It was only that his general ardour for the family found its correct, specific vessel in Victoria – right age, right gender, and as beautiful as the idea of God. Victoria herself, flush with the social and sexual successes of her first summer abroad without her family, returned home to find a tolerable young man, weighed down by his virginity and satisfyingly unmanned by his desire for her. It seemed petty not to make a gift of her new-found loveliness (she had been what Caribbeans call a margar child) to a boy so obviously starved of the same quality. And he’d be gone by August anyway. They spent a week stealing kisses in shaded corners of the house and made love once, extremely badly, under the tree in the Kippses’ back garden.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Jerome, can I talk to your brother, please?’ ‘Mom? Mom – you’re breaking up, I can’t hear you. It’s like a tornado out here. I’ll call you back when I’m out of the city,’ said Jerome, which was childish, but for the moment he and his siblings formed an inviolable gang of three, and he would not be the one to break the delicate bond into which a little coincidence had delivered them. The Belsey children repaired to a nearby cafe´. They sat on stools lined up against the windowpane, looking out over the blasted heath of Boston Common. They caught up with each other’s news casually, leaving long, cosy gaps of silence in which to go to work on their muffins and coffees. Jerome – after two months of having to be witty and brilliant in a strange town among strangers – appreciated the gift of it. People talk about the happy quiet that can exist between two lovers, but this too was great; sitting between his sister and his brother, saying nothing, eating. Before the world existed, before it was populated, and before there were wars and jobs and colleges and movies and clothes and opinions and foreign travel – before all of these things there had been only one person, Zora, and only one place: a tent in the living room made from chairs and bed-sheets. After a few years, Levi arrived; space was made for him; it was as if he had always been. Looking at them both now, Jerome found himself in their finger joints and neat conch ears, in their long legs and wild curls. He  On Beauty heard himself in their partial lisps caused by puffy tongues vibrating against slightly noticeable buckteeth. He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away. ‘Remember that?’ Jerome asked Zora, nodding at the Common across the way. ‘My big reconciliation idea. Dumb idea. How are they anyway?’ The scene of that family outing was presently stripped of all its leaves and colour in such a radical fashion it was difficult to imagine any of it growing green again. ‘They’re doing OK. They’re married, so. They’re as good as can be expected,’ said Zora, and slid off her stool to get some more half and half and a slice of cheesecake. Somehow if you ordered the cheesecake as an afterthought it had fewer calories in it. ‘It’s hardest on you,’ said Jerome, not looking at Levi but referring to him. ‘You have to be there all the time. It’s like you’re in the belly of the beast.’ Levi glossed over this accusation of stoicism: ‘Eyeano. It’s all right, man. I’m out a lot. You know.’ ‘The stupid thing is,’ continued Jerome, fiddling with a ring on his pinkie finger, ‘Kiki still loves him. It’s so obvious.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  She raised it at once like a cat  on beauty and being wrong stretching, she held her stomach in – seemed to hold her breath, in fact – and only when he ceased touching her there did she breathe again. He had the sense that every time he touched an area of her body that area was at once moved out of his reach and then returned to his hand a moment later, restyled. ‘Oh, I so need you inside me,’ said Victoria and pushed her backside yet higher in the air. Howard tried to stretch over her, to touch the skin of her face; she moaned and took his fingers in her mouth, as if they were somebody else’s cock, and proceeded to suck them. ‘Tell me you want me. Tell me how much you want to fuck me,’ said Victoria. ‘I do . . . I . . . you’re so very . . . beautiful,’ whispered Howard, rising up on his heels a little and kissing the only bit of her that was really accessible to him, the small of her back. With a strong hand she pushed him back on to his knees. ‘Put it in me,’ she said. OK, then. Howard took hold of his cock and began the breach. He had imagined it would be hard to top the moaning that had already occurred, but, as he entered Victoria, she managed it, and Howard, who was not used to so much congratulation so early on in the procedure, feared he might have hurt her and now hesitated as to whether to push deeper. ‘Fuck me deeper!’ said Victoria. And so Howard pressed deeper three times, offering about half of his ample eight and a half inches, that happy accident of nature which, Kiki once suggested, was the true, primal reason why Howard was not still working as a butcher on the Dalston High Street. But with his fourth push the nerves and the tight-ness and the wine overpowered him, and he came in a small, shivery way that gave him no great pleasure. He fell forward on to Victoria and waited morosely for those familiar sounds of feminine disappointment. ‘Oh, God! Oh, God!’ said Victoria and convulsed dramatically. ‘Oh, I love it when you fuck me!’ Howard slid himself out and lay next to her on the bed. Victoria,  On Beauty now completely composed again, rolled over and kissed him maternally on the forehead. ‘That was delicious.’ ‘Mmm,’ said Howard. ‘I’m on the pill, so.’ Howard grimaced. He had not even asked. ‘Do you want me to blow you? I’d love to taste your cock.’ Howard sat up and made a grab for his trousers. ‘No, that’s all right, I . . . Jesus Christ.’ He looked at his watch, as if lateness were the problem here. ‘We have to get downstairs . . . I don’t know what just happened. This is insane. You’re my student.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  After all this, I have neglected to say the most important thing of all—namely, that I was madly in love with him (with the accent on the mad). The cynicism came later. To me he was not a pompous, pimply young man, but a figure of legendary charm, a future Lenny Bernstein. I knew that his family (with their champagne-silk, decorator-decorated living-room-under-plastic-covers) was a hundred times more vulgar even than mine. I sensed that Charlie was more snobbish than he was intelligent. I knew he never bathed, never used deodorant, and wiped his ass inadequately (as if he were still hoping his mommy would come to the rescue), but I was crazy about him. I let him condescend to me. After all, he was a devotee of the most universal of the arts: music. I was a lowly, literal-minded scribe. Most important, he was a piano player like my piano-playing father. When he sat down at the keyboard, my underpants got wet. Those continuos! Those crescendos! Those sharps! Those flats! You know that awful expression “tickle the ivories"? That was how Charlie drove me wild. Sometimes we even used to fuck on the piano bench with the metronome going. We met in a funny way. On television. What can be funnier than a poetry reading on television? It isn’t poetry and it isn’t television. It’s “educational"—if you’ll excuse the expression. The program was on Channel 13 and it was a kind of salad of the seven arts—none of them lively. Why it was considered educational was anyone’s guess. There were seven young “artists” each of whom had four minutes to do his (or her) stuff. Then there was a puffy-eyed, pipe-smoking old fart with a name like Phillips Hardtack who interviewed each of us, asking us incisive questions like “what, in your opinion, is Inspiration?” or “what influence did your childhood have on your work?” For these questions (and about ten others) another four minutes was allotted. Apart from hosting shows like this, Hardtack hacked out his living writing book reviews and posing for whiskey ads—two occupations which have more in common than appears on the surface. The Scotch was always “light” and “mild” and the books were always “stark” and “powerful.” All you had to do was crank Hardtack up and out came the adjectives. Sometimes, however, he got them confused and called a book “light” and “mild” while he called the Scotch “stark” and “powerful.” For twenty-year-old Scotch and geriatric authors who had published memoirs, Hardtack reserved the word “mellow.” And for young authors and Brand X’s Scotch, Hardtack had this automatic response: “Lacks smoothness.”

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  14 *Iugum sororium consponsae factionis, ne parenti- bus quidem visis, recta de navibus scopulum petunt illum praecipiti cum velocitate, nec venti ferentis oppertae praesentiam, licentiosa cum temeritate prosiliunt in altum. Nec immemor Zephyrus regalis edicti, quamvis invitus, susceptas eas gremio spirantis aurae solo reddidit. At illae incunctatae statim conferto vestigio domum penetrant, complexaeque praedam suam sorores nomine mentientes thesau- rumque penitus abditae fraudis vultu laeto tegentes, sic adulant : ‘ Psyche, non ita ut pridem parvula, et ipsa iam mater es. Quantum, putas, boni nobis in ista 220 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK V I may comfort myself with the sight of my sisters. I pray you by this lovely and fragrant hair of yours that hangs down, by these round cheeks, delicate and tender like mine own, by your pleasant warm breast, by that shape and face that I shall learn at length by the child in my belly, hear the solemn prayer of my anxious beseeching, grant the fruit of my desire that I may embrace my sisters, refresh your dear spouse Psyche with joy, who is bound and linked unto you forever. I little esteem to see your visage and figure, little do I regard the night and darkness, for I hold you in my arms, my only light.’ Her husband (being as it were enchanted with these words, and compelled by violence of her often em- bracing, wiping away her tears with his hair) did yield unto his wife, and promised that which she desired, and before morning was come departed as he accustomed to do. « Now her sisters, their plot well compacted, arrived on land, and without even visiting of their father and mother never rested till they came to the rock, and there leaped down rashly from the hill themselves, waiting not for the breeze that was to bear them; forgat not then Zephyrus the divine commandment, and brought them down in the bosom of the wind (though it were against his will) and laid them in the valley without any harm. By and by they went into the palace to their sister without leave, and when they had eftsoons embraced their prey, falsely assuming the shew of sisters, and hiding the store of their malice beneath a smiling face, with flattering words they said: ‘O dear sister Psyche, know you that you are now no more so slim and slender, but already almost a mother? O what great joy bear you unto us in your belly! What 221 LUCIUS APULEIUS geris perula, quantis gaudiis totam domum nostram hilarabis ! O nos beatas quas infantis aurei nutri- menta laetabunt! Qui si parentum, ut oportet, pulchritudini responderit, prorsus Cupido nascetur."

• From On Beauty (2005)

  You heading somewhere? You look very . . . aren’t you cold ?’ ‘No, not really – where’s Elisha? Lunch?’ Carl nodded and looked at his computer screen. He was in the middle of a sentence. Zora sat in Elisha’s chair, and moved it round the desk until it was next to Carl’s own. ‘You want to get some lunch?’ she asked. ‘We could go out. I’ve got no class till three.’ ‘You know . . . It’s like I would , ’cept I got all this shit to do . . . I might as well just stay and do it . . . and then it’ll be done.’ ‘Oh,’ said Zora. ‘Oh, OK.’ ‘No, I mean, another time’d be cool – but I’m having trouble concentrating – I keep on getting a lot of noise from outside. People hollering for an hour. You happen to know what’s going on out there?’ Zora stood, went to the window and opened the blind. ‘Some kind of Haitian protest thing,’ she said, pulling open the sash. ‘Oh, you can’t see it from this angle. They’re in the square handing out leaflets. It’s a big deal, lots of people. I guess there’s a march later.’ ‘I can’t see them, but I can hear them, man, they loud . What’s their beef anyway?’ ‘Minimum wage, getting shit on by everybody all the time – a lot of stuff, I guess.’ Zora closed the window and sat down. She leaned into Carl’s body to look at his computer. He covered the screen with his hands. ‘Aw, man – don’t be doing that – I ain’t even spellchecked it, man.’ Zora peeled his fingers from the monitor. ‘ Crossroads . . . The Tracy Chapman album?’ ‘No,’ said Carl, ‘the motif.’ ‘Oh, I see,’ said Zora in a teasing voice. ‘Pardon me. The motif .’ ‘You think I can’t know a word ’cos you know it, is that  on beauty and being wrong it?’ demanded Carl, and immediately regretted it. You couldn’t get angry with middle-class people like that – they got upset too quickly. ‘No – I – I mean, no, Carl, I didn’t mean it like that.’ ‘Oh, man . . . I know you didn’t. Calm down, there.’ He patted her hand softly. He couldn’t know about the electric whoosh that went through her body when he did that. Now she looked at him funny. ‘Why’re you looking at me weird like that?’ ‘No, I was just . . . I’m so proud of you.’ Carl laughed. ‘Seriously. You’re an amazing person. Look at what you’ve achieved, what you’re achieving every day.

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

  Then, regarding the consecration, performed by supernatural power, the people are first of all excited to devotion in the “Preface,” hence they are admonished “to lift up their hearts to the Lord,” and therefore when the “Preface” is ended the people devoutly praise Christ’s Godhead, saying with the angels: “Holy, Holy, Holy”; and His humanity, saying with the children: “Blessed is he that cometh.” In the next place the priest makes a “commemoration,” first of those for whom this sacrifice is offered, namely, for the whole Church, and “for those set in high places” (1 Tim. 2:2), and, in a special manner, of them “who offer, or for whom the mass is offered.” Secondly, he commemorates the saints, invoking their patronage for those mentioned above, when he says: “Communicating with, and honoring the memory,” etc. Thirdly, he concludes the petition when he says: “Wherefore that this oblation,” etc., in order that the oblation may be salutary to them for whom it is offered. Then he comes to the consecration itself. Here he asks first of all for the effect of the consecration, when he says: “Which oblation do Thou, O God,” etc. Secondly, he performs the consecration using our Saviour’s words, when he says: “Who the day before,” etc. Thirdly, he makes excuse for his presumption in obeying Christ’s command, saying: “Wherefore, calling to mind,” etc. Fourthly, he asks that the sacrifice accomplished may find favor with God, when he says: “Look down upon them with a propitious,” etc. Fifthly, he begs for the effect of this sacrifice and sacrament, first for the partakers, saying: “We humbly beseech Thee”; then for the dead, who can no longer receive it, saying: “Be mindful also, O Lord,” etc.; thirdly, for the priests themselves who offer, saying: “And to us sinners,” etc. Then follows the act of receiving the sacrament. First of all, the people are prepared for Communion; first, by the common prayer of the congregation, which is the Lord’s Prayer, in which we ask for our daily bread to be given us; and also by private prayer, which the priest puts up specially for the people, when he says: “Deliver us, we beseech Thee, O Lord,” etc. Secondly, the people are prepared by the “Pax” which is given with the words, “Lamb of God,” etc., because this is the sacrament of unity and peace, as stated above ([4705]Q[73], A[4];[4706] Q[79], A[1]). But in masses for the dead, in which the sacrifice is offered not for present peace, but for the repose of the dead, the “Pax” is omitted. Then follows the reception of the sacrament, the priest receiving first, and afterwards giving it to others, because, as Dionysius says (Eccl. Hier. iii), he who gives Divine things to others, ought first to partake thereof himself.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  A day later he called me up. I didn’t remember him. Then he said that he wanted to set my poems to music, so I met him for dinner. I’ve always been very naive about ploys like that. “Come up to my apartment and let me set your poems to music” and I always come. Or at least go. But Charlie surprised me. He looked scrawny and unwashed and hook-nosed when he came to my door, but in the restaurant he displayed his gigantic knowledge of Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart and Gershwin: all the songs my father had played on the piano when I was a kid. Even the obscure Cole Porter songs, the almost-forgotten Rodgers and Hart songs from obscure musicals, the least-known Gershwin songs—he knew them all. He knew even more of them than me—with my total recall for catchy lines. It was then that I fell absurdly in love with him, transformed him from an unwashed hook- nosed frog—into a prince—a piano-playing Jewish prince at that. As soon as he recited the last stanza of “Let’s Do It” and got the words all right, I was ready to do it with him. A simple case of Oedipussy. We went home to bed. But Charlie was so overwhelmed by his good luck that he wilted. “Conduct me,” I said. “I seem to have lost my baton.” “Well then, do it like Mitropoulos—with your bare hands.” “You’re a real find,” he said, thrashing around under the covers. But, hand or baton, it was hopeless. His teeth were chattering and great shudders were shaking his shoulders. He was gasping for breath like an emphysema patient. “What’s the matter?” I asked. “It’s just that you’re such a find, I can’t believe it.” He seemed to be sobbing and choking alternately. “Will you see me again in spite of this?” he pleaded. “You promise you won’t hold this against me?” “What kind of ghoul do you think I am?” I was astonished. All my maternal instincts had been roused by his helplessness. “What kind of creep would throw you out?” “The last one this happened with,” he moaned. “She threw me out and tossed my clothes to me in the hall. She forgot one sock. I had to go home on the subway with one bare ankle. It was the most humiliating experience of my life.” “Darling,” I said, rocking him. I guess I should have been tipped off about Charlie’s emotional instability by his sobbing and choking and shuddering—but not me. For me this only confirmed his sensitivity. The Prince and the Pea. It was understandable. Opening nights got him down. We could always sing Cole Porter together instead of fucking. But instead he fell asleep in my arms. He slept like no one I’ve ever known. He wheezed and sputtered and farted and thrashed. He groaned and shuddered. He even picked his pimples in his sleep. I stayed up half the night watching him in utter amazement.