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)

  She sat up and began to unwind that long plait of hers. Howard lifted his hands up to help her. Coils of long afro hair came free and sprang wide and short until the halo from the old days surrounded her face. She undid his zip and took him into her hands. Slowly, steadily, sensuously, expertly, she manipulated him. She began whispering in his ear. Her accent grew thick and Southern and filthy. For reasons private and old she was now in character as a Hawaiian fishwife called Wakiki. The fatal thing about Wakiki was her sense of humour – she’d bring you to the edge of abandon and then say something so funny that everything fell apart. Not funny to anyone else. Funny to Howard. Funny to Kiki. Laughing hard now, Howard lay back and pulled Kiki on top of him. She had a way of hovering closely there without putting all her weight on him. Kiki’s legs had always been strong as hell. She kissed him again, straightened up and crouched over him. He reached out like a child for her breasts and she placed them in his hands. She lifted her belly with her own hand and then pushed her husband inside herself. Home! But this happened sooner than Howard had expected, and he was partly saddened, for he knew  on beauty and being wrong like she knew that he was out of practice and therefore doomed. He could survive on top, or behind, or spooning, or any of the many other marital familiars. He was a stayer in those positions. He was a champion. They used to spend hours spooned next to each other, moving gently back and forth, speaking of the day, of funny things that had happened, of some foible of Murdoch’s, even of the children. But if she crouched above him, the giant breasts bouncing and developing their coating of sweat, her beautiful face working intently on what she wanted, the strange genius of her muscles clasping and unclasping him – well, then he had three and a half minutes, tops. For ten or so years, this was a cause of enormous sexual frustration between them. Here was her favourite position; here was his inability to withstand the pleasure of it. But life is long, and so is marriage. There came a breakthrough one year when Kiki found herself able to work with his excitement so as to somehow stimulate new muscles, and these sped her along in time with him. She once tried to explain to him how she did this, but the anatomical difference between our genders is too great. The metaphors won’t work. And who cares, anyway, for technical-ities when that starburst of pleasure and love and beauty is taking you over?

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Faceless, then, are the chappies I happened to see in her company. There was for instance Red Sweater who one day, the day we had the first snow—saw her home; from the parlor window I observed them talking near our porch. She wore her first cloth coat with a fur collar; there was a small brown cap on my favorite hairdo—the fringe in front and the swirl at the sides and the natural curls at the back—and her damp-dark moccasins and white socks were more sloppy than ever. She pressed as usual her books to her chest while speaking or listening, and her feet gestured all the time: she would stand on her left instep with her right toe, remove it backward, cross her feet, rock slightly, sketch a few steps, and then start the series all over again. There was Windbreaker who talked to her in front of a restaurant one Sunday afternoon while his mother and sister attempted to walk me away for a chat; I dragged along and looked back at my only love. She had developed more than one conventional mannerism, such as the polite adolescent way of showing one is literally “doubled up” with laughter by inclining one’s head, and so (as she sensed my call), still feigning helpless merriment, she walked backward a couple of steps, and then faced about, and walked toward me with a fading smile. On the other hand, I greatly liked—perhaps because it reminded me of her first unforgettable confession—her trick of sighing “oh dear!” in humorous wistful submission to fate, or emitting a long “no-o” in a deep almost growling undertone when the blow of fate had actually fallen. Above all—since we are speaking of movement and youth—I liked to see her spinning up and down Thayer Street on her beautiful young bicycle: rising on the pedals to work on them lustily, then sinking back in a languid posture while the speed wore itself off; and then she would stop at our mailbox and, still astride, would flip through a magazine she found there, and put it back, and press her tongue to one side of her upperlip and push off with her foot, and again sprint through pale shade and sun.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Your forehead’s all wet. You feel OK?’ Howard batted Levi’s hand away. ‘What do you want?’ he asked. Levi shook his head disapprovingly but laughed. ‘Oh, man . . . that’s real cold. Just because I come to see you, you think I want something!’ ‘Social call, is it?’ ‘Well, yeah. I like to see you at work, see what’s going on with you, you know how it is, being all intellectual in college land. You’re like my role model and all that.’ ‘Right. How much is it, then?’ Levi shrieked with laughter. ‘Oh, man . . . you’re cold! I can’t believe you!’ Howard looked at the little clock in the corner of his screen. ‘School? Shouldn’t you be in school?’ ‘Well . . .’ said Levi, stroking his chin. ‘Technically, yeah. But see they got this rule – the city has a rule that you can’t be in class if  On Beauty the temperature in the room is below a certain, like, temperature – I don’t know what it is, but that kid Eric Klear knows what it is – he brings this thermometer in? And if it drops below that specific temperature, then – well, basically, we all just go home. Not a thing they can do about it.’ ‘Very enterprising,’ said Howard. Then he laughed and looked at his son with fond wonder. What a period this was to live through! His children were old enough to make him laugh. They were real people who entertained and argued and existed entirely independently from him, although he had set the thing in motion. They had different thoughts and beliefs. They weren’t even the same colour as him. They were a kind of miracle. ‘This isn’t traditional filial behaviour, you know,’ said Howard jovially, already reaching for his back pocket. ‘This is being mugged in your own office.’ Levi slipped off the desk and went to look out of the window. ‘Snow’s melting. Won’t last, though. Man,’ he said, turning around. ‘As soon as I have my own greens and my own life, I’m moving somewhere so hot . I’m moving to, like, Africa . I don’t even care if it’s poor. Long as I’m warm, that’s cool with me.’ ‘Twenty . . . six, seven, eight – that’s all I have,’ said Howard holding up the contents of his wallet. ‘I really appreciate that, man. I’m dry and dusty right now.’ ‘What about that job , for God’s sake?’ Levi squirmed a little before confessing. Howard listened with his head on the table. ‘Levi, that was a good job.’ ‘I got another one! But it’s more . . . irregular.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  * Now on that very night Psyche’s husband spake unto her (for she might not know him with her eyes, but only with her hands and ears) and said: ‘O. my sweet spouse and dear wife, fortune doth menace unto thee imminent peril and danger, whereof I wish thee greatly to beware: for know thou that thy sisters, thinking thou art dead, be greatly troubled and: will soon come to the mountain by thy footsteps ; whose lamentations, if thou fortune to hear, beware that thou do in no wise either make answer or look up toward them. For if thou do, thou shalt purchase to me a great sorrow, and to thyself utter destruction.’ Psyche (hearing her husband) promised that she would do all things as he commanded, but after that he was departed, and the night passed away, she lamented and cried all day following, thinking that now she was past all hope of comfort in that she was both closed within the walls of a fine prison, deprived of human conversation, and commanded not to aid or assist her sorrowful sisters, no, nor once to see them, Thus she passed all the day in weeping, and went to bed at night without any refection of meat or bathing, but incontinently after came her husband earlier than he was wont, who (when he had embraced hersweetly) as she still wept, began to say: ‘Is it thus that you perform your promise, my sweet wife? What do I find here, that am your husband? What have I to hope? Pass you all the day and the night in weeping, and will you not eease even in your hus- band's arms? Go to, do what you will, purchase your own destruction, and when you find it so, then remember my words and repent, but too late." 207 LUCIUS APULEIUS “Tune illa precibus et dum se morituram com- minatur extorquet a marito cupitis annuat, ut sorores videat, luctus mulceat, ora conferat: sic ille novae nuptae precibus veniam tribuit, et insuper quibus- cumque vellet eas auri vel monilium donare concessit, sed identidem monuit ac saepe terruit, nequando Sororum pernicioso consilio suasa de forma mariti quaerat, neve se sacrilega curiositate de tanto fortu- narum suggestu pessum deiciat nec suum postea con- tingat amplexum. Gratias egit marito, iamque laetior ‘Sed prius' inquit * Centies moriar quam tuo isto dulcissimo connubio caream : amo enim, et efflictim te, quicumque es, diligo aeque ut meum Spiritum, nec ipsi Cupidini comparo. Sed istud etiam meis precibus, oro, largire et illi tuo famulo Zephyro prae- cipe simili vectura sorores hic mihi sistat': et impri- mens oscula suasoria et ingerens verba mulcentia et iungens membra cohibentia, haec etiam blanditiis astruit: ‘Mi mellite, mi marite, tuae Psychae dulcis anima. Vi ac potestate Venerei susulrus invitus succubuit maritus et cuncta se facturum spopondit, atque iam luce proximante de manibus uxoris evanuit.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Oh, I reserved the right to go out with other people from time to time, but he saw to it that I was so inundated with his presence, his talk, his gifts, his typing of my papers, his ransacking the stacks for books I needed, his letters and phone calls and flowers and poems vowing eternal devotion—that inevitably the other boys seemed like very pale imitations. In those days, there were Jocks and Intellectuals, Fraternity Boys and Independents. Brian fell into no category and all categories. He was an original, a character, an encyclopedia of information on every subject except perhaps sex where his knowledge was more theoretical at first than practical. We lost our virginity together. Or almost. I say “almost” because it is doubtful that I had much left after all those years of strenuous finger-fucking and regular masturbation, and Brian had been to a whorehouse in Tijuana once when he was sixteen—a birthday present from his dad, who drove him with a carload of buddies as a sort of Jock Sweet-Sixteen Party. As Brian described it, the experience was a fiasco. The whore kept saying “Hurry up, hurry up!” and Brian lost his erection, and his father (as Oedipus would have it) had screwed her first, and his buddies were knocking at the door. It wasn’t much of an initiation; penetration, as they say in the sex books, was not completed. So I guess you could say we lost our virginity together. I was seventeen (still jail bait, as Brian quaintly reminded me) and he was nineteen. We had known each other two months—two months of doing violence to our instincts in Riverside Park, under the tables of the Classics Library where we “studied together” (beneath the watchful blank eyes of Sophocles, Pericles, and Julius Caesar), on the couch in my parents’ living room, in the stacks at Butler Library (where I later was shocked to hear some sacrilegious students actually screwed). We finally had each other’s “final favor” (to use that charming eighteenth-century term) in Brian’s basement apartment on Riverside Drive where the roaches (or perhaps they were water bugs) were bigger than my fist (or his penis) and Brian’s two room-mates kept knocking on the door on the pretext of wanting The Sunday Times “if we were through with it yet.” Brian’s room—one of six in that sprawling pied à terre—shared one wall with the boiler. That was the only heating facility. One wall was perpetually hot as blazes; the other was colder than a witch’s tit (Brian’s expression). You regulated the temperature only by opening the window (which faced on a kind of cement ravine one floor below sidewalk level) and letting the cold air in. Since the wind blasted in from the river, it was sufficiently frigid to counteract the heat of the boiler—but not our heat. It was in this romantic setting that we first enjoyed each other.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  “What’s going on in here?” the cheerleader asked, throwing down her pom-poms. “You know you’re my only single friend?” Reva asked in response. “I wish I had a big sister,” she said. “Someone who could set me up with somebody. Maybe I’ll ask my dad for money to pay a matchmaker.” “No man is worth paying for,” I told her. “I’ll think about it,” Reva said. I was in the fog by then, eyes open just a crack. Through them, I watched the black girl spread the lips of her vagina with long, sharp, pink fingernails. The inside of her glistened. I thought of Whoopi Goldberg. I remember that. I remember Reva setting the empty wine bottle down on the coffee table. And I remember her saying “Happy New Year” and kissing my cheek. I felt myself float up and away, higher and higher into the ether until my body was just an anecdote, a symbol, a portrait hanging in another world. “I love you, Reva,” I heard myself say from so far away. “I’m really sorry about your mom.” Then I was gone. Five I WOKE UP ALONE on the sofa a few days later. The air smelled like stale smoke and perfume. The TV was on at low volume. My tongue was thick and gritty, like I had dirt in my mouth. I listened to the world weather report: floods in India, an earthquake in Guatemala, another blizzard approaching the northeastern United States, fires burning down million-dollar homes in Southern California, “but sunny skies in our nation’s capital today as Yasser Arafat visits the White House for talks with President Clinton aimed at reviving the stalled peace process in the Middle East. More on that story in a minute.”

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Webster was not a College man—he was in Phil’s—so my infatuation with him was bound to be more poetic. He was a well-made little fellow, smooth & brown, with luxuriant curly hair, & he had a beautiful sad expression. His father was a wealthy rum-distiller from Tobago, & his mother was English, & had aspired to give him the best education she could. He was the first negro I had ever known, & in the beginning I suspected he must be slow. Later I found he had a sophisticated, literary mind: he was inclined to be solitary & read a great deal. In his first summer I saw him one day at Gunner’s Hole, lying on the bank in his swimming-drawers, buried in some history book. His colour, among the trees, the green water & the faded grass struck me like a Gauguin. I found that he went to swim whenever the school’s stiff regimen allowed, and if the weather was fine. I had never had much time for it, though it had its erotic side; but I started to swim too. He was a much finer swimmer than I, it should be said, but I was much bigger & could sometimes beat him as we thrashed round the bend together. At the end of our races he gasped & gave his dazzling smile and I lounged beside him in the water, or put my arm round his shoulders, saying ‘That was damned close’ but thinking inside ‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’ When we climbed out on to the bank I was fascinated by the way the water stood off him, leaving him no need to dry himself with a towel, and when he shook his head, the droplets flew away, leaving his black cushion of hair barely damp. Though his head hair was so thick, the rest of his body, though he had passed into manhood already, was virtually without hair, & on the frequent disinterested occasions I contrived to touch him I found his skin as smooth as a dream. It was the beginning of all this thing. In a way it was like my admiration for Strong, but now transformed by a stronger, even ethical power. I formed the impression that I was in the presence of a superior kind of person. Now this was a very strange impression to form. Here at Dekatil, surrounded by the radiant darkness of the Nuba, with not another white man for hundreds of miles, I am continuing to act on it. Does anyone else feel it, or understand? Did anyone then, at Winchester? It was the wildest apostasy. It was the greatest revelation. It affected one’s view of everything.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Into America, or back to England, I really do not remember, and I don't suppose that it matters.* 20,000 Years in Sing Sing: Spencer Tracy and Bette Davis. By this time, I had been taken in hand by a young white schoolteacher, a beautiful woman, very important to me. I was between ten and elev en. She had directed my first play and endured my first theatrical tantrums and had then decided to escort me into the world. She gave me books to read and talked to me about the books, and about the world: about Spain, for example, and Ethiopia, and Italy, and the German Third Reich; and took me to see plays and films, pl ays and films to which no one else would have dreamed of taking a ten-y ear-old boy. I loved her, of course, and absolutely, with a child's love; didn't understand half of what she said, but remembered it; and it stood me in good stead later. It is cer tainly partly because of her, who arrived in my terrifYing lif e so soon, that I never really managed to hate white people- *The novel, which I read much later, is not my favorite novel, and, on some other day, I may detail my quarrel with it; but it is far more honest and courageous than the film. CHAPTER ONE 481 though, God knows, I have often wished to murder more than one or t\vo. But Bill Miller-her name was Orilla, we called her Bill-was not white for me in the way, for example, that Joan Crawford was white, in the way that the landlords and the storekeepers and the cops and most of my teachers were white. She didn't baffie me that way and she never frightened me and she never lied to me. I never felt her pity, either, in spite of the fact that she sometimes brought us old clothes (because she worried about our winters) and cod-liver oil, es pecially for me, because I seemed destined, then, to be carried away by whooping cough. I was a child, of course, and, therefore, unsophisticated.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Again, I was listening very hard to jazz and hop ing, one day, to translate it into language, and Shakespeare's bawdiness became very important to me since bawdiness was "THIS NE TTLE, DAN GER .. one of the elements of jazz and revealed a tremendous, loving and realistic respect for the body, and that ineffable force which the body contains, which Americans have mostly lost, which I had experienced only among �egroes, and of which I had then been taught to be ashamed. My relationship, then, to the language of Shakespeare re vealed itself as nothing less than my relationship to myself and my past. Under this light, this revelation, both myself and my past began slowly to open, perhaps the way a flower opens at morning, but, more probably, the way an atrophied muscle begins to function, or frozen fingers to th aw. The greatest poet in the English language found his poetry where poetry is found: in the lives of the people. He coul d have done this only through lo\·e-by knowing, which is not the same thing as understanding, that whatever was happening to anyone was happening to him. It is said that his time was easier than ours, but I doubt it-no time can be easy if one is living through it. I think it is simply that he walked his streets and saw them, and tried not to lie about what he saw; his public streets and his pri\·ate streets, which are always so mysteriously and in exorably connected; but he trusted that connection. And, though I, and many of us, have bitterly bewailed (and \\ill again) the lot of an American writer-to be part of a people who have ears to hear and hear not, who ha\"e eyes to see and see not!-1 am sure that Shakespeare did the same. Only , he saw, as I think we must, that the people who produce the poet are not responsible to him: he is responsible to them. That is why he is called a poet. And his responsibilit y, which is also his joy and his strength and his lif e, is to det eat all labels and complicate all battles by insisting on the hu man riddle, to bear witness, as long as breath is in him, to that -mighty, unname able, transfiguring force which lives in the soul of man, and to aspire to do his work so well that when the breath has left him, the people-all people! -who search in the rubble for a sign or a witness will be able to find him there. ShoJV, February 196+ Nothing Personal I USED to distract myself, some mornings before I got out of bed, by pressing the television remote control gadget from one channel to another.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Remember that: I know how black it looks today, fo r you. It looked bad that day, too, yes, we were trem bling. We have not stopped trembling yet, but if we had not loved each other none of us would have survived. And now you must survive because we love you, and fo r the sake of your children and your children's children. This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fa ct, it intended that you should perish. Let me spell out precisely what I mean by that, for the heart of the matter is here, and the root of my dispute with my country. You were born where you were born and fa ced the future that you fa ced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set fo rever. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity. \Vherever you have turned, James, in your short time on this earth, you have been told where you could go and what you could do (and how you could do it) and where you could live and whom you could marry. I know your countrymen do not agree with me about this, and I hear them saying, "You exaggerate." They do not know Harlem, and I do. So do you. Take no one's word fo r anything, including mine-but trust your ex perience. Know whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go. The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear. Please try to be clear, dear James, through the storm which rages about your youthful head today, about the reality which lies behind the words ac ceptance and integration. There is no reason fo r you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever fo r their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and 29 + THE FIRE NEXT TIME accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Presently, it discovers it has you, and since it has already de cided it wants to live, it gives you a toothless smile when you come near it, gurgles or giggles when you pick it up, holds you tight by the thumb or the eyeball or the hair, and, having already opted against solitude, howls when you put it down. You begin the extraordinary journey of beginning to know and to control this creature. You know the sound-the mean ing-of one cry from another; without knowing that you know it. You know when it's hungry-that's one sound. You know when it's wet-that's another sound. You know when it's angry. You know when it's bored. You know when it's frightened. You know when it's suffering. You come or you go or you sit still according to the sound the baby makes. And you watch over it where I was born, even in your sleep, be cause rats love the odor of newborn babies and are much, much bigger. 3 5 6 NO NAME IN THE STREET By the time it has managed to crawl under every bed, nearly sutfocate itself in every drawer, nearly strangle itself with string, somehow, God knows how, trapped itself behind the radiator, been pulled back, by one leg, fr om its suicidal in vestigation of the staircase, and nearly poisoned itself with everything-its hand being quicker than your eye-it can possibly get into its mouth, you have either grown to love it or you have left home. I, James, in August. George, in January. Barbara, in August. Wilmer, in October, David, in December. Gloria, Ruth, Elizabeth, and (when we thought it was over!) Paula Maria, named by me, born on the day our father died, all in the summertime. The youngest son of the New Orleans branch of the fam ily-family, here, is used loosely and has to be; we knew al most nothing about this branch, which knew nothing about us; Daddy, the great good friend of the Great God Almighty, had simply fled the South, leaving a branch behind. As I have said, he was the son of a slave, and his youngest daughter, by his first marriage, is my mother's age and his youngest son is nine years older than I. This boy, who did not get along with his father, was my elder brother, as far as I then knew, and he sometimes took me with him here and there.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  291 296 Dear James: My Dungeon Shook Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Ann iversary of the Emancipation I HAVE begun this letter five times and torn it up five times. I keep seeing your face, which is also the face of your father and my brother. Like him, you are tough, dark, vul nerable, moody-with a very definite tendency to sound truc ulent because you want no one to think you are soft. You may be like your grandfather in this, I don't know, but certainly both you and your father resemble him ver y much physically. Well, he is dead, he never saw you, and he had a terrible life; he was defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him. This is one of the reasons that he became so holy. I am sure that your father has told you something about all that. Neither you nor your father exhibit any tendency towards ho liness: you really are of another era, part of what happened when the Negro left the land and came into what the late E. Franklin Frazier called "the cities of destruct ion." You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger. I tell you this because I love you, and please don't you ever forget it. I have known both of you all your lives, have carried your Daddy in my arms and on my shoulders, kissed and spanked hi m and watched him learn to walk. I don't know if you've known anybody from that far back; if you've loved anybody that long, first as an infant, then as a child, then as a man, you gain a strange perspective on time and human pain and effort. Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your father's face, for behind your father's face as it is today are all those other faces which were his. Let him laugh and I see a cellar your father does not remember and a house he does not remember and I hear in his present laughter his laughter as a child. Let him curse and I remember him falling down the cellar steps, and howling, and I remember, with 29!

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  THE FIRE NEXT TIME aGod gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!" for James James Luc James Contents MY DUNGEON SHOOK: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation DoWN AT THE CRoss: Letter from a Region in My Mind . . 29 1 29 6 Dear James: My Dungeon Shook Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation I HAVE begun this letter five times and torn it up five times. I keep seeing your fa ce, which is also the fa ce of your father and my brother. Like him, you are tough, dark, vul nerable, moody-with a very definite tendency to sound truc ulent because you want no one to think you are soft. You may be like your grandfather in this, I don't know, but certainly both you and your fa ther resemble him very much physically. Well, he is dead, he never saw you, and he had a terrible life; he was defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him. This is one of the reasons that he became so holy. I am sure that your fa ther has told you something about all that. Neither you nor your father exhibit any tendency towards ho liness: you really are of another era, part of what happened when the Negro left the land and came into what the late E. Franklin Frazier called "the cities of destruction." You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger. I tell you this because I love you, and please don't you ever forget it. I have known both of you all your lives, have carried your Daddy in my arms and on my shoulders, kissed and spanked hi m and watched him learn to walk. I don't know if you've known anybody from that fa r back; if you've loved anybody that long, first as an infant, then as a child, then as a man, you gain a strange perspective on time and human pain and effort. Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your father's face, for behind your father's fa ce as it is today are all those other fa ces which were his. Let him laugh and I see a cellar your fa ther does not remember and a house he does not remember and I hear in his present laughter his laughter as a child.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The very foundations of their private and public worlds were being destroyed. I had never heard King preach, and I went on Sunday to hear him at his church. This church is a red brick structure, with a steeple, and it directly faces, on the other side of the street, a white, domed building. My notes fail to indicate whether this is the actual capitol of the state or merely a court house; but the conjunction of the two buildings, the steepled one low and dark and tense, the domed one higher and dead white and forbidding, sums up, with an explicitness a set de signer might hesitate to copy, the struggle now going on in Montgomery. At that time in Montgomery, King was almost surely the most beloved man there. I do not think that one could have entered any of the packed churches at that time, if King was MAR TI N LUTHER KING present, and not have felt this. Of course, I think that King would be loved by his congregations in any case, and there is always a large percentage of church women who adore the young male pastor, and not always, or not necessarily, out of those grim, psychic motives concerning which everyone today is so knowledgeable. No, there was a feeling in this church which quite transcended anything I have ever felt in a church before. Here it was, totally familiar and yet completely new, the packed church, glorious with the Sunday finery of the women, solemn with the touching, gleaming sobriety of the men, beautiful with children. Here were the ushers, standing in the aisles in white dresses or in dark suits, with arm bands on. People were standing along each wall, beside the win dows, and standing in the back. King and his lieutenants were in the pulpit, young Martin- as I was beginning to think of him-in the center chair. When King rose to speak-to preach-! began to under stand how the atmosphere of this church differed from that of all the other churches I have known. At first I thought that the great emotional power and authority of the Negro church was being put to a new usc, but this is not exactly the case. The Negro church was playing the same role which it has al ways played in Negro lif e, but it had acquired a new power. Until Montgomery, the Negro church, which has always been the place where protest and condemnation could be most vividly articulated, also operated as a kind of sanctuary.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  But what was the point, the purpose, of my salvation if it did not permit me to behave with love toward others, no matter how they be haved toward me? What others did was their responsibility, fo r which they would answer when the judgment trumpet sounded. But what I did was my responsibility, and I would have to answer, too-unless, of course, there was also in Heaven a special dispensation fo r the benighted black, who was not to be judged in the same way as other human beings, or angels. It probably occurred to me around this time that the vision people hold of the world to come is but a reflection, with predictable wishful distortions, of the world in which they live. And this did not apply only to Negroes, who were no more "simple" or "spontaneous" or "Christian" than anybody else-who were merely more oppressed. In the same way that we, fo r white people, were the descendants of Ham, and were cursed fo rever, white people were, fo r us, the de scendants of Cain. And the passion with which we loved the Lord was a measure of how deeply we fe ared and distrusted and, in the end, hated almost all strangers, always, and avoided and despised ourselves. But I cannot leave it at that; there is more to it than that. In spite of everything, there was in the life I fled a zest and a joy and a capacity fo r fa cing and surviving disaster that are very moving and very rare. Perhaps we were, all of us-pimps, whores, racketeers, church members, and children-bound together by the nature of our oppression, the specific and pe culiar complex of risks we had to run; if so, within these limits we sometimes achieved with each other a freedom that was close to love. I remember, anyway, church suppers and out ings, and, later, after I left the church, rent and waistline par tics where rage and sorrow sat in the darkness and did not stir, and we ate and drank and talked and laughed and danced DOWN AT THE CROSS 3 II and fo rgot all about "the man." We had the liquor, the chicken, the music, and each other, and had no need to pre tend to be what we were not.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Hong Kong will immediately cease to be a name and become the center of your lif e. And you may never know how many people live in Hong Kong. But you will know that one man or one woman lives there without whom vou cannot live. And this is how our lives arc changed, and this is how we are redeemed. NO THING PER SO NAL 705 What a journey this lif e is! dependent, entirely, on things unseen. If your lover lives in Hong Kong and cannot get to Chicago, it will be necessary for you to go to Hong Kong. Perhaps you will spend your lif e there, and never sec Ch icago again. And you will, I assure you, as long as space and time divide you from anyone you love, discover a great deal about shipping routes, air lanes, earthquake, famine, disease, and war. And you will always know what time it is in Hong Kong, for you love someone who lives there. And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win. I know we often lose, and that the death or destruction of another is infinitely more real and unbearable than one's own. I think I know how many times one has to start again, and how often one feels that one cannot start again. And yet, on pain of death, one can never remain where one is. The light. The light. One will perish without the light. I have slept on rooftops and in basements and subways, have been cold and hungry all my lif e; have felt that no fire would ever warm me, and no arms would ever hold me. I have been, as the song says, 'buked and scorned and I know that I always will be. But, my God, in that darkness, which was the lot of my ancestors and my own state, what a mighty fire burned! In that darkness of rape and degradation, that fine, flying froth and mist of blood, through all that terror and in all that helplessness, a living soul moved and refused to die. We really emptied oceans with a home- made spoon and tore down mountains with our hands. And if love was in Hong Kong, we learned how to swim. It is a mighty heritage, it is the human heritage, and it is all there is to trust. And I learned this through descending, as it were, into the eyes of my father and my mother.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Incontinently after came her husband, who when he had embraced her sweetly, began to say, Is it thus that I find you perform your promise, my sweet wife? What do I finde heere? Passe you all the day and the night in weeping? And wil you not cease in your husbands armes? Goe too, doe what ye will, purchase your owne destruction, and when you find it so, then remember my words, and repent but too late. Then she desired her husband more and more, assuring him that shee should die, unlesse he would grant that she might see her sisters, wherby she might speak with them and comfort them, wherat at length he was contented, and moreover hee willed that shee should give them as much gold and jewels as she would. But he gave her a further charge saying, Beware that ye covet not (being mooved by the pernicious counsell of you sisters) to see the shape of my person, lest by your curiosity you deprive your selfe of so great and worthy estate. Psyches being glad herewith, rendered unto him most entire thankes, and said, Sweet husband, I had rather die than to bee separated from you, for whosoever you bee, I love and retaine you within my heart, as if you were myne owne spirit or Cupid himselfe: but I pray you grant this likewise, that you would commaund your servant Zephyrus to bring my sisters downe into the valley as he brought mee. Wherewithall shee kissed him sweetly, and desired him gently to grant her request, calling him her spowse, her sweetheart, her Joy and her Solace. Wherby she enforced him to agree to her mind, and when morning came he departed away. After long search made, the sisters of Psyches came unto the hill where she was set on the rocke, and cried with a loud voyce in such sort that the stones answered againe. And when they called their sister by her name, that their lamentable cries came unto her eares, shee came forth and said, Behold, heere is shee for whom you weepe, I pray you torment your selves no more, cease your weeping. And by and by she commaunded Zephyrus by the appointment of her husband to bring them downe. Neither did he delay, for with gentle blasts he retained them up and laid them softly in the valley. I am not able to expresse the often embracing, kissing and greeting which was between them three, all sorrows and tears were then layd apart. Come in (quoth Psyches) into our house, and refresh your afflicted mindes with your sister.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  There is a reason, after all, that some people wish to colonize the moon, and others dance before it as before an ancient fr iend. And the extent to which these apprehensions, instincts, relations, arc modified by the passage of time, or the accumulation of i1wcntions, is a question that no one seems able to answer. All men, clearly, arc primitive, but it can be doubted that all men arc primiti\'C in the same way; and if they arc not, it can only be because, in that absolutely un assailable privacy of the soul, they do not worship the same gods. Both continents, Africa and America, be it remembered, were "discovcred"-what a wealth of arrogance that little word contains!-with devastating results for the indigenous populations, whose only human usc thereafter was as the source of capital for white people. On both continents the white and the dark gods met in combat, and it is on the out- 474 NO NAME IN THE STREET come of this combat that the future of both continents de pends. To be an Afro-American, or an American black, is to be in the situation, intolerably exaggerated, of all those who have ever found themselves part of a civilization which they could in no wise honorably defend-which they were compelled, indeed, endlessly to attack and condemn-and who yet spoke out of the most passionate love, hoping to make the kingdom new, to make it honorable and worthy of life. Whoever is part of whatever civilization helplessly loves some aspects of it, and some of the people in it. A person does not lightly elect to oppose his society. One would much rather be at home among one's compatriots than be mocked and detested by them. And there is a level on which the mockery of the people, even their hatred, is moving because it is so blind: it is terrible to watch people cling to their captivity and insist on their own destruc tion. I think black people have always felt this about America, and Americans, and have always seen, spinning above the thoughtless American head, the shape of the wrath to come. Epilogue: Who Has Believed Our Report? T HIS BOOK has been much delayed by trials, assassinations, funerals, and despair. Nor is the American crisis, which is part of a global, historical crisis, likely to resolve itself soon. An old world is dying, and a new one, kicking in the belly of its mother, time, announces that it is ready to be born. This birth will not be easy, and many of us are doomed to discover that we are exceedingly clumsy midwives.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I left home-Harlem-in 1 9 4-2. I returned, in 19 4-6, to do, with a white photographer, one of several unpublished efforts; had planned to marry, then realized that I couldn't-or shouldn't, which comes to the same thing-threw my wed ding rings into the Hudson River, and left New York for Paris, in 1 9 4-8. By this time, of course, I was mad, as mad as my dead father. If I had not gone mad, I could not have left. I starved in Paris for a while, but I learned something: for one thing, I fell in love. Or, more accurately, I realized, and accepted for the first time that love was not merely a general, human possibility, nor merely the disaster it had so often, by NO NAME IN THE STREET then, been for me-according to me-nor was it something that happened to other people, like death, nor was it merely a mortal danger: it was among my possibilities, for here it was, breathing and belching beside me, and it was the key to life. Not merely the key to my life, but to life itself. My falling in love is in no way the subject of this book, and yet honesty compels me to place it among the details, for I think-1 know-that my story would be a very different one if love had not forced me to attempt to deal with myself. It began to pry open for me the trap of color, for people do not fall in love according to their color-this may come as news to noble pioneers and eloquent astronauts, to say nothing of most of the representatives of most of the American states-and when lovers quarrel, as indeed they inevitably do, it is not the degree of their pigmentation that they are quarreling about, nor can lovers, on any level whatever, use color as a weapon. This means that one must accept one's nakedness. And nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being. In any case, the world changes then, and it changes forever. Because you love one human being, you see everyone else very differently than you saw them before-perhaps I only mean to say that you begin to see-and you are both stronger and more vulnerable, both fr ee and bound. Free, paradoxically, because, now, you have a home-your lover's arms. And bound: to that mystery, precisely, a bondage which liberates you into something of the glory and suffering of the world. I had come to Paris with no money and this meant that in those early years I lived mainly among les miserables-and, in Paris, les misembles arc Algerian.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  It would soon be time for him to go to work, and I felt him already preparing to abstract himself. Tonight this distancing gave me a little qualm, and as he sat up to get dressed I pushed him back roughly and fucked him hard and fast, his asshole still tacky with spunk and grease from our slower, longer lovemaking just before. As he cleaned up afterwards and looked out his laundered clothes there was still a reserve in his manner, nothing so strong as resentment, but the first suggestion of an independence which it was only dignified that I should allow. All the same I felt unhappy. While he sat on the end of the bed with his back turned to me and pulled on his socks, I looked baffledly at his compact physique. Then he was sitting very still and I caught his eye in the gloomy recess of the dressing-table mirror. ‘Man, I really do love you,’ he said, both as if it were a discovery and to reassure me and chide me for being silly just because he didn’t want to go on a journey to Limehouse (a journey whose only conceivable interest for him would have been that of being with me). To show goodwill he came back upstairs a few minutes after leaving and quite startled me as I stood naked looking out at the stars. He had brought me, under cover of Room Service, a tray with a smoked salmon sandwich and a glass of Drambuie—things which hardly went together, but which had touchingly been chosen for their luxuriousness. The following evening, after an early swim, I went on east on the Central Line. The City had already evacuated, and though the train was crowded to Liverpool Street there was only a scattering of us left for Bethnal Green, Mile End and beyond. All the other people in my car—Indian women with carrier-bags, some beery labourers, a beautiful black boy in a track-suit—looked tired and habituated. When I got out at Mile End, though, other passengers got on, residents of an unknown area who used the Underground, just as I did, as a local service, commuting and shopping within the suburbs and rarely if ever going to the West End, which I visited daily. I felt more competent for my mobility, but also vaguely abashed as I came out into the unimpressionable streets of this strange neighbourhood. I was a touch nervous as well: it was my first independent research into Charles’s life and finding myself doing it I also found myself precipitately involved in the project. I had brought a notebook with me on which I had even written ‘Nantwich’ in bold letters. But I had no idea what I was going to write in it, who ‘old Shillibeer’ was or what to expect from him.