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)

  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.

• 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.