Nostalgia

Passages

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

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• From The Decameron (1353)

  The story of Landolfo Rufolo is the first in the Decameron to be set in the south, and there is no mistaking the tone of nostalgic affection with which Boccaccio describes the Amalfi coast in its opening paragraph. There is also more than a hint of admiration for the spirit of enterprise that has brought prosperity to the numerous merchants who settled in a region familiar to the writer from the days of his youth. The story contains only two characters, Landolfo and the peasant woman who restores him to health after dragging him from the sea off the shore of Corfu. Like most of Boccaccio’s characters, neither is developed in any great psychological depth, their personalities emerging fully formed from the events of the narrative. The distinguishing feature of Landolfo is his acquisitiveness, the motivating force behind all of his actions. The narrator focuses attention on the vicissitudes of the chief character, for which the sea is a sort of emblematic leitmotif. The sea is in fact the most important recurrent image in the narratives of the Second Day, playing a prominent role not only in the tale of Landolfo, but also in those of Beritola (II, 6), Alatiel (II, 7) and Paganino (II, 10). It also features briefly in the stories of Andreuccio (II, 5), the Count of Antwerp (II, 8) and Bernabò and Zinevra (II, 9). The image of the sea, ideal for representing the vicissitudes of Fortune, acts as a link between the main theme of the Second Day and the world of commerce that is depicted in so many of the stories.

• From Story of O (1954)

  After the Alma intersection, the Cours la Reine was visible because the trees were bare, and the Place de la Concorde sparkling and dry with, above it, the sort of sky which promises snow, but from which snow has not yet fallen. O heard a little click and felt the warm air rising around her legs: Sir Stephen had turned on the heater. René was still keeping to the Right Bank of the Seine, then he turned at the Pont Royal to cross over to the Left Bank: between its stone yokes, the water looked as frozen as the stone, and just as black. O thought of hematites, which are black. When she was fifteen her best friend, who was then thirty and with whom she was in love, wore a hematite ring set in a cluster of tiny diamonds. O would have liked a necklace of those black stones, without diamonds, a tight-fitting necklace, perhaps even a choker. But the necklaces that were given to her now—no, they were not given to her—would she exchange them for the necklace of hematites, for the hematites of the dream? She saw again the wretched room where Marion had taken her, behind the Turbigo intersection, and remembered how she had untied—she, not Marion—her two big schoolgirl pigtails when Marion had undressed her and laid her down on the iron bed. How lovely Marion was when she was being caressed, and it’s true that eyes can resemble stars; hers looked like quivering blue stars. René stopped the car. O did not recognize the little street, one of the cross streets which joins the rue de l’Université and the rue de Lille. Sir Stephen’s apartment was situated at the far end of a courtyard, in one wing of an old private mansion, and the rooms were laid out in a straight line, one opening into the next. The room at the very end was also the largest, and the most reposing, furnished in dark English mahogany and pale yellow and gray silk drapes. “I shan’t ask you to tend the fire,” Sir Stephen said to O, “but this sofa is for you. Please sit down, René will make coffee. I would be most grateful if you would hear what I have to say.”

• From My People (2022)

  For example, children my age played hopscotch, just as we did in Covington. But instead of the dirt play grounds I was used to skipping around on, these children played on the paved streets, and I quickly learned how to treat my aching feet after jumping around on concrete. And even though I had a harder time learning to understand the girls and boys I played with—their lilting, musical, and rapid way of speaking a language I had never heard before—in time, I even managed to pick up a few Spanish words. And while my great-uncle was no longer among the living by the time I went to Harlem as a reporter some twenty-two years later, what I had learned about Harlem early on did not depart from me as I returned armed with pen and notepad—the days before cell phones made them mostly obsolete. In attempting to expand readers’ views of the Black community, I continued to apply my well-learned lessons about My People’s community and culture, including the music. Now I often went to places in Harlem, like the historic Apollo Theater, where some of the legends of Black music performed music that was right up my alley. But when I learned about a symphony orchestra in Harlem, well, that was surely not anything that had ever seen the light of day in any newspaper, other than, perhaps, the Harlem-based Black newspaper the Amsterdam News . So I immediately set out to find it, and when I met some of the musicians, what a surprise it was, as by day some were employed as postal workers or schoolteachers or held jobs totally unrelated to a symphony orchestra and had no place other than Harlem to display their classical talents. To be sure, I was exposed to Harlem in all of its manifestations, not all nearly as benign as those from my young years on 115th-Street-Between-Lenox-and-Fifth. I never shied away from reporting its darker challenges. But even when I had to cover those, I often tried to give context, like some of the reasons so many young people turned to drugs—using, selling, or both and sometimes dying, like young Walter Vandermeer, whose family I got to know. I offered whatever support I could provide to a mother with five children and no man living in their cramped apartment. My other approach to Harlem was through culture and individuals who were attracted by and contributed to its vibrancy, people like Frank Hercules, the Trinidadian author, and Lewis Michaux, whose bookstore they and so many authors and others frequented because of its huge collection of books by and about Black people. The history it contained was also reflected on the corner across the street, where for generations Black men from Marcus Garvey to Malcolm X stood on tall wooden ladders to speak.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Even when a branch of the Christian Church was as powerful as the Western Church became in Europe between 1100 and 1500, we would be naïve in looking for one single outlook on sexual matters which was that of ‘the medieval West’ (below, Chapter 13). As the printing-press became available as a means of rapidly reproducing and spreading ideas, one can begin to notice, amid the growing torrent of printed matter, expressions of ideas that are very difficult to register in the written witness of earlier centuries. The previous apparent silence is no guarantee that the thoughts had not been thought, or expressed in private. Often the hints come in ephemeral forms of print like that of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century single-sheet ballads. The production and sale price of ballads were inexpensive, but their survival as physical evidence may be unrepresentatively small, since they were read to death by a great many people and ended up as recycling (often no doubt as toilet paper). For those without access to the technology of writing but with the capacity to read text – a likely distinction for women in much of Christian history – such ballads were witnesses to the oral and aural culture in which they could express themselves more fully. In the England of the Reformation era, a reader could brood on the personal implications of cheap ballads as much as she or he did when reading or hearing more officially acceptable works of prayer or piety. Folk will have been as eager as we are ourselves for novelty or emotional stimulation. [24] WORD COMPLEXITIES: SEX AND GENDER Such are some of the problems in sifting evidence from the past in a general survey of history. The continuing sexual revolution of our present world offers another series of puzzles: how historians should talk about both past and present, what words to use. Bliss was it in that dawn of the 1970s to be alive, when one leading historian of sexuality could blithely assert that, ‘for the first time in Western culture, we have the potential of coming to terms with human sexuality’, including a language to describe it ready to hand, as in his own massively judicious survey. [25] The term ‘heterosexuality’, for instance, is now so commonly used as to seem a basic part of our vocabulary on sex, gender and the family. It is nevertheless logically secondary to another word- coinage in 1869 by the same German-Hungarian journalist (Karl Maria Benkert/Károly Mária Kertbeny): his innovative term ‘homosexuality’ sought to describe same-sex behaviour, newly regarded in Kertbeny’s time as arising from medically defined behavioural disorders. English language borrowed both words from medical/psychological German usage, and they have persisted to our own time when other nineteenth-century attempted word-inventions have fallen by the wayside. [26] Like ‘homosexuality’, the early use of ‘heterosexuality’ described a medical pathology, an abnormal appetite for the opposite sex – an origin likely to surprise most of those who casually use the word today.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  Do you have time to make a vanilla ice-cream base? he asked. I did. I found the milk and cream in the walk-in, cracked the eggs. At his station, Brandon chopped shallots for vinaigrette. June’s class ended, and she sat at the counter in her gossamer skirt with a blanket tied around her shoulders. It was like old times, old times we’d never really had. On the stereo, the first notes of an Elvis Perkins album kicked in. It was one of a dozen songs I associate with the opening of Delancey, songs we listened to over and over. We’d listened as we poured the concrete tabletops and painted the ceiling, as we polished silver and stacked plates, the two of us hacking away at a project that I wished I’d wanted. Elvis Perkins in Dearland had become the soundtrack of that feeling, a preemptive nostalgia as one phase of our lives slid into the next. For years after Delancey opened, when I needed a good cry, I’d play that album like a musical ipecac, to shake loose and expel a feeling. Now, this Monday afternoon, Brandon put it on the stereo. So he noticed too, I thought, the way this afternoon was a kind of echo, an ideal echo, of times we’d had before. Stop, stop! I begged, grinning. Turn it off, or I’ll cry! Don’t make me do it! We laughed, and he put on something else. I could hear that laugh for hours. It was a relief to recognize who we’d been to each other and to not pretend we were still the same. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Nora and I talked on the phone on the nights when we didn’t see each other. That night I wanted to tell her about the afternoon at Delancey, but I hesitated. I worried that it wouldn’t land right. But she’d wanted to know about my day, hadn’t she? I wanted to be able to tell her about the things that matter to me. So I told her about it. Gosh, she said. It’s kind of hard to hear that. Why? I asked. I’d play dumb. Sometimes it seems like you’re going to get back together, she said. He’s the father of my child, I said. I want a good relationship with him. That’s not the same as wanting to stay married to him. You can understand that, right? It’s just hard to hear about the two of you together, Nora said. Something hot surged in the back of my throat. I had brought her a positive event, but to her it wasn’t good news. I had come to her with light; she took it in and became something dark. When clouds of space dust form so densely that light rays cannot pass through, they appear in the night sky as black patches, shapes even darker than midnight. Astronomers call them dark cloud constellations. I’ve got to be able to talk about my life, I said, without us falling apart over it.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Eleven OMG the Halloween Party!!! There are two big party days at HubSpot. One is Cinco de Mayo, when the company ships in a truckload of tequila and Dos Equis beer and Mexican food, and five hundred twenty-something gringos go mental in the first-floor conference room drinking margaritas and chowing down on nachos, and Halligan roams around wearing a huge straw hat—the kind that people wear in Mexico, geddit?—like a real-life version of Frank the Tank, the beer-bong- hitting character played by Will Ferrell in Old School. But Halloween is an even bigger deal, a sacred tradition in the cult of the orange people, a day when the entire company comes to work wearing costumes and spends the day running around behaving like idiots. In the afternoon the company brings in food and beer, and work grinds to a halt. HubSpot people are incredibly proud of this tradition, which they view as part of their culture. Dharmesh even included a Halloween photo in his Culture Code, with this message: “We dare to be different.” Photos of the Halloween madness are also featured on the website, so that prospective customers can see what a cool, fun place HubSpot is. The idea seems to be that this will make people want to work at HubSpot, and will make customers want to buy our software. I don’t understand why prospective customers care whether HubSpotters have fun at work. If our software can’t save customers money, or make them money, or both, all the kooky Halloween parties in the world won’t matter. (As an aside: I urge you to count the non-white faces in that Halloween photo and consider the claim about “daring to be different.”) As it happens, on the day of the Halloween party I have a friend in town. Rose is a friend of mine who works in marketing. She lives in New York and has come to Boston for meetings. She is in her forties and is executive vice president of marketing for a big sports brand. We meet for breakfast at a hotel near the Charles River. Seeing Rose makes me remember my old life, when I wore a suit, moderated panels in Washington, DC, and participated in actual journalism. I tell her what’s happened to me at HubSpot, how I was promised one job but given another. Rose doesn’t seem surprised—or sympathetic. Rose is British. She has no patience for complainers. After breakfast she has some free time, so I offer to give her a tour around our offices. She’s heard of HubSpot and is curious to see the software. She thinks her company might be able to use it.

• From The World of Biblical Israel (2013)

  14 Lecture 2: By the Rivers of Babylon—Exile national deity requires being physically present in his temple or, at least, in their homeland. A god was tied to a land. • In verses 5 and 6, the references to the right hand withering and the tongue cleaving to the roof of the mouth relate to singing and harp playing. If the captives forget Jerusalem, they will never sing or play the harp again. • In verse 7, there is a sharp shift in the language of the psalm from nostalgia and lament to anger and a call for revenge. The Judeans specifically call for revenge against the Edomites, who had rejoiced in Jerusalem’s fall, and Babylon, the “devastator.” • Both parts of the psalm emphasize memory. The Judeans call on themselves to remember their homeland and capital city. Here, memory is infused with nostalgic longing and a conviction to endure. They also call on their god to remember who wronged them. This memory is infused with anger and a desire for revenge. Lamentations 1 • Lamentations is a book of poetry that laments the conquest of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. It is different from Psalm 137 because it is set in the conquered city of Jerusalem rather than in exile. psalm 137 gives us the context of exile—within which the Bible began to take shape as a historical narrative, a sacred memory, and ultimately a canon of scripture. © Getty Images/Photos.com/Thinkstock.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Meanwhile, Stephen, enjoying the comfortable brougham, would begin to indulge in kaleidoscopic musings, those musings that belong to the end of the day, and occasionally visit children. Mrs. Thompson’s bent spine, it looked like a bow—not a rainbow but one of the archery kind; if you stretched a tight string from her feet to her head, could you shoot straight with Mrs. Thompson? China dogs—they had nice china dogs at Langley’s—that made you think of someone; oh, yes, of course, Collins—Collins and a cottage with red china dogs. But you tried not to think about Collins! There was such a queer light slanting over the hills, a kind of gold glory, and it made you feel sorry—why should a gold glory make you feel sorry when it shone that way on the hills? Rice pudding, almost as bad as tapioca—not quite though, because it was not so slimy—tapioca evaded your efforts to chew it, it felt horrid, like biting down on your own gum. The lanes smelt of wetness, a wonderful smell! Yet when Nanny washed things they only smelt soapy—but then, of course, God washed the world without soap; being God, perhaps He didn’t need any—you needed a lot, especially for hands—did God wash His hands without soap? Mother, talking about calves and babies, and looking like the Virgin Mary in church, the one in the stained-glass window with Jesus, which reminded you of Church Street, not a bad place after all; Church Street was really rather exciting—what fun it must be for men to have hats that they could take off, instead of just smiling—a bowler must be much more fun than a Leghorn—you couldn’t take that off to Mother— The brougham would roll smoothly along the white road, between stout leafy hedges starred with dog-roses; blackbirds and thrushes would be singing loudly, so loudly that Stephen could hear their voices above the quick clip, clip, of the cobs and the muffled sounds of the carriage. Then from under her brows she must glance across at Anna, who she knew loved the songs of blackbirds and thrushes; but Anna’s face would be hidden in shadow, while her hands lay placidly folded. And now the horses, nearing their stables, would redouble their efforts as they swung through the gates, the tall, iron gates of the parklands of Morton, faithful gates that had always meant home. Old trees would fly past, then the paddocks with their cattle—Worcestershire cattle with uncanny white faces; then the two quiet lakes where the swans reared their cygnets; then the lawns, and at last the wide curve in the drive, near the house, that would lead to the massive entrance.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  As for the fish section, where perch, pike, plaice, sole, and eels lay heaped on black slate slabs with fresh water constantly running over them, Pereira described it as a whole underworld in itself, said Austerlitz, and if it hadn’t been too late he, Austerlitz, would go round the place again with me. He added that he would particularly like to show me the temple, with its omamental gold-painted picture of a three-story ark floating beneath a rainbow, and the dove just returning to it carrying the olive branch in her beak. Oddly enough, said Austerlitz, as he stood in front of this attractive motif with Pereira that afternoon he had been thinking of our encounters in Belgium, so long ago now, and telling himself he must find someone to whom he could relate his own story, a story which he had learned only in the last few years and for which he needed the kind of listener I had once been in Antwerp, Liége, and Zeebrugge.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  In my own career, there have always been two soundtracks for each kitchen: one for the workday and another for the late hours after work, when, pumped up with excess adrenaline, my fellow culinarians and I would head out to the clubs or the bars, where we'd drink and review the events of the day. We'd tell stories, share our pain, gripe about bosses and customers, and do what chefs and cooks do when they travel in packs: talk shop. The things I cooked, like the people I knew, I associate with certain songs, certain bands, nightclubs long gone, bars both nearly forgotten and still with us. The places and the songs changed, but certain patterns have held true over the years. During the mornings, while prep cooks roasted bones and chopped vegetables for stock and the line cooks set up their stations, portioned fish, and made sauce, it was a time for fairly melodic fare. The kitchen sound system, usually a food- encrusted boom box with considerable functional eccentricities, would play nothing too jangly or nerve-racking: Curtis Mayfield, Isaac Hayes, Depeche Mode, Neil Young—sentimental, atmospheric fare likely to make us feel good about ourselves while cleaning squid or tearing the abductor muscles off scallops. The service period (when, admittedly, most chefs don't allow music, but read on) was usually given over to the large and usually omnipresent Latino contingent: salsa, soca, mariachi, and Mexican pop. When the rush was over, while last orders dribbled out and the cooks began to break down their stations, I usually stepped in with louder, more nihilistic sounds, designed to get us through the last hours of cleaning drudgery and off to the bars with hearts still pumping: mostly mid-seventies/early-eighties punk: the Clash, the New York Dolls, my beloved Ramones, and others whom I still associate with my first happy years of cooking professionally in New York. Those were the bands we went to see then, after our kitchens closed and we'd had a few freebies at the bar. Most of those places—in fact, all of them—are closed now: Max's Kansas City, CBGB's, the Mudd Club, Club 57, Hurrah, along with after-hours venues like AM/ PM, the Nursery, and the Continental. All day long, the job was about control and maintaining command of one's ingredients, environment, and personnel. After work it was about losing control. One constant, then and now, is my still ironclad ground rule regarding music both during and after work: In any kitchen where I am in control, there is a strict NO Billy Joel, NO Grateful Dead policy. If you are seen visibly enjoying either act, whether during or even after your working hours, you can clean out your locker now. You're fired. Like a lot of my peers, I'm much older and maybe even a little nicer now and pretty much done with nightclubs and any place where there are likely to be crowds or dancing.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  2. Iron Age glimpses of Asherah: ( left ) pottery fragment from Kuntillet Ajrud (north Sinai) with a trio of figures, two bovine; in the inscription above, ‘I bless you by Yahveh our Guardian and his Asherah’; ( right ) figurine of Asherah in a common Judaean ‘pillar figurine’ type, with hands emphasizing her nursing breasts. The subsequent narrative in the Hebrew Bible (which, it has to be said, is not much reflected in archaeological discoveries) portrays David as conquering most of the tract of territory in which the Children of Israel lived, though never subduing their main rivals in coastal cities. His son Solomon (reigned c .970– c .930) brought extra swagger to the resulting kingdom – though probably not nearly so much as the biblical sources claim. Solomon’s most lasting achievement is undeniable: he built a new Temple for God on a hill beside Jerusalem, a spectacularly sited small city conquered by David a few decades before. There God reigned along with his consort Asherah, though she found herself unceremoniously ejected in later centuries. This monumental Temple became increasingly an unchallenged symbol of Judaic faith and identity, and though its successor was finally destroyed by a Roman army in the early years of Christian emergence a thousand years later, it remains a potent presence in the imaginations of Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. It may have been in Solomon’s time, the tenth century BCE , that the combination of monarchy and Temple priesthood spawned a bureaucracy of record-keepers. In turn they began producing what are probably the first large-scale fragments of text to remain in the Hebrew Bible: works of history chronicling and celebrating the monarchy, including a suitably edifying presentation of the rather awkward transition from Saul’s to David’s dynasty. Overladen with much long-term adaptations and preoccupations, these form the backbone of the books of Samuel, Kings and the later reworkings of them which Christian Bibles label the two books of Chronicles. [23] Solomon’s realm quickly split after his death into two kingdoms, southern Judah and northern Israel; their political union had probably never been robust despite their common worship of the God of Abraham. That political disaster led to constant nostalgia for the remembered and now much- exaggerated glories of David and Solomon, through two or three centuries of dual monarchical rule which the Hebrew Bible portrays as repeatedly falling short of earlier standards, not least in faithfulness to God and his laws. Because of this, alongside complex narrative history the Hebrew Bible enshrines a remarkable genre of literature rarely surviving from other ancient cultures: passionate denunciations of the society around the divinely inspired speaker, who is known as a prophet. Centuries later, Christians ransacked the texts inherited from these prophetic performances for clues about the coming of Jesus and the radical change of direction for the Judaic tradition that it represented.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  Beside her, almost as tall as she was, walked a Belgian sheepdog now gray with age who answered to the name of Billie and was very timid. In the bright spring light shining through the newly opened leaves of the lime trees you might have thought, Austerlitz told me, that you had entered a fairy tale which, like life itself, had grown older with the passing of time. I for my part could not get the story of the cemetery in Alderney Street with which Austerlitz had taken his leave of me out of my head, and that may have been why I stopped in Antwerp on my way back from Paris, to see the Nocturama again and go out to Breendonk once more. I spent a disturbed night in a hotel on the Astridsplein, in an ugly room with brown wallpaper looking out on fire walls, ventilation chimneys, and flat roofs separated from each other by barbed wire at the back of the building. meer

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  What particularly attracted me to Turner’s watercolor, said Austerlitz, was not merely the similarity of the scene in Lausanne to the funeral at Cutiau, but the memory it prompted in me of my last walk with Gerald in the early summer of 1966, through the vineyards above Morges on the banks of Lake Geneva. During my subsequent studies of Turner’s life and his sketchbooks I discovered the fact, entirely insignificant in itself but nonetheless one I found curiously moving, that in 1798 he, Turner, had himself visited the estuary of the Mawddach on a journey through Wales, and that at the time he was exactly the same age as I was at the funeral in Cutiau. As I speak of it now, said Austerlitz, it is as if I had been sitting in the south-facing drawing room of Andromeda Lodge among the mourners only yesterday, as if I could still hear their quiet murmuring, and Adela saying she didn’t know what she would do with herself now, all alone in that big house. Gerald, who was then in his last year of school and had come over from Oswestry especially for the funeral, told me about the lack of any improvement in conditions at Stower Grange, which he described as a horrible inkblot disfiguring the souls of its pupils for ever. He was kept from going mad, said Gerald, only by the fact that since joining the Air Cadet Corps he had been able to fly over the whole wretched place in a Chipmunk and get right away from it once a week. The further you can rise above the earth the better, he said, and for that same reason he had decided to study astronomy. About four o’clock I went down to Barmouth station with Gerald. When I returned—dusk was already falling, said Austerlitz, and fine rain hung suspended in the air, apparently without sinking to the ground—Adela came to meet me from the misty depths of the garden, muffled up in greenish-brown tweed with millions of tiny drops of water clinging to the fine fuzz of its outline and forming a kind of

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  patiently stayed beside me, he led me round a few more corners and up several steps to a kind of mezzanine floor, from which I could look up at the mighty dome of the former Wilsonova Station, or more accurately at half the dome, since the other half had been sliced away, so to speak, by the new construction towering up into it. Along the semicircular lower rim of the dome ran a gallery with small café tables on it. When I had bought myself a ticket for the Hook of Holland I sat there for half an hour, until it was time for my train to leave, trying to think my way back through the decades, to remember what it had been like when, carried in Agata’s arms—as Vera had told me, said Austerlitz—I craned my neck, unable to take my eyes off the vault reaching such a vast height above us. But neither Agata nor Vera nor I myself emerged from the past. Sometimes it seemed as if the veil would part; I thought, for one fleeting instant, that I could feel the touch of Agata’s shoulder or see the picture on the front of the Charlie Chaplin comic which Vera had bought me for the journey, but as soon as I tried to hold one of these fragments fast, or get it into better focus, as it were, it disappeared into the emptiness revolving over my head. It was all the more surprising and indeed alarming a little later, said Austerlitz, when I looked out of the corridor window of my carriage just before the train left at seven-thirteen, to find it dawning upon me with perfect certainty that I had seen the pattern of the glass and steel roof above the platforms before, made up as it was of triangles, round arches, horizontal and vertical lines and diagonals, and in the same half- light. As the train rolled very slowly out of the station, through a passage between the backs of blocks of flats and into the dark tunnel running under the New Town, and then I crossed the Vitava with a regular beat, it really seemed to me, said Austerlitz, as if time had stood still since the day when I first left Prague. It was a dark, oppressive morning. A small lamp with a pink pleated shade, the kind of thing one used to see in the windows of Belgian brothels, stood on the white cloth covering the little table in the Czech State Railways dining car, where I was sitting in order to get a better view. The chef, his toque at an angle on his head, leaned in the entrance to his galley smoking and talking to the waiter, a curly-haired, slight little man in a check waistcoat and yellow bow tie. Outside, under the lowering sky, meadows and fields passed by, fishponds, woods, the curve of a bend in a river, a stand of alders, hills and valleys, and at Beroun, if I remember correctly, a limeworks extending over a square mile or more, with chimneys and towering silos disappearing into the low clouds above, huge square buildings of crumbling concrete roofed with rusty corrugated iron, conveyor belts moving up and down, mills to grind the stone, conical mounds of gravel, huts and freight trucks, all of it uniformly covered with pale gray sinter and dust.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  the Sporkova, in the last weeks before the Germans marched in. In any case, one of the photographs showed the stage of a provincial theater, perhaps in Reichenau or Olmiitz or one of the other towns where Agata sometimes performed before she was engaged to appear in Prague. At first glance, said Austerlitz, Vera said she had thought the two figures in the bottom left-hand comer were Agata and Maximilian—they were so tiny that it was impossible to make them out well—but then of course she noticed that they were other people, perhaps the impresario, or a conjuror and his woman assistant. She had wondered, said Vera, what kind of play or opera had been staged in front of this alarming backdrop, and because of the high mountain range and the wild forest background she thought it might have been Wilhelm Tell, or La Sonnambula, or Ibsen’s last play. The Swiss boy with the apple on his head appeared in my mind’s eye, Vera continued; I sensed in me the moment of terror in which the narrow bridge gives way under the sleepwalker’s foot, and imagined that, high in the rocks above, an avalanche was already breaking loose, about to sweep the poor folk who had lost their way (for what else would have brought them to these desolate surroundings?) down into the depths next moment. Minutes went by, said Austerlitz, in which I too thought I saw the cloud of snow crashing into the valley, before I heard Vera again, speaking of the mysterious quality peculiar to such photographs when they surface from oblivion. One has the impression, she said, of something stirring in them, as if one caught small sighs of despair, gémissements de désespoir was her expression, said Austerlitz, as if the pictures had a memory of their own and remembered us, remembered the roles that we, the survivors, and those no longer among us had played in our former lives. Yes, and the small boy in the other photograph, said Vera after a while, this is you, Jacquot, in February 1939, about six months before you left Prague. You were to accompany Agata to a masked ball at the house of one of her influential admirers, and she had the snow-white costume made for you especially for the occasion. On the back it says Jacquot Austerlitz, paze ruzové krdlovny, in your grandfather’s handwriting, for he happened to be visiting at the time. The picture lay before me, said Austerlitz, but I dared not touch it. The words pdze ruizové krdlovny, paze ruzové krdlovny went round and round in my head, until their meaning came to me from far away, and once again I saw the live tableau with the Rose Queen and the little boy carrying her train at her side.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  That year I walked for long hours along the sea and through the town and sat for hours mulling and writing among the ancient ruins of the city. I never tired of imagining what the twelfth-century cathedral must once have been, what glorious stained glass must once have filled its now-empty stone-edged windows; nor could I escape the almost archetypal pullings of Sunday services in the college chapel, which, like the university itself, had been built during the early fifteenth century. The medieval traditions of learning and religion were threaded together in a deeply mystifying and wonderful way. The thick scarlet gowns of the undergraduates, said to be brightly colored because of an early Scottish king’s decree that students, as potentially dangerous to the State, should be easily recognized, brought vivid contrast to the gray buildings of the town; and, after chapel, the red-gowned students would walk to the end of the town’s pier, further extending their vivid contrast to the dark skies and the sea. It was, it is, a mystical place: full of memories of cold, clear nights and men and women in evening dress, long gloves, silk scarves, kilts, and tartan sashes over the shoulders of women in elegant floor-length silk gowns; an endless round of formal balls; late dinner parties of salmon, hams, fresh game, sherry, malt whiskies, and port; bright scarlet gowns on the backs of students on bicycles, in dining and lecture halls, in gardens, and on the ground as picnic blankets in the spring. There were late nights of singing and talking with my Scottish roommates; long banks of daffodils and bluebells on the hills above the sea; seaweed and rocks and limpet shells along the yellow, high-tided sands, and ravishingly beautiful Christmas services at the end of term: undergraduates in their long, bright gowns of red, and graduate students in their short, black somber ones; the old and beautiful carols; hanging lamps of gold-chained crowns, and deeply carved wooden choir stalls; the recitation of lessons in both the English public school and the far gentler, more lyrical Scottish accents. Leaving the chapel late that winter night was to enter onto an ancient scene, the sight of scarlet against snow, the ringing of bells, and a clear, full moon. St. Andrews provided a gentle forgetfulness over the preceding painful years of my life. It remains a haunting and lovely time to me, a marrow experience. For one who during her undergraduate years was trying to escape an inexplicable weariness and despair, St. Andrews was an amulet against all manner of longing and loss, a year of gravely held but joyous remembrances. Throughout and beyond a long North Sea winter, it was the Indian summer of my life.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  That year I walked for long hours along the sea and through the town and sat for hours mulling and writing among the ancient ruins of the city. I never tired of imagining what the twelfth-century cathedral must once have been, what glorious stained glass must once have filled its now-empty stone-edged windows; nor could I escape the almost archetypal pullings of Sunday services in the college chapel, which, like the university itself, had been built during the early fifteenth century. The medieval traditions of learning and religion were threaded together in a deeply mystifying and wonderful way. The thick scarlet gowns of the undergraduates, said to be brightly colored because of an early Scottish king’s decree that students, as potentially dangerous to the State, should be easily recognized, brought vivid contrast to the gray buildings of the town; and, after chapel, the red-gowned students would walk to the end of the town’s pier, further extending their vivid contrast to the dark skies and the sea. It was, it is, a mystical place: full of memories of cold, clear nights and men and women in evening dress, long gloves, silk scarves, kilts, and tartan sashes over the shoulders of women in elegant floor-length silk gowns; an endless round of formal balls; late dinner parties of salmon, hams, fresh game, sherry, malt whiskies, and port; bright scarlet gowns on the backs of students on bicycles, in dining and lecture halls, in gardens, and on the ground as picnic blankets in the spring. There were late nights of singing and talking with my Scottish roommates; long banks of daffodils and bluebells on the hills above the sea; seaweed and rocks and limpet shells along the yellow, high-tided sands, and ravishingly beautiful Christmas services at the end of term: undergraduates in their long, bright gowns of red, and graduate students in their short, black somber ones; the old and beautiful carols; hanging lamps of gold-chained crowns, and deeply carved wooden choir stalls; the recitation of lessons in both the English public school and the far gentler, more lyrical Scottish accents. Leaving the chapel late that winter night was to enter onto an ancient scene, the sight of scarlet against snow, the ringing of bells, and a clear, full moon. St. Andrews provided a gentle forgetfulness over the preceding painful years of my life. It remains a haunting and lovely time to me, a marrow experience. For one who during her undergraduate years was trying to escape an inexplicable weariness and despair, St. Andrews was an amulet against all manner of longing and loss, a year of gravely held but joyous remembrances. Throughout and beyond a long North Sea winter, it was the Indian summer of my life.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  One never thinks of China, but it is there all the time on the tips of your fingers and it makes your nose itchy; and long afterward, when you have forgotten almost what a firecracker smells like, you wake up one day with gold leaf choking you and the broken pieces of punk waft back their pungent odor and the bright red wrappers give you a nostalgia for a people and a soil you have never known, but which is in your blood, mysteriously there in your blood, like the sense of time or space, a fugitive, constant value to which you turn more and more as you get old, which you try to seize with your mind, but ineffectually, because in everything Chinese there is wisdom and mystery and you can never grasp it with two hands or with your mind but you must let it rub off, let it stick to your fingers, let it slowly infiltrate your veins. A few weeks later, upon receipt of a pressing invitation from Collins who had returned to Le Havre, Fillmore and I boarded the train one morning, prepared to spend the weekend with him. It was the first time I had been outside of Paris since my arrival here. We were in fine fettle, drinking Anjou all the way to the coast. Collins had given us the address of a bar where we were to meet; it was a place called Jimmie’s Bar, which everyone in Le Havre was supposed to know. We got into an open barouche at the station and started on a brisk trot for the rendezvous; there was still a half bottle of Anjou left which we polished off as we rode along. Le Havre looked gay, sunny; the air was bracing, with that strong salty tang which almost made me homesick for New York. There were masts and hulls cropping up everywhere, bright bits of bunting, big open squares and high-ceilinged cafés such as one only sees in the provinces. A fine impression immediately; the city was welcoming us with open arms. Before we ever reached the bar we saw Collins coming down the street on a trot, heading for the station, no doubt, and a little late as usual. Fillmore immediately suggested a Pernod; we were all slapping each other on the back, laughing and spitting, drunk already from the sunshine and the salt sea air. Collins seemed undecided about the Pernod at first. He had a little dose of clap, he informed us. Nothing very serious—“a strain” most likely. He showed us a bottle he had in his pocket—“Vénétienne” it was called, if I remember rightly. The sailors’ remedy for clap. We stopped off at a restaurant to have a little snack before repairing to Jimmie’s place. It was a huge tavern with big, smoky rafters and tables creaking with food. We drank copiously of the wines that Collins recommended. Then we sat down on a terrasse and had coffee and liqueurs.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  One never thinks of China, but it is there all the time on the tips of your fingers and it makes your nose itchy; and long afterward, when you have forgotten almost what a firecracker smells like, you wake up one day with gold leaf choking you and the broken pieces of punk waft back their pungent odor and the bright red wrappers give you a nostalgia for a people and a soil you have never known, but which is in your blood, mysteriously there in your blood, like the sense of time or space, a fugitive, constant value to which you turn more and more as you get old, which you try to seize with your mind, but ineffectually, because in everything Chinese there is wisdom and mystery and you can never grasp it with two hands or with your mind but you must let it rub off, let it stick to your fingers, let it slowly infiltrate your veins. A few weeks later, upon receipt of a pressing invitation from Collins who had returned to Le Havre, Fillmore and I boarded the train one morning, prepared to spend the weekend with him. It was the first time I had been outside of Paris since my arrival here. We were in fine fettle, drinking Anjou all the way to the coast. Collins had given us the address of a bar where we were to meet; it was a place called Jimmie’s Bar, which everyone in Le Havre was supposed to know. We got into an open barouche at the station and started on a brisk trot for the rendezvous; there was still a half bottle of Anjou left which we polished off as we rode along. Le Havre looked gay, sunny; the air was bracing, with that strong salty tang which almost made me homesick for New York. There were masts and hulls cropping up everywhere, bright bits of bunting, big open squares and high-ceilinged cafés such as one only sees in the provinces. A fine impression immediately; the city was welcoming us with open arms. Before we ever reached the bar we saw Collins coming down the street on a trot, heading for the station, no doubt, and a little late as usual. Fillmore immediately suggested a Pernod; we were all slapping each other on the back, laughing and spitting, drunk already from the sunshine and the salt sea air. Collins seemed undecided about the Pernod at first. He had a little dose of clap, he informed us. Nothing very serious—“a strain” most likely. He showed us a bottle he had in his pocket—“Vénétienne” it was called, if I remember rightly. The sailors’ remedy for clap. We stopped off at a restaurant to have a little snack before repairing to Jimmie’s place. It was a huge tavern with big, smoky rafters and tables creaking with food. We drank copiously of the wines that Collins recommended. Then we sat down on a terrasse and had coffee and liqueurs.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Wren’s loose laugh has somehow released. With that bottle between my legs and the sun splashing through the window I experience once again the splendor of those miserable days when I first arrived in Paris, a bewildered, poverty-stricken individual who haunted the streets like a ghost at a banquet. Everything comes back to me in a rush—the toilets that wouldn’t work, the prince who shined my shoes, the Cinema Splendide where I slept on the patron’s overcoat, the bars in the window, the feeling of suffocation, the fat cockroaches, the drinking and carousing that went on between times, Rose Cannaque and Naples dying in the sunlight. Dancing the streets on an empty belly and now and then calling on strange people—Madame Delorme, for instance. How I ever got to Madame Delorme’s, I can’t imagine any more. But I got there, got inside somehow, past the butler, past the maid with her little white apron, got right inside the palace with my corduroy trousers and my hunting jacket—and not a button on my fly. Even now I can taste again the golden ambiance of that room where Madame Delorme sat upon a throne in her mannish rig, the goldfish in the bowls, the maps of the ancient world, the beautifully bound books; I can feel again her heavy hand resting upon my shoulder, frightening me a little with her heavy Lesbian air. More comfortable down below in that thick stew pouring into the Gare St. Lazare, the whores in the doorways, seltzer bottles on every table; a thick tide of semen flooding the gutters. Nothing better between five and seven than to be pushed around in that throng, to follow a leg or a beautiful bust, to move along with the tide and everything whirling in your brain. A weird sort of contentment in those days. No appointments, no invitations for dinner, no program, no dough. The golden period, when I had not a single friend. Each morning the dreary walk to the American Express, and each morning the inevitable answer from the clerk. Dashing here and there like a bedbug, gathering butts now and then, sometimes furtively, sometimes brazenly; sitting down on a bench and squeezing my guts to stop the gnawing, or walking through the Jardin des Tuileries and getting an erection looking at the dumb statues. Or wandering along the Seine at night, wandering and wandering, and going mad with the beauty of it, the trees leaning to, the broken images in the water, the rush of the current under the bloody lights of the bridges, the women sleeping in doorways, sleeping on newspapers, sleeping in the rain; everywhere the musty porches of the cathedrals and beggars and lice and old hags full of St.