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.

Page 12 of 45 · 20 per page

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  Your affairs all have their death, even as have ye; but in such an one as long endureth, it escapeth note because your lives are short. And as the rolling of the lunar heaven covereth and layeth bare the shores incessantly, so fortune doth to Florence; wherefore it should appear no wondrous thing which I shall tell of the exalted Florentines whose fame lieth concealed by time. I have seen the Ughi, seen the Catellini, Filippi, Greci, Ormanni, and Alberichi, illustrious citizens, already in decline; 19 I have seen, even as great as ancient, with him of the Sannella, him of the Arca, and Soldanieri and Ardinghi and Bostichi. Over the gate 20 which is now laden with new felony of so great weight, that soon ’twill be the wrecking of the bark, were the Ravignani, whence descendeth the County Guy, and whoso since hath taken lofty Bellincione’s name.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  The transcendence of solipsism is a central concern in Nabokov. He recommends no escape, and there is an unmistakable moral resonance in his treatment of the theme: it is only at the outset of Lolita that Humbert can say that he had Lolita “safely solipsized.” The coldly unromantic scrutiny which his exiles endure is often overlooked by critics. In Pnin the gentle, addlepated professor is seen in a new light in the final chapter, when the narrator assumes control and makes it clear that he is inheriting Pnin’s job but not, he would hope, his existence. John Shade asks us to pity “the exile, the old man / Dying in a motel,” and we do; but in the Commentary, Kinbote says that a “king who sinks his identity in the mirror of exile is guilty of [a regicide].” “The past [is] the past,” Lolita tells Humbert toward the end of that novel, when he asks her to relive what had always been inexorably lost. As a book about the spell exerted by the past, Lolita is Nabokov’s own parodic answer to his previous book, the first edition of Speak, Memory. Mnemosyne is now seen as a black muse, nostalgia as a grotesque cul-de-sac. Lolita is the last book one would offer as “autobiographical,” but even in its totally created form it connects with the deepest reaches of Nabokov’s soul. Like the poet Fyodor in The Gift, Nabokov could say that while he keeps everything “on the very brink of parody … there must be on the other hand an abyss of seriousness, and I must make my way along this narrow ridge between my own truth and a caricature of it”. An autobiographic theme submitted to the imagination thus takes on a new life: frozen in art, halted in space, now timeless, it can be lived with. When the clownish Gradus assassinates John Shade by mistake, in a novel published forty years after Nabokov’s father was similarly murdered, one may remember the butterfly which the seven-year-old Nabokov caught and then lost, but which was “finally overtaken and captured, after a forty-year race, on an immigrant dandelion … near Boulder” (Speak, Memory). One recognizes how art makes life possible for Nabokov, and why he calls Invitation to a Beheading a “violin in a void.” His art records a constant process of becoming—the evolution of the artist’s self through artistic creation—and the cycle of insect metamorphosis is Nabokov’s controlling metaphor for the process, provided by a lifetime of biological investigations which established in his mind “links between butterflies and the central problems of nature.” Significantly, a butterfly or moth will often appear at the end of a Nabokov novel, when the artistic “cycle” of that book is complete.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  Foster were in the hospital, where Ben Sapphire stayed when he wasn’t sleeping on Irene’s couch. And where Dr. O went when Corinne kicked him out of the house. Miri had been inside the hotel just once, for a bar mitzvah party back in seventh grade. She can still remember the dress she wore, one of Charlotte Whitten’s, though she didn’t know it at the time. Black velvet top, sweetheart neckline, white net skirt. She tries to imagine Eliza wearing a party dress and gets a picture in her mind of her fifteen-year-old daughter, named for the city she’s returning to, galloping on her beloved horse in one of Charlotte Whitten’s dresses from Bonwit’s. She laughs out loud. When is the last time she wore a cocktail dress? No, wait—she remembers—Frank Sinatra’s opening at the Sands, where they celebrated Rusty’s sixty-fifth birthday. He’d dedicated “Fly Me to the Moon” to Rusty, which made her night. Miri didn’t want a big bash for her fiftieth. She made Andy promise, no surprise party. She hated surprise parties. Christina threw a barbecue at the ranch anyway, but at least it wasn’t a surprise. She and Andy danced the Hustle, the Bump, the Funky Chicken, to prove to their sons, Malcolm and Kenny, both college students, and to teenage Eliza, how young they were, how hip, never mind that their kids had moved on to new dance fads. Andy is a great dancer, much better than she is. He’s still trying to get her to loosen up on the dance floor. He’s a skier, a mountain biker, an easygoing, well-liked guy. He’s made a name for himself in forensic dentistry. She fought him on that one. She had enough disasters in her life. But he won, promising not to bring the details of his work to the dinner table. Her hotel room is nothing to write home about, but it’s clean and light, looking out over Jersey Avenue. Christina and Jack are staying in a suite at the Pierre in New York. They offered her an adjoining room, but she opted for Elizabeth, explaining she was having dinner with Henry and Leah, who would also be staying at the Elizabeth Carteret. And she’s been thinking about a story based on the thirties gangland slaying that took place in a suite on the eighth floor of this hotel. She’s never lost her fascination for the Jewish gangsters. She sits on the edge of the bed and dials Eliza at school. It’s midafternoon there so she’s surprised when Eliza answers in a sleepy voice. “Hullo?” She didn’t expect her to answer at all, thought she’d just leave a message on her machine, the way she had this morning. “Hi, honey. Are you all right?” “Why wouldn’t I be all right?” “I expected you to be at class. Or at the stables.” She means to sound soft, maternal, but knows she sounds judgmental.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  You?” “Still married,” she tells him. Then adds, “Happily.” “One of the lucky ones.” She nods. “I was at your stepbrother’s funeral. Steve Osner. He was your stepbrother, wasn’t he?” “Yes. The family was devastated.” “A military hero. He was my best friend all through school. The way Corinne threw herself over his coffin…I’ll never forget that moment.” No one had told Miri about this. Rusty had been asked not to attend the funeral. She’d understood. She was pregnant again, anyway, and as sick as the last time. Daisy went with Dr. O to the funeral, as much to look after Dr. O as to mourn Steve. “If only I’d been able to convince him to go to Lehigh with me,” Phil said. “Neither of us could stand the idea of Syracuse after my cousin’s death. You remember Kathy?” “I do, and her green velvet New Year’s Eve dress.” “It was an awful time.” “Yes.” “But Steve went and enlisted the second he graduated.” He shakes his head. “Maybe to prove something to his parents. Who knows? He was enraged by the divorce. Shipped out to Korea after basic training.” “He walked into enemy fire, didn’t he?” They didn’t talk a lot about Steve’s death but Miri knows Dr. O blamed himself. “Tossed a grenade into a bunker on Pork Chop Hill,” Phil said, “blew himself up along with the enemy. And you know, the war was basically over by then. But they kept fighting over that stupid hill, as if it mattered, as if it would make a difference. Such a fucking waste, excuse my language.” “Dr. O’s never gotten over it. I doubt you ever get over a child’s death. He and Rusty named my second brother Stuart. It would have been too hard to have another son named Steven.” It’s bittersweet, chatting with Phil, then Gaby, who takes Miri aside and asks if it’s true about Longy. “Was he really a mobster?” “I’m afraid so,” Miri says. “He sent me a basket of flowers after the crash. He was such a gentleman.” “Yes,” Miri says, then adds, with a straight face, “and he was good to his mother.” She doesn’t mean to be the last to leave. Or does she? Before she reaches the door, Mason says, “Sit awhile, Miri. Talk to me.” He brings her a glass of wine. She sinks into the sofa, tucks her feet under her. She’s more relaxed now. “Hungry?” Mason asks. She shakes her head. Looks right at him for the first time. “Do you ever think about how young we were? My kids are older than we were.” “Miri…” Hearing him say her name like that in a soft, slightly hoarse voice takes her back to the basement in Irene’s house, to the night they played Trust. He rests his hand on her arm, and just that is enough to make her tingle. “I didn’t know how to hear your side of the story,” she says.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  The flight attendant gently nudges Miri. They’re coming into Newark and her seat back has to be returned to its upright position. She’s still a nervous flier, still digs her fingernails into the fabric of her seat cushion for landings. She could have waited until tonight and come with Christina and Jack on the company plane but she wanted to do this on her own. It’s not the first time she’s flown into Newark Airport. The flight path no longer brings planes in or out over residential Elizabeth. Not since the airport reopened in November 1952. But that doesn’t stop her from thinking about it every time. It doesn’t stop her from rushing to the doctor before a flight, sure she has a sinus infection, hoping to be told it’s not safe for her to fly. She closes her eyes, sings a little song inside her head until they’re safely on the ground. Then she’s up and on her way with all the other passengers. Outside, she grabs a taxi to the old Elizabeth Carteret hotel, the hotel where Joseph Fluet stayed during the investigations, where Mr. Foster stayed while Betsy and Mrs. Foster were in the hospital, where Ben Sapphire stayed when he wasn’t sleeping on Irene’s couch. And where Dr. O went when Corinne kicked him out of the house. Miri had been inside the hotel just once, for a bar mitzvah party back in seventh grade. She can still remember the dress she wore, one of Charlotte Whitten’s, though she didn’t know it at the time. Black velvet top, sweetheart neckline, white net skirt. She tries to imagine Eliza wearing a party dress and gets a picture in her mind of her fifteen-year-old daughter, named for the city she’s returning to, galloping on her beloved horse in one of Charlotte Whitten’s dresses from Bonwit’s. She laughs out loud. When is the last time she wore a cocktail dress? No, wait—she remembers—Frank Sinatra’s opening at the Sands, where they celebrated Rusty’s sixty-fifth birthday. He’d dedicated “Fly Me to the Moon” to Rusty, which made her night. Miri didn’t want a big bash for her fiftieth. She made Andy promise, no surprise party. She hated surprise parties. Christina threw a barbecue at the ranch anyway, but at least it wasn’t a surprise. She and Andy danced the Hustle, the Bump, the Funky Chicken, to prove to their sons, Malcolm and Kenny, both college students, and to teenage Eliza, how young they were, how hip, never mind that their kids had moved on to new dance fads. Andy is a great dancer, much better than she is. He’s still trying to get her to loosen up on the dance floor. He’s a skier, a mountain biker, an easygoing, well-liked guy. He’s made a

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  answers. She stays up too late that night, watching A Place in the Sun on TV. She’d seen it with Rusty at the Regent movie theater that winter, the year it won six Academy Awards. They’d each gone through two handkerchiefs, bawling over the young Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift. Rusty planned to come with her to Elizabeth for tomorrow’s commemorative event, but Dr. O’s health is too fragile, even though Fern is a doctor and offered to stay at the house. — THEY GATHER the next morning at the site of the third crash, in the field behind Janet Memorial. The old home is in disrepair, no longer used to house children in need, children without parents or family to care for them. She wonders where those children go now. It’s a bright, sunny day, mild compared to the bitterly cold winter of 1952. Miri stands between Christina and Henry, oversize sunglasses covering half her face, a cashmere shawl thrown over her new suit. She and Christina had gone shopping for today’s event. They’d each bought a designer suit with big shoulders, right out of Dynasty. They’d laughed their heads off in the dressing room. Christina is the best friend Miri always wanted. The real deal. When it comes to dynasties, Christina and Jack have their own. Irish Jack, that’s what they called him in the early days. He’d built his dynasty slowly, shrewdly—though he swears he didn’t have a clue back then, just knew he wanted to work hard and be successful for Christina and their girls. An understatement, if ever there was one. Went from being an electrician to an electrical contractor to a general contractor to owning one of the biggest commercial construction companies in the West, with IRISH JACK lettered on the side of his plane. — THE MAYOR, Thomas Dunn, who was a Sixth Ward councilman that winter, speaks from a platform. “The fifty-eight-day period that ended here on February eleventh, 1952, at twelve-twenty a.m., was the most memorable of my life, outside of World War Two. Our mayor at the time called it ‘The Umbrella of Death.’ Others referred to our town as ‘Plane Crash City.’ But we know better. We know our city survived the American Revolution. George Washington slept

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  “Vegas must be a good place for stories,” Mason says. “If you like weird stories, it’s great.” “Well, I’m proud of you.” Again, he looks into her eyes. Again, she looks away. Gulps down the whole glass of water. She’s saved by a knock on the door. Gaby and her family, and a few minutes later, the boys from Janet. And Phil Stein. “Oh my god,” she says. “You’re Phil Stein, aren’t you?” “I am.” “I loved your mother.” “And she loved you. Never stopped talking about you, even after you moved away.” “Is she...” It’s awkward, asking if a parent is still living. He shakes his head. “She died years ago. Complications of diabetes and a stroke.” “I’m sorry. She was so kind to me.” “She was a good person. I’m still trying to convince my sister of that.” “Mother-daughter relationships can be difficult,” Miri says. “Tell me about it. I gave Mom a dog for her sixtieth birthday. My sister almost killed me. The dog reminded Mom of Fred. Remember Fred?” “We have a dog named Fred,” Miri tells him, “and another called Goldie.” “Goldie. My mother would have loved knowing that.” They both laugh. “Do you have a family?” she asks. “Divorced,” he says. “Like half our generation.” “Sorry.” “But I have two kids. You?” “Still married,” she tells him. Then adds, “Happily.” “One of the lucky ones.” She nods. “I was at your stepbrother’s funeral. Steve Osner. He was your stepbrother, wasn’t he?” “Yes. The family was devastated.” “A military hero. He was my best friend all through school. The way Corinne threw herself over his coffin...I’ll never forget that moment.”

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  She sometimes thinks of Mason when she and Andy are making love. When she’s not sure she can get there—something new, something perimenopausal— as soon as she puts herself back—ohmygod—as soon as she’s there, she calls out, Yes, yes, yes! And Andy is happy he’s satisfied her so well. Does Mason imagine her when he’s with Rebecca? Does he imagine Polina? “Do you ever wonder about what might have been?” Mason asks. “Who doesn’t?” She collects her shawl, her bag, the kaleidoscope. When they say goodnight at the hotel room door he touches her face. She goes back to her room, kicks off her boots, falls back on the bed and calls Andy. She needs to hear his voice. “Are you okay?” he asks. “Yes...but I miss you.” “Miss you, too.” “See you tomorrow,” she tells him. “I’ll meet you at the airport.” “But I left my car there.” “So what?” She tears up. “Ask me about the snow on the mountain,” he says. “How was the snow?” “Perfect.” — SHE MEETS Mason for breakfast the next morning, then he drives her to the cemetery to visit Irene and Ben. The cemetery is close to Newark Airport, not exactly a peaceful site, but it’s where they wanted to be, with their families and old friends. She places a stone on top of each headstone. Ben Sapphire, the stepgrandfather she came to admire, and Irene Ammerman Sapphire. She misses Irene, her nana, who loved her unconditionally, who taught her, by example, to take another chance on love. Miri wipes the tears from her eyes, then blows her nose. “She gave me her recipe for brisket,” Mason says. “No.” “Yeah, she did. And I passed it on to Rebecca. Every Friday night we have

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Everything quickened, even my heartbeat. The sense of smell, so long banished from out-of-doors save for a whiff of exhaust or the scent of desultory smoke unspooling from a chimney, now returned and released memories long buried in the pockets of earth’s apron. I’d cross the piazza at school and smell something earthy or rusty or a dog’s stale turd, much washed and often salted, leeched of everything except its palest quintessence. Or last autumn would rise like a revenant from a scattered pile of burned leaves long covered with snow, and behind that ghost stood one even taller, more deeply shrouded in sadness—the memory of the hollow behind the house where I’d lived and played as a child. But if all these odors awakened memories, the salt smell, suggesting nothing of my past, promised a future, a journey, and I could hear sails luffing and snapping as they were cranked up the mast until they shivered under the weight of the cold wind. Two developments were unfolding within me, or rather two quite different stories about a single life were getting told. In one, Dr. O’Reilly’s version, I was wrestling with my unconscious, an immense, dark brother who seeped around me when I was awake, flowed over me when I slept, who sometimes invaded my body, caused my pen or tongue to slip, who erased a name from the blackboard of memory—a force with a baby’s features, greedy orifices, a madman’s cunning and an animal’s endurance, a Caliban as quicksilver as Ariel. This doppelganger was determined to confine me to what I’d already experienced and to deny me adventure, as though life were a cynical editor of gothic romances who demanded that every novel conform to a formula, who might accept slight variations in detail so long as the plot remained the same. O’Reilly’s job was to outwit this brilliant tyrant. While I observed the rounds in this psychoanalytic struggle, a quite different, less lurid, more scattered sort of story was taking place within me, one that lacked narrative drive or even direction. It sprang up without warning like mushrooms after rain; it came and went, circled around itself, died away and then was crawling like moss over the rock face of my will.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  “I’d know you anywhere,” he says, “even with the hair. ” “I’d know you, too, even without it.” He’s not really without it, just has less on his head, more on his face. He laughs. And just like that, she’s fifteen again. Except she’s not. —THEY’RE SEATED at different tables at lunch. She’s with Christina and Jack, Henry and Leah, four others. He’s across the room with Gaby and her handsome husband, their grown children and young grandchildren, and two men who were boys at Janet then, boys who helped rescue the trapped passengers. None of her old crowd is here. Suzanne lives in Seattle, married to a neurosurgeon. Miri tries to see her every year. Robo is divorced and has a gift shop in Westfield. Aside from two years at Boston U, she’s never left New Jersey. Eleanor is a professor of mathematics at Purdue, married to an economist. She hasn’t won the Nobel Prize yet and didn’t laugh when, a few years ago, Miri mentioned the possibility. Some things aren’t funny, Eleanor told her. Miri and Mason steal looks at one another through lunch. Miri doesn’t blush the way Rusty does, but she feels her cheeks flush. She drinks two glasses of wine, too fast. It goes straight to her head. You go to my head… She must have sung that line out loud because the woman next to her, a daughter of the Secretary of War who was killed when the second plane crashed, says, “What?” Miri knows she sometimes sings a line from a song out loud when she means to sing it only inside her head. “I was just thinking of an old song,” she says. “Don’t you love the old songs?” “I do,” Miri says. “My daughter finds me hopeless that way.” “Mine finds me hopeless in every way.” “Yes, that, too.” They laugh. “My father was a wonderful person,” she tells Miri. “I’ve never stopped missing him.” “My uncle, Henry Ammerman, wrote about your family,” Miri says. “The young reporter?” the woman asks, eyeing Henry, who is seated on Miri’s other side. “I remember him. I was at the apartment the day he came to talk to my mother.” “Henry talked to everyone after the crashes. Everything I know about writing I learned from him.” “You’re a writer?” “Reporter, now columnist, for the Las Vegas Sun. ” “Las Vegas…” she says, in a tone Miri has heard a million times, as if ordinary people can’t possibly live there. The program begins as dessert is served, plates of cookies and some kind of mousse that Miri pushes away. The mayor introduces Henry Ammerman. Oh, god, it’s going to be in alphabetical order? She’s going to be next? She doesn’t want to go next. Doesn’t want to get up in front of these people at all, especially not in front of Mason. “He was a young reporter for the Daily Post then,” the mayor says. “Today, he’s a prizewinning journalist for The Washington Post.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  “Miri...” Hearing him say her name like that in a soft, slightly hoarse voice takes her back to the basement in Irene’s house, to the night they played Trust. He rests his hand on her arm, and just that is enough to make her tingle. “I didn’t know how to hear your side of the story,” she says. “I didn’t believe there could be another side to the story.” “My side of the story is easy,” he says. “I was an idiot.” “I didn’t know how to forgive you.” “I never blamed you for not forgiving me. No girl in her right mind would have forgiven me.” “I couldn’t compete with her.” “If it matters, I was never with her again. A few months later she married a guy who owned a bar, had another kid and died at thirty-nine of ovarian cancer.” “That’s sad.” “Yes.” As she sips her wine, she can feel the pull. But she’s not going to do anything stupid. Never mind the devil on her shoulder whispering, Life is short and then you die. He leans in, kisses her gently, waits to see if she responds. She does, then changes her mind. “I can’t do this.” “I know,” he says. “Neither can I.” It’s all about remembering, it’s all about being fifteen and in love for the first time. She can almost smell the winter air outside the Y, feel the oil burner’s warmth in Irene’s basement, see the kaleidoscope, the colors, the patterns— which reminds her—she jumps up, walks across the room and pulls a tissue- paper-wrapped package tied in red and white bakery string from her bag. She hands it to him. “I thought your daughter might like to have this.” He rips off the paper, holds the kaleidoscope up to his eye, then hands it back to her. “Remember what I said when I gave it to you.” She remembers. He pulls her to her feet, hits the switch on his tape player and Nat King Cole sings, “Unforgettable, that’s what you are...” He’s thought of everything. They dance, holding each other, swaying, the way they did at the Y. Is this what she wants? Is this why she came here? She loves the idea of the kids they were, the sweetness between them.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  33Ramsdale revisited. I approached it from the side of the lake. The sunny noon was all eyes. As I rode by in my mud-flecked car, I could distinguish scintillas of diamond water between the far pines. I turned into the cemetery and walked among the long and short stone monuments. Bonzhur, Charlotte. On some of the graves there were pale, transparent little national flags slumped in the windless air under the evergreens. Gee, Ed, that was bad luck—referring to G. Edward Grammar, a thirty-five-year-old New York office manager who had just been arrayed on a charge of murdering his thirty-three-year-old wife, Dorothy. Bidding for the perfect crime, Ed had bludgeoned his wife and put her into a car. The case came to light when two county policemen on patrol saw Mrs. Grammar’s new big blue Chrysler, an anniversary present from her husband, speeding crazily down a hill, just inside their jurisdiction (God bless our good cops!). The car sideswiped a pole, ran up an embankment covered with beard grass, wild strawberry and cinquefoil, and overturned. The wheels were still gently spinning in the mellow sunlight when the officers removed Mrs. G’s body. It appeared to be a routine highway accident at first. Alas, the woman’s battered body did not match up with only minor damage suffered by the car. I did better. I rolled on. It was funny to see again the slender white church and the enormous elms. Forgetting that in an American suburban street a lone pedestrian is more conspicuous than a lone motorist, I left the car in the avenue to walk unobtrusively past 342 Lawn Street. Before the great bloodshed, I was entitled to a little relief, to a cathartic spasm of mental regurgitation. Closed were the white shutters of the Junk mansion, and somebody had attached a found black velvet hair ribbon to the white FOR SALE sign which was leaning toward the sidewalk. No dog barked. No gardener telephoned. No Miss Opposite sat on the vined porch—where to the lone pedestrian’s annoyance two pony-tailed young women in identical polka-dotted pinafores stopped doing whatever they were doing to stare at him: she was long dead, no doubt, these might be her twin nieces from Philadelphia.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  “How was the snow?” “Perfect.” —SHE MEETS Mason for breakfast the next morning, then he drives her to the cemetery to visit Irene and Ben. The cemetery is close to Newark Airport, not exactly a peaceful site, but it’s where they wanted to be, with their families and old friends. She places a stone on top of each headstone. Ben Sapphire, the stepgrandfather she came to admire, and Irene Ammerman Sapphire. She misses Irene, her nana, who loved her unconditionally, who taught her, by example, to take another chance on love. Miri wipes the tears from her eyes, then blows her nose. “She gave me her recipe for brisket,” Mason says. “No.” “Yeah, she did. And I passed it on to Rebecca. Every Friday night we have Irene’s brisket. It’s not exactly the same, not quite as good as I remember, but it’s good. I look forward to it.” “Irene would love knowing that.” “She knew.” “You kept in touch with her?” “Holiday cards, the occasional note.” “She never told me.” “She didn’t want to upset the cart. One summer, when she and Ben were vacationing down the shore, she invited me and Rebecca and our kids to lunch.” “I can’t believe she kept you a secret from me!” “She wanted to see for herself that I was happy. She already knew you were.” “She never stopped trying to rescue people, to fix what wasn’t right.” “Rebecca fell in love with her.” “Who didn’t?” She stops, then asks, “You and Rebecca?” “Up and down. But I think we’re going to make it.” “I hope you do.” He checks his watch. “I have to get you to the airport…if you’re really going.” She gives him a you must be kidding look. He shrugs and smiles. They walk back to his car. “I’m glad we got to spend time together.” “I’m glad, too.” She feels satisfied, happy. At the airport he kisses her goodbye in the car. “If someday…” he begins. “Yes, if …But for now…” “I get it,” he says, kissing her one last time. —SHE’S MADE A PLAN to meet Natalie for coffee in the first-class lounge at the airport before their flights. How long has it been since Natalie visited them in Las Vegas? She gave a lecture at the library on “channeling your past lives” during one of her book tours, but that was years ago, and she flew in and out of town quickly, with no time for family. Fern, who’d come in from Shiprock with her girlfriend, Ora, also a doctor on the Navajo reservation, had been disappointed. Now the two of them run a family clinic outside of Las Vegas. Natalie spies her first. “Hey, Brenda Starr …how’s it going?” “Not so bad.” “You look better today. Yesterday, you looked like a corporate executive in that suit.” If Miri thought Natalie would be different now that she’d achieved fame, she was wrong. “How was it seeing Mason again?” she asks.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Fewer American flags than in Florida but more than in San Francisco. Everywhere the hint of yellow curl on the leaves of the trees, like the catch paper thrown at something about to go up in flame. Here also were some of the oldest things in America: three churches built in the s, a graveyard overrun with mouldy pilgrims, blue plaques alerting you to all of this. Kiki made a cautious move to link arms with Jerome; he let her. People began to join them on the road, a  kipps and belsey few more at each corner. At the square, the power of independent movement was taken away from them; they were as one mass with hundreds of others. It had been a mistake to bring Murdoch. The festival was at its most populated point, lunchtime, and inside the crush everybody was too hot and grouchy to be interested in stepping aside for a small dog. With difficulty the three of them made their way to the less populated sidewalk. Kiki stopped at a stall selling sterling silver – earrings, bracelets, necklaces. The stallholder was a black man, exceptionally skinny, in a green string vest and grubby blue jeans. No shoes at all. His bloodshot eyes widened as Kiki picked up some hoop earrings. She had only this brief glimpse of him, but Kiki suspected already that this would be one of those familiar exchanges in which her enormous spellbinding bosom would play a subtle (or not so subtle, depending on the person) silent third role in the conversation. Women bent away from it out of politeness; men – more comfortably for Kiki – sometimes remarked on it in order to get on and over it, as it were. The size was sexual and at the same time more than sexual: sex was only one small element of its symbolic range. If she were white, maybe it would refer only to sex, but she was not. And so her chest gave off a mass of signals beyond her direct control: sassy, sisterly, predatory, motherly, threatening, comforting – it was a mirror-world she had stepped into in her mid forties, a strange fabulation of the person she believed she was. She could no longer be meek or shy. Her body had directed her to a new personality; people expected new things of her, some of them good, some not. And she had been a tiny thing for years and years! How does it happen? Kiki held the hoops up to each ear. The stall guy proffered a small oval mirror, raising it up to her face, but not quickly enough for her sensitivities. ‘Excuse me, brother – a few inches higher with that – Thank you – they don’t wear jewellery – sorry ’bout that. Just the ears.’ Jerome recoiled from this joke. He dreaded his mother’s habit of starting conversations with strangers. ‘Honey?’ she asked Jerome, turning to him. Again with the shrugging.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  We believe in his pain but are thrilled to the point of love, admiring how that pain explains itself. This schism helps account for the famously complicated ethics of the work’s ending. At last our narrator seems to have found, only to discard, his very own admiring married man with children. “Daddy? Finally got your full attention. And now—you listening?—you’re fired. No severance package, either, chump. So long, Pop.” All along, this boy’s upper vocal register has been wonderfully complicated by the ventriloquism of his looking back and down on himself, by his having turned forty. He has found a safe place of his own. He has remained deeply engaged and bitterly amused by the comic sadness of his own first years. When we read Ben Franklin’s autobiography we know that everything turned out all right for the suffering typesetting boy, because we bought the story of Ben Franklin; the kid did okay. In the way of these things, given the saving adoption agency run by Art itself, and generously supplanted by completest trust fund Memory, this book contains at least one kind father figure. —That turns out to be none of the priests, counselors, professors, roommates, hoodlums who push forward wanting to lead or corrupt this child. No, the best dad present is the boy himself, matured into the wondrous teller of his own tale. We have moved from the erection of hope—“anticipation”—to satiation’s warming afterglow—“nostalgia.” What, meanwhile, is absent? Isn’t a real and active life missing in action after those formative years spent reading great writers, fantasizing superior lovers? What rests between pubescent underripe high notes and middle age’s Brahmsian baritone refrains about regret, decay? What waits hammocked between elation at the prospect of a whole new life and its endlessly echoing Proustian ramifications? The core. Whatever is there, that is what’s most thoroughly a boy’s own. Hard-won. Is it often borrowed from books? Yes. It is a set of love letters written in exquisite diction and penmanship on parchment worthy of national constitutions. Are these petitions addressed to folks who will surely worry about the legal consequences of such a minor’s love? Were poetic tributes sent to the very people who must find such pubescent admiration a form of stalking? Yep. And yet that is one’s story. So often that’s just what our quest for the Ideal leaves us holding. We enjoyed our beloved’s favorite Requiem at the same time he did, but only from half a house away. And yet, who wise would wish away even one of love’s indignities? So now, prepare to be seduced by a song composed of hope. True, it goes all sweet and then all sour. But it always offers something glittering, permanent and yet while feeling as clearly transitory as that last, pure, held note of a gifted boy soprano. You hear the final quavering perfection before his whole mechanism, hormone-soaked, “breaks” at last. But here, for now, Nabokov’s “wayward child” has not quite met—nor fully yet become—the “panting maniac.”

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Thirty years! It can’t be thirty years since Fear of Flying was published. Either time is an illusion (as I’ve always suspected) or I’ve been sleeping through the decades like Rip Van Winkle. The girl who wrote this book is young enough to be my daughter. I look back on her tenderly. What a maniac she was. Raging hormones ruled her life. She was always in love with the wrong man and always compulsively writing about it. I want to say to her: “Slow down, be calm, meditate, do yoga, everything will turn out all right.” But she can’t hear me. There is no time machine to take me back to her and revise the contents of her teeming brain. And if there were, this book would not exist. The twenties are as frenetic a decade as the teens. You have a voice inside your head repeating I want, I want, I want, but you don’t know what you want or how to get it. You hardly know who you are. You go on instinct. And your instinct mostly pushes you toward adventures you won’t grasp until you look back on them. Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward, some sage once said. Isadora wants love, but how can she recognize love when the madness of sex is blinding her? She is wildly ambitious yet her romantic fantasies are forever getting in her way. She wants to break away from her parents, she wants to find herself—and yet she is driven by family forces she can’t fully comprehend. She wants to break free of restraints but she keeps getting caught by new versions of the same old traps. She runs away from one man’s tyranny just to fall into the tyranny of another. Mostly she is tyrannized by her own neuroses. She wants everything all at once. She has no serenity. She desperately wants to be a writer but she can’t sit still. My heart goes out to women in their twenties—my own creature, Isadora Wing, among them. Let me try to go back in time and remember how I invented her.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  You would put it more cleverly.’ ‘No, no – I just – surely, it’s about what both people want to do,’ said Kiki, applying a layer of colourless gloop to her mouth. ‘And how they each might . . . I guess enable their partners, no?’ ‘Enable? I don’t know.’ ‘I mean, your husband, Monty, for example,’ said Kiki, boldly. ‘He writes a lot about – I mean, I’ve read his articles – about what a perfect mother you are, and he . . . you know, often uses you as an example of the ideal – I guess, the ideal ‘stay-at-home’ Christian Mom – which is amazing of course – but there must also be things you . . . maybe things you wanted to do that . . . maybe you wish . . .’ Carlene smiled. Her teeth were the only non-regal thing about her, raggedy and uneven with large childish gaps. ‘I wanted to love and to be loved.’ ‘Yes,’ said Kiki, because she could not think of anything else. She listened out hopefully for the footsteps of Clotilde, some sign of imminent interruption, but nothing. ‘And Kiki – when you were young? I imagine you did a million things.’ ‘Oh, God . . . I wanted to. I don’t know about doing them. For the longest time I wanted to be Malcolm X’s private assistant. That didn’t work out. I wanted to be a writer. Wanted to sing at one point. My mamma wanted me to be a doctor. Black woman doctor . Those were her three favourite words.’ ‘And were you very good-looking?’ ‘Wow . . . what a question! Where’d that come from?’ Carlene lifted her bony shoulders once again. ‘I always wonder what people were like before I knew them.’ ‘Was I good-looking . . . Actually, I was!’ It was a strange thing to say out loud. ‘Carlene, between you and me, I was hot . Not for very long. About six years maybe. But I was.’ ‘You can always tell. You still have a good deal of beauty, I think,’ said Carlene. Kiki laughed raucously. ‘You are a shameless flatterer. You know  the anatomy lesson . . . I see Zora worrying all the time about her looks, and I want to say to her, honey, any woman who counts on her face is a fool . She doesn’t want to hear that from me. It’s how it is, though. We all end up in the same place in the end. That’s the truth .’ Kiki laughed again, more sadly this time. Now it was Carlene’s turn to smile politely. ‘Did I tell you?’ said Carlene, to end the brief silence, ‘My son Michael is engaged. We heard only last week.’ ‘Oh, that’s great,’ said Kiki, no longer so easily wrong-footed by the disconnected turns of Carlene’s conversation. ‘Who is she? American girl?’ ‘English. Her parents are Jamaican.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  The African women in their colourful kenti cloths, the whippet blonde with three phones tucked into the waistband of her tracksuit, the unmistakable Poles and Russians introducing the bone structure of Soviet Realism to an island of chinless, browless potato-faces, the Irish men resting on the gates of housing estates like farmers at a pig fair in Kerry . . . At this distance, walking past them all, thus itemizing them, not having to talk to any of them , flaˆneur Howard was able to love them and, more than this, to feel himself, in his own romantic fashion, to be one of them. We scum, we happy scum! From people like these he had come. To people like these he would always belong. It was an ancestry he referred to proudly at Marxist conferences and in print; it was a communion he occasionally felt on the streets of New York and in the urban outskirts of Paris. For the most part, however, Howard liked to keep his ‘working-class roots’ where they flourished best: in his imagination. Whatever the fear or force that had thrust him from Carlene Kipps’s funeral out on to these cold streets was what now compelled him to make this rare trip: down the Broadway, past the McDonald’s, past the halal butchers, second road on the left, to arrive here, at No.  with the thick glass panel in the door. The last time he stood on this doorstep was almost four years ago. Four years! That was the summer when the Belsey family had considered returning to London for Levi’s secondary education. After a disappointing reconnaissance of North London schools, Kiki insisted upon visiting No. , for old times’ sake, with the kids. The visit did not go well. And since then only a few phone calls had passed between this house and  Langham, along with the usual cards on birthdays and anniversaries. Although Howard had visited London often in recent times, he had never stopped at this door. Four years is a long time. You don’t stay away for four years without good reason. As soon as his finger pressed the bell, Howard knew he’d made a mistake. He waited – nobody  on beauty and being wrong came. Radiant with relief, he turned to go. It was the perfect visit: well intended but with no one at home. Then the door opened. An elderly woman he did not know stood before him with a nasty bunch of flowers in her hand – many carnations, a few daisies, a limp fern and one wilted star-gazer lily. She smiled coquettishly like a woman a quarter of her age greeting a suitor half Howard’s. ‘Hello?’ said Howard. ‘Hello, dear,’ she replied serenely, and pressed on with her smile.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  With these folk, and with others with them, did I see Florence in such full repose, she had not cause for wailing; with these folk I saw her people so glorious and so just, ne’er was the lily on the shaft reversed,36 nor yet by faction dyed vermilion.”37 1. Dante deals with the subject of nobility in the De Monorchia, ii, and in Conv. iv. 2. The legend ran that when Caesar united in himself all the high offices of state, he was addressed as a plurality of individuals, “ye”; but as a matter of fact in Dante’s time the Romans adhered to the old-fashioned thou. “Nay, they would not address either Pope or Emperor save as thou” (Benvenuto).3. “At these words which the queen spake to him [Lancelot] it came to pass that the lady of Malehaut coughed, of a set purpose, and uplifted her head which she had bowed down.” Romance of Lancelot. See Toynbee under Galeotto.4. Florence, the patron saint of which was St. John Baptist.5. Does not imply that Cacciaguida spoke throughout in Latin as he had begun (Canto xv), but that he spoke in the ancient Florentine dialect of his day. Dante was well aware of the rapidity with which spoken dialects, not yet fixed by a standard literature, vary. See De Vulgari Eloquentia, i. 9.6. Some MSS. and editions read three for thirty; and the question is also raised whether the period of Mars is to be calculated at the rough approximation of two years (cf. Conv. ii. 15, where the half revolution is given at “about a year”), or at the nearer approximation of 687 days, which was known in Dante’s age. Two of the four combinations which might thus arise are excluded by the date of Conrad’s crusade 1147. (Cf. Canto xv.) Two years multiplied by 553 would give A.D. 1106 as the year of Cacciaguida’s birth, and 687 days multiplied by 580 would give the year 1091. The former dare would make Cacciaguida forty-one when he went on crusade, which seems more appropriate than fifty-six; but the reading that gives the latter has the better authority.7. His own Lion. Apparently the kinship between Leo and Mars is to be found in the attribute of courage, not in any specific astrological belief of the time.8. The annual race was run along the Corso, and the Sesto of St. Peter was the last that the racers entered. Just as you come to it you pass the house of the Elisei on your right. (Cf. Canto xv, note 15.) it is a place of ancient families. On the Quarters and Sesti of Ancient Florence, see Villani, iii. 2.9. The reader may make what he can of this ambiguous utterance. The commentators throw no fresh light on it.10. The Baptistery lay at the north of the ancient Florence, and the statue of Mars (at the head of the Ponte Vecchio on the north side) was practically its southern boundary. On this statue of Mars compare Inf. xiii. Further, see Villani, i. 42; iii. 1; v. 38. The associations with this torso of Mars are so vivid and pervading that every student of Dante should make himself thoroughly acquainted with them. See further note 35.11. neighbours, not fellow-citizens.12. Baldo d’Aguglione and Fazio de’ Mori Ubaldini da Signa, both of them lawyers, and both of them deserters from the White to the Black faction in 1302. Baldo was a prior in 1298 and in 1311, in which last year he drew up the decree recalling many of the exiles, but expressly including Dante. (Gardner, i. 6, “Letters and Fresh Sentence”) In 1209 he had been convicted of cutting an inconvenient entry out of the public records of the courts of justice. Cf Purg. xii. Fazio held several high offices from 1310 onwards. He was a bitter opponent of the Whites and also of Henry VII.13. Simifonti was a fortress in Valdelsa, captured in 1202. See Villani, v. 30. The specific allusion is obscure. Does it refer to a descendant of the traitor mentioned by Villani? or to some event more closely connected with papal intrigues and aggressions? The clear reference to the Roman priesthood points to the latter interpretation. (Cf. Purg. xvi.)14. Montemurlo, between Prato and Pistoia, was sold by the Conti Guidi to the Florentines in 1254, as they themselves felt unequal to the task of defending it against the Pistoians. Its acquisition, therefore, marks a step in the aggressive expansion of Florence.15. Acone was probably in the Val di Sieve. Well if the Cerchi (leaders of the Whites) had stayed there! Cf. note 20.16. This is the climax. The implication is that in that case all the intestine conflicts of Florence would have been averted. Cf. note 32.17. Luni or Luna, “now destroyed,” Villani, i. 50. It was on the Macra, the northern boundary of Tuscany, and was celebrated in legendary lore.Urbisaglia a decayed city of the March of Ancona.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  And it was funny, because these were his streets. Milton had known them his whole life. Over there on Lincoln there used to be a fruit stand. Lefty used to stop there with Milton to buy cantaloupes, teaching Milton how to pick a sweet one by looking for tiny punc- tures left by bees. Over on Trumbull was where Mrs. Tsatsarakis lived. Used to always ask me to bring up Vernorsfrom the basement, Mil- ton thought to himself. Couldn't climb stairs anymore. On the corner of Sterling and Commonwealth was the old Masonic Temple, where one Saturday afternoon thirty-five years before, Milton had been runner-up in a spelling bee. A spelling bee! Two dozen kids in their best clothes concentrating as hard as they could to piece out "pres- tidigitation" one letter at a time. That's what used to happen in this neighborhood. Spelling bees! Now ten-year-olds were running in the streets, carrying bricks. They were throwing bricks through store windows, laughing and jumping, thinking it was some kind of game, some kind of holiday. Milton looked away from the dancing children and saw the pillar of smoke right in front of him, blocking the street. There was a sec- ond or two when he could have turned back. But he didn't. He hit it dead on. The Oldsmobile's hood ornament disappeared first, then the front fenders and the roof. The taillights gleamed redly for a mo- ment and then winked out. In every chase scene we'd ever watched, the hero always climbed up to the roof. Strict realists in my family, we always objected: "Why do they always go up?" "Watch. He's going to climb the tower. See? I told you." But Hollywood knew more about human nature than we realized. Because, faced with this emergency, Tessie took Chapter Eleven and me up to the attic. Maybe it was a vestige of our arboreal past; we wanted to climb up and out of danger. Or maybe my mother felt safer there because of the door that blended in with the wallpaper. Whatever the reason, we took a suitcase full of food up to the attic and stayed there for three days, watching the city burn on my grandparents' small black-and-white. In housedress and sandals, Desdemona held her cardboard fan to her chest, shielding herself 239 against the spectacle of life repeating itself. "Oh my God! Is like Smyrna! Look at the mavrosl Like the Turks they are burning every- thing!"