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 On Beauty (2005)

  This is because it is never really very cold in England. It is drizzly, and the wind will blow; hail happens, and there is a breed of Tuesday in January in which time creeps and no light comes and the air is full of water and nobody really loves anybody, but still a decent jumper and a waxen jacket lined with wool is sufficient for every weather England’s got to give. Howard knew this, and so was suitably dressed for England in November – his one ‘good’ suit, topped by a lightweight trench coat. Smugly he watched the Boston woman opposite him overheating in her rubber coat, the liberated pearls of sweat emerging from her hairline and slinking down her cheek. He was on the train from Heathrow into town. At Paddington the doors opened and he stepped into the warm smog of the station. He wound his scarf into a ball and stuffed it in his pocket. He was no tourist and did not look about him, not at the sheer majesty of interior space, nor at that intricate greenhouse ceiling of patterned glass and steel. He walked straight out to the open air, where he might roll a cigarette and smoke it. The absence of snow was sensational. To hold a cigarette without wearing gloves, to reveal one’s whole face to the air! Howard rarely felt moved by an English skyline, but today just to see an oak and an  On Beauty office block, outlined by a bluish sky with no interpolation of white on either, seemed to him a landscape of rare splendour and refinement. Relaxing in a narrow corridor of sun, Howard leaned against a pillar. A stretch of black cabs lined up. People explained where they were going and were given generous help lugging bags into back seats. Howard was taken aback to hear twice in five minutes the destination ‘Dalston’. Dalston was a filthy East End slum when Howard was born into it, full of filthy people who had tried to destroy him – not least of all his own family. Now, apparently, it was the sort of place where perfectly normal people lived. A blonde in a long powder-blue overcoat holding a portable computer and a pot plant, an Asian boy dressed in a cheap, shiny suit that reflected light like beaten metal – it was impossible to imagine these people populating the East London of his earliest memory. Howard dropped his fag and nudged it into the gutter. He turned back and walked through the station, keeping pace with a flow of commuters, allowing himself to be bustled by them down the steps to the underground. In a standing-room-only tube carriage, pressed up against a determined reader, Howard tried to keep his chin clear of a hardback and considered his mission, such as it was.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  Wherefore I, a mortal, feel the stress of this unequalness, and therefore only with my heart give thanks for the paternal greeting. But I may and do entreat thee, living topaz, who dost be-gem this precious jewel, that thou assuage me with thy name.” “Oh leaf of mine, in whom I took delight, only expecting thee, I was thy taproot,” such opening in his answer made he me. Then said: “He from whom thy kindred hath its name, and who a hundred years and more4 hath circled round the Mount on the first terrace, was son to me, and thy grandfather’s father; meet it is, that with thy works thou shouldst abate his long-stretched toil for him. Florence, within the ancient circling wherefrom she still receiveth tierce and nones,5 abode in peace, sober and chaste. There was no chain or coronet, nor dames decked out, nor girdle that should set folk more agaze than she who wore it. As yet the daughter’s birth struck not the father with dismay; for wedding day and dowry evaded not the measure on this side and on that.6 There were no mansions empty of the household;7 Sardanapalus8 had not yet arrived to show what may be done within the chamber. Not yet was Montemalo overpassed by your Uccellatoio,9 which, as it hath been passed in the uprising, shall be in the fall. Bellincion Berti10 have I seen no girt with bone and leather, and his dame come from her mirror with unpainted face; I have seen him of the Nerlo, and him of the Vecchio, content with the skin jerkin and nought over it, and their dames at the spindle and the flax. O happy they, each one of them secure of her burial place, and none yet deserted in her couch because of France.11 The one kept watch in minding of the cradle, and soothing spake that speech which first delighteth fathers and mothers; another, as she drew its locks from the distaff, would tell her household about the Trojans, and Fiesole, and Rome.12 Then a Cianghella, or a Lapo Salterello,18 would have been as great a marvel as now would Cincinnatus or Cornelia. To so reposeful and so fair a life among the citizens, to so faithful cityhood, to so sweet abode, Mary—with deep wailings summoned14—gave me; and, in your ancient Baptistery, at once a Christian I became and Cacciaguida. Moronto was my brother and Eliseo;15 my wife came to me from Po valley, and from her was thy surname derived. Then followed I the Emperor Conrad,16 who girt me with his knighthood, so much by valiant work did I advance me in his grace. In his train I marched against the infamy of that Law17 whose people doth usurp, shame to the pastors, what is yours by right. There by that foul folk was I unswathed of the deceitful world, whose love befouleth many a soul, and came from martyrdom unto this peace.”

• From On Beauty (2005)

  The staircase itself is a steep spiral. To pass the time while descending it, a photographic Belsey family gallery has been hung on the walls, following each turn that you make. The children come first in black and white: podgy and dimpled, haloed with  kipps and belsey curls. They seem always to be tumbling towards the viewer and over each other, folding on their sausage legs. Frowning Jerome, holding baby Zora, wondering what she is. Zora cradling tiny wrinkled Levi with the crazed, proprietorial look of a woman who steals children from hospital wards. School portraits, graduations, swimming pools, restaurants, gardens and vacation shots follow, monitoring physical development, confirming character. After the children come four generations of the Simmondses’ maternal line. These are placed in triumphant, deliberate sequence: Kiki’s great-great-grandmother, a house-slave; great-grandmother, a maid; and then her grandmother, a nurse. It was nurse Lily who inherited this whole house from a benevolent white doctor with whom she had worked closely for twenty years, back in Florida. An inheritance on this scale changes everything for a poor family in America: it makes them middle class. And  Langham is a fine middle-class house, larger even than it looks on the outside, with a small pool out back, unheated and missing many of its white tiles, like a British smile. Indeed much of the house is now a little shabby – but this is part of its grandeur. There is nothing nouveau riche about it. The house is ennobled by the work it has done for this family. The rental of the house paid for Kiki’s mother’s education (a legal clerk, she died this spring past) and for Kiki’s own. For years it was the Simmondses’ nest egg and vacation home; they would come up each September from Florida to see the Color. Once her children had grown and after her minister husband had died, Howard’s mother-in-law, Claudia Simmonds, moved into the house permanently and lived happily as landlady to cycles of students who rented the spare rooms. Throughout these years Howard coveted the house. Claudia, acutely aware of this covetousness, determined to pervert its course. She knew well that the place was perfect for Howard: large, lovely and within spitting distance of a half-decent American university that might consider hiring him. It gave Mrs Simmonds joy, or so Howard believed, to make him wait all those years. She tripped happily into her seventies without any serious health problems. Meanwhile, Howard shunted his young family around various second-rate seats of learning: six years in upstate New York,  On Beauty

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Oh I have certain memories: my grandmother lathering my hands between hers and saying she was washing away “the Germans” (her punning synonym for germs). My sister Randy initiating a game called “Running Away from the Germans” in which we put on our warmest clothes, bundled our baby sister Chloe in the doll carriage, made applesauce sandwiches, and sat eating them in the fragrant depths of the linen closet, hoping our supplies would last until the war was over and the Allies came. There is also a stray memory of my Episcopalian best friend, Gillian Battcock (age five), saying she couldn’t take a bath with me because I was Jewish and Jews “always make wee-wee in the bath water.” But in general, I had a fairly ecumenical childhood. My parents’ friends came in all colors, religions, and races, and so did mine. I must have learned the phrase “Family of Man” before my training pants were dry. Though Yiddish was sometimes spoken at home, it seemed to be used only as a sort of code language to hide things from the maid. Sometimes it was spoken to deceive the children, but we, with our excellent childhood radar, always sensed the content even if we missed the words. The result was that we learned almost no Yiddish. I had to read Goodbye, Columbus to learn the word shtarke and The Magic Barrel to hear of a paper called The Forward. I was fourteen before I attended a bar mitzvah (a first cousin’s in Spring Valley, New York) and my mother stayed home with a headache. My grandfather was a former Marxist who believed religion was the opiate of the masses, forbade my grandmother any “religious baloney,” and then accused me (in his sentimental Zionist eighties) of being “a goddamned anti-Semite.” Of course I was not an anti-Semite. It was just that I didn’t feel particularly Jewish and couldn’t understand why he, of all people, had suddenly started sounding like Chaim Weizmann. My adolescence (at Break Neck Work Camp, the High School of Music and Art, and as a counselor- in-training at the Herald Tribune Fresh Air Fund) had been spent in the palmy days when a black was invariably elected president of the senior class, and it was a blazing sign of social status to have interracial friends and dates. Not that I didn’t realize the hypocrisy of this reverse discrimination even then—but still, I had my share of honest integration. I considered myself an internationalist, a Fabian socialist, a friend of all mankind (nobody mentioned womankind in those days), a humanist. I cringed when I heard ignorant Jewish chauvinists talking about how Marx and Freud and Einstein were all Jewish, how Jews had superior genes and brains. It was clear to me that thinking yourself superior was a sure sign of being inferior and that thinking yourself extraordinary was a sure sign of being ordinary. Every Christmas from the time I was two, we had a Christmas tree.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Monty put his back to Claire. ‘Zora, could you answer my question, please? Would it be an unfair description to describe this young man as from the ‘‘wrong side of the tracks’’? Are we likely to find a criminal record?’ Zora ignored Claire Malcolm’s attempt to catch her eye. ‘If you mean, is he a kid from the streets, well, obviously he is – he’d tell you that himself. He’s mentioned being in . . . like, trouble before, sure. But I don’t really know the details.’ ‘We will find out the details, soon enough, I’m sure,’ said Monty. ‘You know,’ said Zora evenly, ‘if you really want to find him you  on beauty and being wrong should probably ask your daughter. I hear they’re spending a lot of quality time together. Can I go now?’ she asked Jack, as Monty steadied himself with a hand to the desk. ‘Liddy will let you out,’ repeated Jack faintly. An (almost) empty house. A bright spring day. Birdsong. Squirrels. All the curtains and blinds open except in Jerome’s room, where a beast with a hangover remains under his comforter. Afresh, afresh, afresh! Kiki did not consciously begin a spring clean. She merely thought: Jerome is here, and in the storeroom beneath our lovely home boxes and boxes of Jerome’s things lie, awaiting the decision to be kept or destroyed. And so she would go through all of these things, the letters, the childhood report cards, the photo albums, the diaries, the home-made birthday cards, and she would say to him: Jerome, here is your past. It is not for me, your mother, to destroy your past. Only you can decide what must go and what must stay. But please, for the love of God, throw away something so I can free up some space in the storeroom for Levi’s crap . She put on her oldest track pants and tied a bandanna round her head. She went into the storeroom, taking nothing but a radio for company. It was a chaos of Belsey memories down here. Just to get in the door Kiki had to clamber over four massive plastic tubs that she knew to be full of nothing but photographs. It would be easy to panic when confronted with such a mass of the past, but Kiki was a professional. Many years ago she had loosely divided this space into sections that corresponded with each of her three children. Zora’s section, at the back, was the largest, simply because it was Zora who had put more words on paper than anyone else, who had joined more teams and societies, garnered more certificates, won more cups. But nor was Jerome’s space inconsiderable. In there were all the things Jerome had collected and loved over the years, from fossils to copies of Time to autograph books to an assortment of Buddhas to decorated china eggs. Kiki sat legs crossed among all this and got to work. She separated physical things from 

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘They’re going to have the wedding here, in Wellington. They’ll come at Christmas to look for the right place. You’ll excuse me for a moment. I must check on your lovely pie.’ Kiki watched Carlene leave the room, unsteadily, leaning on things as she went. Alone, Kiki put her hands between her knees and pressed in on them. The news that some girl was about to start out on the road she herself had walked thirty years earlier gave her a vertiginous feeling. A clearing opened in her mind, and in it she tried to restage one of her earliest memories of Howard – the night they first met and first slept together. But it could not be conjured so easily; for at least the past ten years the memory had presented itself to her like a stiff tin toy left out in the rain – so rusty, a museum piece, not her toy at all any more. Even the kids knew it too well. Upon the Indian rug on the floor of Kiki’s Brooklyn walk-up, with all the windows open, with Howard’s big grey feet halfway out the door resting on the fire escape. A hundred and two degrees in the New York smog. ‘Halleluiah’ by Leonard Cohen playing on her dime-store record player, that song Howard liked to call ‘a hymn deconstructing a hymn’. Long ago Kiki had submitted to this musical part of the memory. But it was surely not true –  On Beauty ‘Hallelujah’ had been another time, years later. But it was hard to resist the poetry of the possibility, and so she had allowed ‘Halleluiah’ to fall into family myth. Thinking back, this had been a mistake. A tiny one, to be sure, but symptomatic of profound flaws. Why did she always concede what was left of the past to Howard’s edited versions of it? For example, she should probably say something when, at dinner parties, Howard claimed to despise all prose fiction. She should stop him when he argued that American cinema was just so much idealized trash. But , she should say, but! Christmas  he gave me Gatsby, a first edition. We saw Taxi Driver in a filthy dive in Times Square – he loved it . She did not say those things. She let Howard reinvent, retouch. When, on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, Jerome had played his parents an ethereal, far more beautiful version of ‘Halleluiah’ by a kid called Buckley, Kiki had thought yes, that’s right, our memories are getting more beautiful and less real every day. And then the kid drowned in the Mississippi, recalled Kiki now, looking up from her knees to the colourful painting that hung behind Carlene’s empty chair. Jerome had wept: the tears you cry for someone whom you never met who made something beautiful that you loved. Seventeen years earlier, when Lennon died, Kiki had dragged Howard to Central Park and wept while the crowd sang ‘All You Need is Love’

• From On Beauty (2005)

  On Beauty paper things, childhood things from college things. Generally she kept her head down, but on the occasions she raised it she was treated to the most intimate of panoramic views: the scattered possessions of the three people she had created. Several small items made her cry: a tiny woollen bootie, a broken orthodontic retainer, a woggle from a cub-scout tie. She had not become Malcolm X’s private secretary. She never did direct a movie or run for the Senate. She could not fly a plane. But here was all this. Two hours later, Kiki lifted a box of sorted Jerome papers and carried it into the hallway. All these journals and notes and stories he had written before he was sixteen! She admired the weight of it in her arms. In her head she was making another speech to the Black American Mother’s Guild: Well, you just have to offer them encouragement and the correct role models, and you have to pass on the idea of entitlement. Both my sons feel entitled, and that’s why they achieve . Kiki accepted her applause from the assembly and went back into the clutter to retrieve two bags of Jerome’s pre-growth-spurt clothes. She carried these sacks of the past on her back, one over each shoulder. Last year, she had not thought she would still be in this house, in this marriage, come spring. But here she was, here she was. A tear in the garbage bag freed three pairs of pants and a sweater. Kiki crouched to pick these up and, as she did so, the second bag split too. She had packed them too heavy. The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free. Lunchtime came round. Kiki was too involved in her work to stop. And while the radio jocks pushed the country to extremity and the voices of white housewives encouraged her to take advantage of the spring sales, Kiki made a pile of all the photographic negatives she could find. They were everywhere. At first she held each one up to the light and tried to decode the inverted brown shadows of ancient beach holidays and European landscapes. But there were too many. The truth was, nobody would ever reprint them or look at them again. That didn’t mean you threw them away. This was why you freed up floor space – to make room for oblivion. ‘Hey, Mom,’ said Jerome sleepily, poking his head round the doorframe. ‘What’s going on?’  on beauty and being wrong ‘You. You’re going out, buddy. That’s your stuff in the hallway – I’m trying to free up some space, so I can put some of the crap from Levi’s room in here.’ Jerome rubbed his eyes. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Out with the old, in with the new.’ Kiki laughed. ‘Something like that. How are you?’ ‘Hung over.’ Kiki tutted chidingly. ‘You shouldn’t have taken the car, you know.’ ‘Yeah, I know . . .’

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Even though he had academic tenure at Cornell, the Nabokovs never owned a house, and instead always rented, moving from year to year, a mobility he bestowed on refugee Humbert. “The main reason [for never settling anywhere permanently], the background reason, is, I suppose, that nothing short of a replica of my childhood surroundings would have satisfied me,” says Nabokov. “I would never manage to match my memories correctly—so why trouble with hopeless approximations? Then there are some special considerations: for instance, the question of impetus, the habit of impetus. I propelled myself out of Russia so vigorously, with such indignant force, that I have been rolling on and on ever since. True, I have lived to become that appetizing thing, a ‘full professor,’ but at heart I have always remained a lean ‘visiting lecturer.’ The few times I said to myself anywhere: ‘Now that’s a nice spot for a permanent home,’ I would immediately hear in my mind the thunder of an avalanche carrying away the hundreds of far places which I would destroy by the very act of settling in one particular nook of the earth. And finally, I don’t much care for furniture, for tables and chairs and lamps and rugs and things—perhaps because in my opulent childhood I was taught to regard with amused contempt any too-earnest attachment to material wealth, which is why I felt no regret and no bitterness when the Revolution abolished that wealth” (Playboy interview).

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Nice, though. Nice to meet you, Howard. Next week, Harry. May the good Lord go with you. Otherwise known as, don’t do nothing I wouldn’t. Now you won’t, will you?’ ‘Chance’d be a fine thing!’ They laughed – Harry still wiping tears – and walked to the front door together, continuing with these banal little English catchphrases that never failed to drive Howard up the bleeding wall. His childhood had been shot through with this meaningless noise, just so many substitutes for real conversation. Brass monkeys out there. Don’t mind if I do. I don’t fancy yours much . And on. And on. This was what he had been running from when he escaped to Oxford and every year since Oxford. Half-lived life. The unexamined life is not worth living . That had been Howard’s callow teenage dictum. Nobody tells you, at seventeen, that examining it will be half the trouble. ‘Now: how much do you want to put on it as a reserve?’ asked the man on the television. ‘Forty quid?’ Howard wandered into the golden-yellow galley kitchen to pour his tea down the sink and make an instant coffee. He hunted in the cupboards for a biscuit (when did he ever eat biscuits? Only here! Only with this man!) and found a couple of HobNobs. He filled his cup and heard Harold settling back into his chair. Howard turned round in the tiny space allowed him and knocked something off the sideboard with his elbow. A book. He picked it up and brought it through. ‘This yours?’ He could hear his own accent climbing down the class ladder a few rungs to where it used to be.  On Beauty ‘Oh, bloody hell . . . look at him. He is a right ponce,’ said Harold, referring to the television. He tuned in to Howard: ‘I dunno. What is it?’ ‘A book. Unbelievably.’ ‘A book? One of mine?’ said Harold blithely, as if this room housed half the Bodleian rather than three A–Z s of varying sizes and a free Koran that had come in the post. It was a hardback royal blue library book that had been relieved of its dust jacket. Howard looked at the spine. ‘A Room with a View . Forster.’ Howard smiled sadly. ‘Can’t stand Forster. Enjoying it?’ Harold screwed up his face in distaste. ‘Ooh, no, not mine. Carol’s I should think. She’s always got a book on the go.’ ‘Not such a bad idea.’ ‘What’s that, son?’ ‘I said it’s not such a bad idea.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  He spoke of the great diversity of techniques and appr oaches now at the command of black people, with particu lar emphasis on the role the American Negro could be expected to play. Among black people, the American Negro was in the technological vanguard and this could prove of inestimable value to the de \'eloping African sover eignties. And the dialogue ended im mediately aftenvard , at six-fifty-five, with Senghor's statement that this was the first of many such conferences, the first of many dialogues. As night was falling we poured into the Paris streets. Boys and girls, old men and women, bicycles, terraces, all were there, and the people were queueing up before the bakeries fo r bread. J. Fifth Avenue) Uptown: A Letter from Harlem T HER E is a housing project standing now where the house in which we grew up once stood, and one of those stunted city trees is snarling where our doorway used to be. This is on the rehabilitated side of the avenue. The other side of the avenue-f or progress takes time-has not been reha bilitated yet and it looks exactly as it looked in the days when we sat with our noses pressed against the windowpane, long ing to be allowed to go "across the street." The grocery store which gave us credit is still there, and there can be no doubt that it is still giving credit. The people in the project certainly need it-f ar more, indeed, than they ever needed the project. The last time I passed by, the Jewish proprietor was still stand ing among his shelves, look ing sadder and heavier but scarcely any older. Farther down the block stands the shoe-repair store in which our shoes were repaired until reparation became impossible and in which, then, we bought all our "new" ones. The Negro proprietor is still in the window, head down, working at the leather. These two, I imagine, could tell a long tale if they would (perhaps they would be glad to if they could), having watched so many, fi>r so long, struggling in the fishhooks, the barbed wire, of this avenue. The avenue is elsewhere the renowned and elegant Fifth. The area I am describing, which, in today's gang parlance, would be called "the turf," is bounded by Lenox Avenue on the west, the Harlem River on the east, 135th Street on the north, and 1 30th Street on the south. We never lived beyond these boundaries; this is where we grew up. Wal king along 145th Street-f or example -f amiliar as it is, and similar, does not have the same impact because I do not know any of the people on the block. But when I turn cast on 1 31st Street and Lenox Avenue, there is first a soda-pop joint, then a shoeshine "parlor," then a grocery store, then a dry cleaners', then the houses.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  For he and Chester were fri ends, they brought out the best in each other, and the atmosphere they created brought out the best in me. Three absolutely tense, unre lentingly egotistical, and driven people, free in Paris but fa r from home, with so much to be said and so little time in which to say it! And time was flying. Part of the trouble between Richard and myself, after all, was that I was nearly twenty years younger and had never seen the South. Perhaps I can now imagine Richard's odyssey better than I could then, but it is only imagination. I have not, in my own flesh, traveled, and paid the price of such a journey, from the Deep South to Chicago to New York to Paris; and the world which produced Richard Wright has vanished and will never be seen again. Now, it seems almost in the twinkling of an eye, nearly twenty years have passed since Richard and I sat nervously over bour bon in his Brooklyn living room. These years have seen nearly NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME all of the props of the Western reality knocked out from under it, all of the world's capitals have changed, the Deep South has changed, and Atrica has changed. For a long time, it seems to me, Richard was cruelly caught in this high wind. His ears, I think, were nearly deafened by the roar, all about him, not only of falling idols but of fa lling enemies. Strange people indeed crossed oceans, fr om Mr ica and America, to come to his door; and he really did not know who these people were, and they very quickly sensed this. Not until the very end of his lite, judging by some of the stories in his last book, Eight Men, did his imagination really begin to assess the century's new and terrible dark stranger. Well, he worked up until the end, died, as I hope to do, in the middle of a sentence, and his work is now an irreducible part of the history of our swift and terrible time. Whoever He may be, and wherever you may be, may God be with you, Richard, and may He help me not to tail that argument which you began in me. III. ALAS, POOR RICHARD And my record's clear today, the church brothers and sisters used to sing, for He washed my sins away, And that old account was settled long ago! Well, so, perhaps it was, for them; they were under the illusion that they could read their records right. I am far from certain that I am able to read my own record at all, I would certainly hesitate to say that I am able to read it right. And, as f(>r accounts, it is doubtful that I have ever really "settled" an account in my life. Not that I haven't tried.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  "Oh," he would say then , looking, as he so often did, bewilderingly juvenile, "here you come again with all that art for art's sake crap ." This never failed to make me fu rious, and my anger, for some reason, always seemed to amuse him. Our rare, best times came when we managed to exasperate each other to the point of helpless hi larity. "R oots," Richard would snort, when I had finally worked my way around to this dreary subject, "what - roots! Next thing you'll be telling me is that all colored folks have rhyt hm." Once, one evening, we managed to throw the whole terrifYing subject to the winds, and Richard, Chester Himes, and myself went out and got drunk. It was a good night, perhaps the best I remember in all the time I knew Richard. For he and Chester were friends, they brought out the best in each other, and the atmosphere they created brought out the best in me. Three absolutely tense, unre lentingly egotist ical, and driven people, free in Paris but far from home, with so much to be said and so li ttle time in which to say it! And time was flying. Part of the trouble between Richard and myself, after all, was that I was nearly twenty years younger and had never seen the South . Perhaps I can now imagine Richard's odyssey better than I could then, but it is only imagination. I have not, in my own flesh, traveled, and paid the price of such a jour ney, from the Deep South to Chi cago to New York to Paris; and the world which produced Richard Wright has vanished and will never be seen again. Now, it seems almost in the twinkling of an eye, nearly twenty year s have passed since Richar d and I sat ner vously over bour bon in his Br ooklyn living room. These years have seen nearly NOBODY KNOWS MY NAM E all of the props of the Western reality knocked out from under it, all of the world's capitals have changed, the Deep South has changed, and Atrica has changed. For a long time, it seems to me, Richar d was cruelly caught in this high wind.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Although we had not met in person, Gary Bates and I had been playing phone tag for nearly three weeks, trying to set up an interview. As the owner of a successful hardware store, dedicated jogger, and father of three young children, time was his scarcest commodity. Gary’s wife, Sara, was just leaving for a birthday party with the two older children, aged ten and seven. The baby was fast asleep inside the house. “I’m really curious to know what you find out,” she said, leaning out of her car window. “My sister just got divorced and sold her house. I haven’t told her this but I think she’s made a terrible mistake. Her kids are really young. I think she could have stayed in her marriage and toughed it out at least a little longer.” As Gary and I walked into the house, he confided, “Sara and Janine were raised in a very traditional family where divorce is unheard of. And so when Janine got a divorce, her folks were crushed. They just can’t understand why she did it.” After we had settled down with “mid-morning depth charges”—Gary’s name for his homemade double lattes—I asked him to describe his own family. What was it like growing up in a middle-class neighborhood in Marin County in the 1970s and 1980s? Gary scrunched his face comically. “Do you want the outdoor version or the indoor version?” “Both, of course.” “Well, the outdoor version is what I think of when I remember my childhood. We lived in a big, old Victorian house just a couple of blocks away from downtown. My folks still live there. All my friends lived close by, and by the time I was seven or eight I could ride my bike to their houses and we’d go all over to town together. I just remember being outside as much as I could. There was a huge old live oak tree in our backyard and we’d spend hours in it, pretending to be explorers or astronauts. My best friend Eric had a tree house in his yard and we used to build magnificent forts and whoop it up with war games that drove our moms crazy. That of course was the point. Another friend’s house was right on a creek. When we got older we took great hikes up the canyon. We just were outside and going as much as we could. I remember how tough it was to come in for dinner, not to mention to have to stay in and do homework!” He laughed, obviously enjoying sharing his memories.

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  231 Giovanni Boccaccio Lecture 33 In this, our ninth lecture, we come to Giovanni Boccaccio, the third member of the Italian triumvirate, who really created Italian literature and ushered Europe into the Renaissance. L ike his predecessors Dante and Petrarch, whom he admired, emulated, and criticized, Boccaccio stood with one foot in the Middle Ages and another in the dawning Renaissance. Like Dante and Petrarch, he also affected to disdain his Italian writings but became famous through them. Boccaccio was born in 1313, probably in Certaldo but possibly in Florence, the illegitimate son of a prosperous banker (the story that he was born in Paris is charming but false). His earliest years were spent in Florence. In 1327, he joined his father, who was then working for the Bardi bank, in Naples, where he stayed until 1341. His father had him trained fi rst in banking, then in law, but Boccaccio dismissed both in favor of the study of literature. In Naples, he had access to elementary schooling and to the illustrious court of King Robert. The Neapolitan courts offered access to French literature, to Byzantine culture, and as a great seaport, to the wider cultures of the Mediterranean world. Boccaccio began his literary career in Naples and always remembered the Neapolitan years as the happiest of his life. He returned to Florence in 1341 but found the city unbearable. In 1345, his father went broke owing to the fall of the Bardi bank (King Edward III of England reneged on his debts and brought down the Bardi and Peruzzi). For the rest of his life, Boccaccio was in straightened fi nancial circumstances as he sought, unsuccessfully, for a patron. He undertook a few minor diplomatic tasks for Florence, including, touchingly, a mission to Dante’s daughter Beatrice in 1350 with 10 fl orins voted by the government. In about 1360, he entered Holy Orders, possibly becoming a priest (he bequeathed priestly vestments in his will). He died, famous but poor and confused, in 1375.

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  “No,” replied Elinor, “her opinions are all romantic.” “Or rather, as I believe, she considers them impossible to exist.” “I believe she does. But how she contrives it without reflecting on the character of her own father, who had himself two wives, I know not. A few years however will settle her opinions on the reasonable basis of common sense and observation; and then they may be more easy to define and to justify than they now are, by any body but herself.” “This will probably be the case,” he replied; “and yet there is something so amiable in the prejudices of a young mind, that one is sorry to see them give way to the reception of more general opinions.” “I cannot agree with you there,” said Elinor. “There are inconveniences attending such feelings as Marianne’s, which all the charms of enthusiasm and ignorance of the world cannot atone for. Her systems have all the unfortunate tendency of setting propriety at nought; and a better acquaintance with the world is what I look forward to as her greatest possible advantage.” After a short pause he resumed the conversation by saying,— “Does your sister make no distinction in her objections against a second attachment? or is it equally criminal in every body? Are those who have been disappointed in their first choice, whether from the inconstancy of its object, or the perverseness of circumstances, to be equally indifferent during the rest of their lives?” “Upon my word, I am not acquainted with the minutiae of her principles. I only know that I never yet heard her admit any instance of a second attachment’s being pardonable.” “This,” said he, “cannot hold; but a change, a total change of sentiments—No, no, do not desire it; for when the romantic refinements of a young mind are obliged to give way, how frequently are they succeeded by such opinions as are but too common, and too dangerous! I speak from experience. I once knew a lady who in temper and mind greatly resembled your sister, who thought and judged like her, but who from an enforced change—from a series of unfortunate circumstances—” Here he stopt suddenly; appeared to think that he had said too much, and by his countenance gave rise to conjectures, which might not otherwise have entered Elinor’s head. The lady would probably have passed without suspicion, had he not convinced Miss Dashwood that what concerned her ought not to escape his lips. As it was, it required but a slight effort of fancy to connect his emotion with the tender recollection of past regard. Elinor attempted no more. But Marianne, in her place, would not have done so little. The whole story would have been speedily formed under her active imagination; and every thing established in the most melancholy order of disastrous love. CHAPTER XII.

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  515 nationalism. In mourning the death of “Romantic Ireland,” the poem seems to display the nostalgia of Yeats’s early poems—the nostalgia he once put behind him. But instead of fl ying to the Celtic past, this poem grips the Ireland of the poet’s own time in gritty, mostly monosyllabic words. Rather than taking us back to the ideal glory of the past, the poem confronts the grim reality of the present. The blunt language of “September 1913” exempli fi es Yeats’s poetry in his “naked” second phase. In “A Coat,” he speaks of his earlier poetry as a coat that had to be discarded. He had once used “old mythologies” to make his poetry. But another Irish writer named George Moore ridiculed his Celtic ornaments, which is what Yeats means by saying “the fools caught” his embroidered Celtic “coat.” Now the poet resolves to walk “naked.” Ironically, however, Yeats’s ambition to walk naked of myth recalls a passage in which Blake evokes the oldest myth we have in Western culture. In one of Blake’s “prophecies,” the outbreak of the French Revolution prompts him to say he is stripping off his old beliefs, casting off old doctrine in order to proclaim “the return of Adam into Paradise.” Blake thus evokes the Book of Genesis and its ancient myth. Even though “A Coat” may evoke an ancient myth, it also marks Yeats’s entry into the world of Modernism. Modernism spotlights the isolated self and strips away layers of sentiment and abstraction. In the fi ction of such writers as Conrad, Faulkner, Kafka, and Woolf, Modernism spotlights the isolated self cut off from traditional beliefs and institutions. In poetry, Modernism spotlights the naked object stripped of rumination and sentiment. Yeats came to poetic Modernism through the urging of the young Ezra Pound. Modernism in poetry also shucked the corset of regular versi fi cation. Some Modernist poetry is written in free verse. Though Yeats never went this far, he defi nitely loosened the stays of rhyme and meter in “A Coat.” In poetry, Modernism spotlights the naked object stripped of rumination and sentiment. Yeats came to poetic Modernism through the urging of the young Ezra Pound.

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  513 which led, in turn, to the bloody revolution that liberated southern Ireland from British rule. In his late work, Yeats became a visionary struggling to make order out of the “mere anarchy” that he saw loosed upon the world by war. In “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (1888), the city-bound Yeats voices nostalgia for his ancestral county of Sligo. When he conceived the poem, he was 23 and living in London. Walking through Fleet Street one day, he noticed a little fountain in a shop window. It reminded him of lake water—specifi cally of a small island called Innisfree in a lake in County Sligo, Ireland. He resolves in his poem to go there, build a cabin, plant beans, keep honeybees, and live alone. Unlike Thoreau in Walden, however, Yeats expresses a mood, not a practical plan of action. About 40 years earlier, the American writer Henry David Thoreau actually built a cabin on Walden Pond, planted beans, and lived there for more than a year. Instead of explaining just how the speaker will live on Innisfree, Yeats’s poem expresses a mood of nostalgia—a desire to revisit a place that lies as much within his heart as in a distant lake. The fi nal words of the poem evoke the ending of a poem by Wordsworth that is likewise fi lled with yearning. Rather than actually going to Innisfree himself, Yeats creates a “speaker” who resolves to go in the future, but in the last lines, the tense becomes present and the speaker merges with the poet. The “speaker” of a poem is a character distinct from the author—as a character in a play is distinct from the playwright. For much of the poem, the speaker tells us what he will do. In the fi nal lines, the speaker merges with the poet, who tells us what he feels in time present. After a childhood spent by turns in England and Ireland, Yeats settled in London and launched the fi rst phase of his poetic career by mining Celtic legend and myth. After a few years of early childhood in London, two years in Sligo, and four years’ schooling in London, Yeats fi nished his education in Dublin. Returning to settle in London, he launched the fi rst phase of his poetic career. Challenging scienti fi c rationalism, his early poems use Celtic

• 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!"

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  How I knew this, I do not re member precisely. But I know that I read everything I could get my hands on, including movie advertisements, and Uncle Tom's Cabin had had a tremendous impact on me, and I cer tainly reacted to the brutal conjunction of the words, prisoner, and shark, and island. I may have feared becoming a prisoner or teared that I was one already; had never seen a shark-! hoped: but I was certainly trapped on an island. And, in any case, the star of this fil m, Warner Baxter, later, but during the same era, made a film with the female star of A Tale of TJVo Cities, called Slave Ship: which I did not see, either. I knew about Booker T. Washington less than I knew about my father's mother, who had been born a slave, and who died in our house when I was little: a child cannot make the con nection between slave and grandmother, and it was to take me a while (mainly because I had discovered the Schomburg col lection at the 1 35th Street Library) to read Up From Slavery: but, when I read it, I no longer knew which way was up. As tor The Cotton Club, I knew only that it was a dance hall which gave out free Thanksgiving dinners every Thanksgiving (!) tor which my brother, George, and I, stood in line. Which means that I knew that I was poor, and knew that I was black, but did not yet know what being black really meant, what it meant, that is, in the history of my country, and in my own history. Bill could instruct me as to how poverty came about and what it meant and what it did, and, also, what it was meant to do: but she could not instruct me as to blackness, except obliquely, feeling that she had neither the right nor the authority, and also knowing that I was certain to find out. CHAPTER ONE +85 Thus, she tried to suggest to me the extent to which the world's social and economic arrangements are responsible for (and to) the world's victims. But a victim may or may not have a color, just as he may or may not have virtue: a difficult, not to say unpopular notion, for nearly everyone prefers to be defined by his status, which, unlike his virtue, is ready to wear. The 193 6 Metro-Goldwyn-Ma yer production of A Tale of TJVo Cities ends with this enormity sprawled across the screen: I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he JVere dead, yet shall he live: and he that believeth in me shall never die.

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  512 Lecture 75: William Butler Yeats William Butler Yeats Lecture 75 Born in Dublin in 1865, he was the eldest child of a middle-class, Anglo- Irish family. His father briefl y practiced law before giving it up to study painting in London, where he moved his family when the future poet was just 2 years old. W hen the boy was 7, his mother—Susan Mary Yeats—took him and his three new siblings off to Sligo, where they stayed for two years. They then returned to London, and at the age of 12 William entered the Godolphin School in Hammersmith—“an obscene, bullying place,” he later called it, where pretentious little English dimwits sneered at what one them called a “Mad Irishman.” None of them could have foreseen that he would eventually become the greatest Irish poet of his time. As a young man, he settled in London, where he launched the fi rst phase of his poetic career. Radiating nostalgia and a fascination with Celtic myth and folklore, Yeats’s early poems seek to recon fi rm “the ancient supremacy of the imagination.” Though he soon realized that poetry of this kind was escapist and that he had to shed the “old mythologies” like an old coat, he could never forsake aesthetic ornaments altogether, and like the women of “Adam’s Curse,” he knew that a poet “must labor to be beautiful”—even though labor alone could not ensure either beauty or art. In his plays and theater management, as well as in his poetry, Yeats labored to inspire the Irish through times of bitter con fl ict with England; much as he hated violence, he saluted the “terrible beauty” of the Easter Rising in 1916, Easter Uprising of 1916. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.