Nostalgia

Passages

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

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

  There often is a history of love and friendship that still binds the couple together despite their growing distress and anger at each other. In other words, these are families that stay together in the face of adversities that drive many other couples into divorce court. As I learned more about these families, I began to recognize striking similarities to the families that divorced back in 1971 when my study began and to the thousands of divorcing families that we saw at the Center for the Family in Transition in the 1980s and 1990s. Families like these can go either way depending on a host of factors. At the core of their interactions and ambience, they are alike. These are the parents who are most likely to ask, should we divorce or would it be better for the children if we stayed together? What happens to their children is a key issue. How they decide creates striking differences in the entire life experience of their children, as Gary’s story reveals. Gary, the Fort Builder “I’VE FOUND some time!” 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.

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

  It gradually dawned on me that children of divorce and those in happy intact families live in separate albeit parallel universes. I would not have seen this without their descriptions of play, and the lack of it, in their backyards after school. This finding has important implications for our social policy. When visiting and custody plans are made, the child’s friendships and play activities are rarely considered by parents. The courts never acknowledge them. In the common scenario, parents are the major protagonists. Their schedules, wishes, and rights occupy center stage. In the hundreds of court evaluations and decisions that I have read and in thousands of conversations with parents, I’ve rarely heard a word about the importance of maintaining the child’s friendships and play activities. The only exceptions are where a young adolescent is a gifted athlete or shows special promise in another field. In the view of officialdom, the only thing of value in a child’s life is her time with each parent. It should be sobering to parents and others who allocate the child’s time to take the memories of this generation into account. Peer play looms much larger in their fond memories than afternoons spent with either Dad or Mom. Gary continued to reminisce nostalgically about his childhood. “Another memory I have was the crunch of the tires on my dad’s car when he returned from work at seven o’clock every evening. It’s funny but I can still hear that in my head. Supper was a family thing at our home. We had a special ritual. We used to go round the table and everyone said what they did that day. I still remember being included when I was three years old. I felt ten feet high!” A lot of adults from intact families remembered supper as an important family event. Like today, many of the mothers who worked outside the home tried to arrange their schedules so they’d be home after school when the children were young. They made a point of having sit-down meals in the evening. Most of the fathers worked long hours, including some weekends. But in most homes supper waited until the entire family was assembled, if not nightly then several times a week. Sunday dinner was special in many homes. With a few exceptions, these were pleasant memories with games, rituals, and conversation that included the children and the grown-ups. I was again interested that Karen and her peers from divorced families never spontaneously mentioned family suppers or other regular occasions happening after the breakup. Undoubtedly they shared evening meals when the family was together, and I suspect that they had many pleasant sit-down dinners with either parent at home after the divorce.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  [image "The author—“bearded, besweatered, and booted”—in the field recording bird songs on a reel-to-reel tape recorder with a parabolic microphone at 2900 meters altitude near Laguna Puruhanta in the Ecuadorian Andes in 1987." file=image_rsrc3MM.jpg] The author—“bearded, besweatered, and booted”—in the field recording bird songs on a reel-to-reel tape recorder with a parabolic microphone at 2900 meters altitude near Laguna Puruhanta in the Ecuadorian Andes in 1987. The intellectual origins of aesthetic evolution are not in abstract mathematics but in Darwin’s own, bold realization of the evolutionary consequences of the subjective aesthetic experiences of animals and the intellectual insufficiency of natural selection to explain the phenomenon of beauty in nature. Nearly 150 years later, the best path to appreciating how beauty has come into being is still to follow in Darwin’s footsteps. — The Darwin versus Wallace, aesthetic versus adaptationist debate remains vital to science today. Whenever we study mate choice, we are using intellectual tools that were shaped by this debate, and we need to be aware of the history of our tools. Among those tools is the language we use to define concepts in evolutionary biology. For example, let’s examine the history of the word “fitness.” To Darwin, fitness had the ordinary language meaning of physical fitness. Fitness meant fit to do a task. Darwinian fitness was the physical capacity to do the tasks necessary to ensure one’s survival and capacity for reproduction. However, during the development of population genetics in the early twentieth century, fitness was redefined mathematically as the differential success of one’s genes in subsequent generations. This broader and more general new definition combined all sources of differential genetic success—survival, fecundity, and mating/fertilization success—into a single variable under the common label of “adaptive natural selection.” The redefinition of fitness was accomplished precisely during the period when sexual selection by mate choice had been entirely rejected as irrelevant to evolutionary biology. Thus, the effect of redefining fitness was to flatten and eliminate the original, subtle, Darwinian distinction between natural selection on traits that ensured survival and fecundity and sexual selection on traits that resulted in differential mating and fertilization success. Ever since, this mathematically convenient but intellectually muddled new concept of fitness has reshaped how people think evolution works and made it difficult to even articulate the possibility of a distinct, independent, nonadaptive sexual selection mechanism. If it contributes to fitness, it must be adaptive, right? The Darwinian/Fisherian concept of sexual selection by mate choice has been essentially written out of the language of biology. It has become linguistically impossible to be an authentic Darwinian.

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

  I was again interested that Karen and her peers from divorced families never spontaneously mentioned family suppers or other regular occasions happening after the breakup. Undoubtedly they shared evening meals when the family was together, and I suspect that they had many pleasant sit-down dinners with either parent at home after the divorce. But as children they did not mention these events and as adults they did not recall such dinners in their memories of growing up. Even the children in the remarried families did not talk about their family dinners together except early on in the remarriage when the children wondered where the new stepparent would sit and whether he would occupy Dad’s or Mom’s vacant place. Somehow these occasions lacked the symbolic power of belonging to a family, as they did for children in intact homes. A Sense of HistoryWITH THE VISION of a mom and dad at either end of a dinner table, I said to Gary, “Tell me about your folks.” Gary leaned back and stretched out his long legs. Suddenly he jumped up, went over to the piano, and brought back a framed photograph. “This will help to explain it,” he said, handing it to me. “It’s my favorite picture of my parents.” Taken when Gary’s parents were in their twenties, the father was leaning casually against a tree, his head thrown back, laughing. He was tall and fair, with tightly curled blond hair, and he wore sideburns, which were then very fashionable. Gary’s mother was much shorter than her husband and had very dark, exotic, Barbra Streisand—like looks. She was standing in profile, both hands around one of her husband’s arms, looking intently up at him. “That’s kind of how they are,” Gary continued, as both of us gazed at the photo. “They’re so different but I think that’s what brought them together, being really different. Later on, though, it caused a lot of friction.” He set the picture on the coffee table in front of us. “I’d like to hear about them.”

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

  For those raised in intact families, the childhood home is a symbol of family history. It’s the storehouse of good, bad, funny, and bitter memories—a place children can leave when they feel ready and know it will be there when they come back. Considering how much Americans move around, it’s interesting that the family home has retained its traditional meaning for these young people and that a couple like Gary and Sara were willing to make sacrifices to preserve it. I found it interesting that adults raised in intact families recognized the importance of stability for them and their children. For children of divorce, especially those in their teens or older, the family home also carries great meaning and they mourn its loss for years after the breakup. The home is the repository of the family they lost and the sense of continuity with their childhood that ended with the divorce. Some poignantly go back to the neighborhood where they grew up, gazing at the house from the outside, and sit there for hours with tears in their eyes. One young woman whose parents divorced when she was a senior in high school made regular pilgrimages during her college vacations just to see the family home and renew her memories. Will You Still Need Me ... When I’m Sixty-four? THE FAMILY AS symbol of continuity plays yet another role in the lives of adults whose parents have stayed together. When I asked Gary how he got along with his parents these days, he spoke about how much closer they had become in recent years. He said, “I guess I’ve come to appreciate that my dad and I have stayed close. We talk several times a week. It’s not so much father-son as man to man. It’s a precious relationship to both of us and it gets more so as the years go by.” I was interested in Gary’s response because it was different from what children of divorce were saying. There were very few father-son relationships among the adult children of divorce that grew to have the emotional richness that many sons in intact families described with so much pleasure. Rather, there was a widening gap between the generations. (Because this is so important, I will describe it in greater detail in Chapter 15.) But men like Gary became close friends with their dads, even when those same fathers had not been around all that much during their childhoods. They said, “He’s changed, I’ve changed. We have more time to ourselves together.” It was a time of mellowing. What did they talk about?

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  He was long a source of amusement and instruction to me. At about that time Antinous chose as his tutor the philosopher Chabrias, a Platonist with leanings toward Orphic teachings, and the most innocent of men; he developed a kind of watchdog fidelity to the boy which was later transferred to me. Eleven years of court life have not changed him; he is still the same honest, pious creature, chastely absorbed in his dreams, blind to all intrigue and deaf to rumor. He annoys me at times, but I shall part with him only at my death. My relations with the Stoic philosopher Euphrates were of shorter duration. He had retired to Athens after brilliant successes in Rome. I engaged him as my reader, but the suffering which he had long endured from a liver abscess, and the resulting weakness, convinced him that his life no longer offered him anything worth the living. He asked my permission to quit my service by suicide. I have never been opposed to voluntary departure from life, and had considered it as a possible end in my hour of crisis before Trajan's death. The problem of suicide which has obsessed me since seemed then of easy solution. Euphrates received the authorization which he sought; I had it carried to him by my young Bithynian, perhaps because it would have pleased me myself to receive from the hands of such a messenger this final response. The philosopher came to the palace that same evening for a conversation which differed in no respect from all preceding visits; he killed himself the next day. We talked over the incident several times; the boy remained somber for some days thereafter. This ardent young creature held death in horror; I had not observed that he already gave it much thought. For my part I could ill conceive that anyone would willingly leave a world which seemed to me so fair, or fail to exhaust to the end, despite all its evils, its utmost possibility of thought and of contact, and even of seeing. I have indeed changed since that time. The years merge: my memory forms but a single fresco whereon are crowded the events and travels of several seasons. The luxuriously fitted bark of the merchant Erastos turned its prow first toward the Orient, then to the south, and only at last toward Italy, which was fast becoming for me the Occident. We twice touched Rhodes; Delos, blinding white, was visited on an April morning, and later on under full moon of the summer solstice; storms on the coast of Epirus allowed me to prolong a stay in Dodona. In Sicily we delayed a few days to explore the mystery of the Syracusan springs, Arethusa and Cyane, fair nymphs of blue waters.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Afterwards I went to have my hair cut. A while ago I had affected an old-fashioned barber in Neal Street, who would keep me trimmed and tidy for £1.05—a guinea, as he always insisted. In the window were black-and-white photographs of men tipping their heads forward, and inside, where one waited, a colour poster of the Prince and Princess of Wales simpered above the boxes of Durex. The shop was an outpost of neighbourly simplicity amid the chic revamping of Covent Garden, and Mr Bandini, who ran it with his middle-aged bachelor son Lenny, would talk with motiveless fluency about boxing and about life during the war, and the hard time he had had then. Unlike modern studios, where each haircut has the pretensions of a work of art, Mr Bandini’s shop, with its floral linoleum, its clippers and ivory-handled razors, gave me the reassuring feeling that exactly the same thing had been happening in it for half a century. There was something melancholy but entrancing in imagining the hundreds of thousands of identical, routine haircuts that Mr Bandini had given as the decades slipped by. Though, like other Soho Italians, he had been interned in the war, he had been at work on this spot for almost forty years. I could easily imagine Charles, in handsome middle age, popping in for his fortnightly short back and sides and a friction of eau de quinine. Wartime London, which I had always imagined half bombed to bits, the rest of it keeping going on five-shilling dinners and a lot of selflessness and doing without, emerged quite differently in Charles’s journal. It appeared (and I suppose this was the other side of my apprehension about war) as an era of extraordinary opportunity, when all kinds of fantasy became suddenly possible, and when the fellow-feeling of allies and soldiers could be creamed off in sex and romance. September 26, 1943: My birthday … It’s so dull being as old as the century, it makes one’s progress seem so leaden & inevitable, with no scope for romantic doubts about one’s age. However, a beautiful, hazy pre-war sort of day—lunch at the Club with Driberg, who was very flattering & said he thought I only looked 42. He told me about some of his exploits, though I was perhaps a shade reticent about mine: with him one simply doesn’t know where they’ll end up—careless talk etc. We lamented the still frequent attacks & insults meted out to coloured servicemen, by the English though mainly of course by the Yanks. It seems all Driberg’s attempts to counter the foul American laws, in Parliament & out, have been unsuccessful. Never mind, he said, he tried to make it up to them personally.

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

  Gary had a lot more to say about his parents’ marriage. This was a subject that was clearly “up front” and important to him, even though he hadn’t lived with them for over fifteen years. “I think they were really happy in the early years,” he said. “My dad inherited the business from his dad and always spent long hours at the store. Mom raised us and did the bookkeeping. It was hard to get away for vacations but they managed some camping trips. They’d close the store for two weeks in the summer and we’d tour the national parks. Mom was always real happy to get back to a shower and her kitchen. But early on it seemed like they enjoyed each other and there wasn’t much tension.” Like remembering their play, most of the people raised in well-functioning intact families also remembered family holidays, vacations, and other social occasions that brought the family together. They described the abundance of good food, noise, loving interest from grandparents, and mischievous fighting with cousins. They also recalled tensions and some open antagonism among different family members. But these were secondary to the warm glow of the get-togethers. Family vacations were especially memorable. Camping trips were the best-loved vacations among these children who later recalled their escapades and misadventures. The children knew when one of the adults, like Gary’s mother, did not share their enthusiasm. One young man guffawed when he recalled how his mom decided to do gourmet cooking over a campfire. Some of their fondest memories were about several families getting together to go camping, hiking, fishing, or boating. These were important communal experiences and the children were proud to do their share of the chores and planning. One young woman remembered how pleased she was that her parents invited her best friend whose parents were divorcing. As I searched my memory I was hard put to recall children of divorce talking happily, after the divorce, about any holidays or family vacations. Thanksgiving and Christmas posed annual dilemmas. Along with the goodies came the question—whose turn is it to spend which holiday where? For many, these occasions were a mixed bag. Some recalled visiting grandparents alone without their parents, which gave many children a sense of belonging to an extended family, something youngsters in intact families took for granted. Most loved their grandparents very much. These were happy times in their grandparents’ home that were long remembered. Some children liked spending separate vacations with their dad and his new family while others hated summer vacations because they were forced to go visit one parent under court order. Family celebrations like graduations, bar mitzvahs, weddings, and birthdays could be very happy. But they could also be marred by continuing tensions between parents, new lovers, and ex-partners.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  But my worst enemies would not dare to reject their most upright representative, nor the son of one of their most respected members as well. My public duty was done: I could now return to Tibur, going back into that retreat which is called illness, to experiment with my suffering, to taste fully what delights are left to me, and to resume in peace my interrupted dialogue with a shade. My imperial heritage was safe in the hands of the devoted Antoninus and the grave Marcus Aurelius; Lucius himself would survive in his son. All that was not too badly arranged. PATIENTIA Arrian wrote me thus: I have completed the circumnavigation of the Black Sea, in conformity with the orders received. We ended the circuit at Sinope, whose inhabitants are still grateful to you for the vast work of enlarging and repairing the port, brought successfully to conclusion under your supervision some years back. . . . By the way, they have erected a statue in your honor which is not fine enough, nor a good enough likeness; pray send them another, in white marble. . . . At Sinope it was not without emotion that I looked down on that same sea from the hilltops whence our Xenophon first beheld it of old, and whence you yourself contemplated it not so long ago. . . . I have inspected the coastal garrisons: their commandants merit the highest praise for excellent discipline, for use of latest methods in training, and for the quality of their engineering. . . . Wherever the coasts are wild and still rather little known I have had new soundings taken, and have rectified, where necessary, the indications of earlier navigators. . . . We have skirted Colchis. Knowing how interested you are in what the ancient poets recount, I questioned the inhabitants about Medea's enchantments and the exploits of Jason. But they seemed not to know of these stories. . . . On the northern shore of that inhospitable sea we touched upon a small island of great import in legend, the isle of Achilles. As you know, Thetis is supposed to have brought her son to be reared on this islet shrouded in mist; each evening she would rise from the depths of the sea and would come to talk with her child on the strand. Nowadays the place is uninhabited; only a few goats graze there.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I was willing to yield to nostalgia, that melancholy residue of desire. I had even given the name of Styx to a particularly somber corner of the park, and the name of Elysian Fields to a meadow strewn with anemones, thus preparing myself for that other world where the torments resemble those of this world, but where joys are nebulous, and inferior to our joys. But most important of all, in the heart of this retreat I had built for myself a refuge more private still, an islet of marble at the center of a pool surrounded by colonnades; this gave me a room wholly apart, connected with, or rather, separated from the shore by a turning bridge so light that with one hand I could make it slide in its grooves. Into this summer pavilion I had two or three beloved statues moved, and the small bust of Augustus as a child, which Suetonius had given me in the period when we still were friends; I used to go there at the hour of siesta to sleep or to think, or to read. My dog would stretch out across the doorway, extending his paws somewhat stiffly now; reflections played on the marble; Diotimus would rest his cheek, to cool himself, against the smooth surface of an urn; my thoughts were on my successor. I have no children, nor is that a regret. To be sure, in time of weakness and fatigue, when one lacks the courage of one's convictions, I have sometimes reproached myself for not having taken the precaution to engender a son, to follow me. But such a vain regret rests upon two hypotheses, equally doubtful: first, that a son necessarily continues us, and second, that the strange mixture of good and evil, that mass of minute and odd particularities which make up a person, deserves continuation. I have put my virtues to use as well as I could, and have profited from my vices likewise, but I have no special concern to bequeath myself to anyone. It is not by blood, anyhow, that man's true continuity is established: Alexander's direct heir is Caesar, and not the frail infant born of a Persian princess in an Asiatic citadel; Epaminondas, dying without issue, was right to boast that he had Victories for daughters. Most men who figure in history have but mediocre offspring, or worse; they seem to exhaust within themselves the resources of a race. A father's affection is almost always in conflict with the interests of a ruler.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  He was long a source of amusement and instruction to me. At about that time Antinous chose as his tutor the philosopher Chabrias, a Platonist with leanings toward Orphic teachings, and the most innocent of men; he developed a kind of watchdog fidelity to the boy which was later transferred to me. Eleven years of court life have not changed him; he is still the same honest, pious creature, chastely absorbed in his dreams, blind to all intrigue and deaf to rumor. He annoys me at times, but I shall part with him only at my death. My relations with the Stoic philosopher Euphrates were of shorter duration. He had retired to Athens after brilliant successes in Rome. I engaged him as my reader, but the suffering which he had long endured from a liver abscess, and the resulting weakness, convinced him that his life no longer offered him anything worth the living. He asked my permission to quit my service by suicide. I have never been opposed to voluntary departure from life, and had considered it as a possible end in my hour of crisis before Trajan's death. The problem of suicide which has obsessed me since seemed then of easy solution. Euphrates received the authorization which he sought; I had it carried to him by my young Bithynian, perhaps because it would have pleased me myself to receive from the hands of such a messenger this final response. The philosopher came to the palace that same evening for a conversation which differed in no respect from all preceding visits; he killed himself the next day. We talked over the incident several times; the boy remained somber for some days thereafter. This ardent young creature held death in horror; I had not observed that he already gave it much thought. For my part I could ill conceive that anyone would willingly leave a world which seemed to me so fair, or fail to exhaust to the end, despite all its evils, its utmost possibility of thought and of contact, and even of seeing. I have indeed changed since that time. The years merge: my memory forms but a single fresco whereon are crowded the events and travels of several seasons. The luxuriously fitted bark of the merchant Erastos turned its prow first toward the Orient, then to the south, and only at last toward Italy, which was fast becoming for me the Occident. We twice touched Rhodes; Delos, blinding white, was visited on an April morning, and later on under full moon of the summer solstice; storms on the coast of Epirus allowed me to prolong a stay in Dodona. In Sicily we delayed a few days to explore the mystery of the Syracusan springs, Arethusa and Cyane, fair nymphs of blue waters.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  The fall of 1964, September 2, a lifetime ago. That last bright and beautiful morning when everything was to change forever, that last moment of lighthearted innocence and youth, of Massapequa and the backyard before the shock, the chaos, and the deluge. I had just turned eighteen that summer, and there are some old black-and-white photographs of me from those days. … I remember seeing those photos on my desk, looking at a boy, who’s got his whole life yet to be lived, who has not the slightest idea about what is going to happen. … And then the old man, my father, is driving me in my uniform to the Long Island Railroad station with only a few words being said between us—Dad was always that way—and then that long and contemplative ride into the city, being sworn in at Whitehall Street, holding my right hand up proudly with all the other young men, taking the oath of enlistment, and swearing our allegiance to the Constitution of the United States.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  But he was very quick to spot that the subject of one photograph, taken from an odd angle so that he seemed to turn into a kind of naked coastline, was Bobby. And Bobby turned up quite a bit, in soulful vigil at a window, or in his whites, more dazzling then, against a bright white wall in Tunis, or, less convincingly, leaning into lamplight over an old book. There were some camp fantasies—Bobby as sailor; or as Airforceman, with perched cap and oiled kiss-curl. In one, dated eighteen years ago, he appeared, wearing only sandals and a cincture of vine-leaves, between two classical garden statues. Staines could have had no difficulty in inducing that expression of tossed-back pagan pleasure: degeneracy was already evident in the luscious good looks and the unclassical softness of his body. It seemed that Bobby must have run off with the much older man, by then perhaps an acclaimed society portraitist with the entrée to country houses. I imagined Bobby being pampered and disapproved of by their hostesses, and, though the Sixties were beginning, posing for the adoring Staines in the artistic, Sicilian manner of an earlier age. When Staines came back, empty-handed, I asked him about Sandy Labouchère and Otto Henderson. ‘There is a picture of them,’ he said, ‘somewhere. I didn’t actually know them much—I’m too young , you see, really to be of use to you … They were a gruesome couple when I met them: Labouchère was a hopeless drunkard, and so was Henderson. They stuck together, more or less, painting the most extraordinary pictures, morbid to a degree and full of decadent young men twice as large as life—in all respects. Otto was really a cartoonist, of course, though sometimes he managed to get work in the theatre. I saw some strange opera he did, with the most shaming caryatids and things, and slaves. It had the most uncomfortable-looking furniture in it; I remember one critic said, “Mr Otto Henderson was responsible for the misère-en-scène ”.’ ‘What happened to him?’ ‘Do you know, he may well still be alive. I haven’t heard of him for an age: he was living, the last time I had news, in a basement in Earl’s Court, I think it was, with a sort of sect. When his friend finally drank himself to death, poor old Otto did become a bit queer. I’ve got a painting by Labouchère, by the way, if you’d like to see it.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Voluptuous memories, if ever there had been any, were completely effaced for me; this was no more than a pleasant exchange with a creature marked like me by sickness or age; I felt the same slightly irritated sympathy that I would have had for an elderly cousin from Spain, or a distant relative coming from Narbonne. I am trying for a moment to recapture mere curls of smoke, the iridescent bubbles of some childish game. But it is easy to forget. ... So many things have happened since the days of those ephemeral loves that doubtless I no longer recognize their flavor; above all I am pleased to deny that they ever made me suffer. And yet among those mistresses there was one, at least, who was a delight to love. She was both more delicate and more firm than the others, gentler but harder, too; her slender body was rounded like a reed. I have always warmed to the beauty of human hair, that silken and undulating part of a body, but the headdresses of most of our women are towers, labyrinths, ships, or nests of adders. Hers was simply what I liked them to be: the cluster of harvest grapes, or the bird's spread wing. Lying beside me and resting her small proud head against mine, she used to speak with admirable candor of her loves. I liked her intensity and her detachment in loving, her exacting taste in pleasure, and her consuming passion for harrowing her very soul. I have known her to take dozens of lovers, more than she could keep count of; I was only a passer-by who made no demands of fidelity. She fell in love with a dancer named Bathyllus, so handsome that all follies for his sake were justified in advance. She sobbed out his name in my arms, and my approbation gave her courage. At other times we laughed a great deal together. She died young, on a fever-ridden island to which her family had exiled her after a scandalous divorce. She had feared old age, so I could only rejoice for her, but that is a feeling we never have for those whom we have truly loved. Her need for money was fantastic. One day she asked me to lend her a hundred thousand sesterces. I brought them to her the next morning. She sat down on the floor like some small, trim figure playing at knucklebones, emptied the sack on the marble paving, and began to divide the gleaming pile into heaps.

• From Untrue (2018)

  The Way We WereIf she were from another generation, Sarah might have conducted herself differently. In her book Lust in Translation, Pamela Druckerman tells the stories of a group of women who lived in tony suburbs like Sarah’s—just across the George Washington Bridge from Manhattan and in the fancier areas of Long Island and Westchester—in the early 1960s. They had moved to assisted living facilities in Florida by the time Druckerman tracked them down. But this particular clique of women and not a few of their peers across the country had sex lives that could have been written by Cheever. Their stories illustrate, among other things, that when it comes to female infidelity, we haven’t necessarily become more tolerant over time. Thrice-married Loretta, sixty-eight at the time of the interview, and Barbara, nine years her senior, reminisced about themselves and their friends and the sexual codes of their world. “Yvonne had an affair…” “Linda…would just have affair after affair.” “Alice was sort of happily married, sort of not. There was a surprise birthday party, and that afternoon she’s screwing someone in a hotel room.” “I think most people knew Les’s wife had an affair for many years.” “It was Peyton Place,” Barb summarized neatly. “We all learned from the movie stars,” Loretta explained. “You met your sweetheart in New York for a drink, kind of thing. It was… Sinatra and stuff like that. The songs had words and you closed your eyes…” Songs of the era provided a backdrop, and may also have described their yearnings and their sexual culture. They had High Hopes and believed, as much of the nation did, that The Best Was Yet to Come. They were beautiful, like the Girl from Ipanema, adorned in Pucci and Lilly Pulitzer poolside and at the club. They drank and danced at parties and stood close to men they were interested in when their spouses were in the other room. They wanted to be flown to the moon and to feel the Summer Wind year-round. But while these songs thematized their hopes and desires, “Strangers in the Night” was one that truly missed the mark. For these young married women, as they rushed to tell Druckerman decades later, seduced and were seduced by the successful married husbands of female acquaintances and friends, men with whom their own husbands worked and golfed and socialized. No strangers for them—their affairs were deeply embedded in and shaped by their social world, not rejections of it.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  A quarter of a mile from the school buildings, down a chestnut-lined drive, the small open-air bath and its whitewashed, skylit changing-room saw all my earliest excesses. On high summer nights when it was light enough at midnight to read outside, three or four of us would slip away from the dorms and go with an exaggerated refinement of stealth to the pool. In the changing-room serious, hot No 6 were smoked, and soap, lathered in the cold, starlit water, eased the violence of cocks up young bums. Fox-eyed, silent but for our breathing and the thrilling, gross little rhythms of sex—which made us gulp and grope for more—we learnt our stuff. Then, noisier, enjoining each other to silence, we slid into the pool and swam through the underwater blackness where the cleaning device, humming faintly, swung round the sucking tentacle of its hose. On the dorm floor in the morning there were often dead leaves, or grassy lumps of mud, which we had brought in on our shoes in the small hours and which seemed mementoes of some Panic visitor. I told Phil all or some of this when he asked me about swimming, and showed him my Swimming-Pool Librarian badge (brass letters on red enamel, with a bendy brass pin) which, along with my preliminary lifesaving badge, I still had and kept in a round leather stud-box on my dressing-table. The box itself, aptly enough, was a gift from Johnny Carver, my great buddy and love at Winchester. Phil was round at my place for the first time, and it seemed to arouse a curiosity in him which had been almost abnormally absent before. ‘It smells so rich,’ he said. ‘That onion flan, yesterday—my old socks …’ I apologised. He was close enough to me now to laugh at anything. ‘No, no. I mean it smells expensive. Like a country house.’ I still dream, once a month or so, of that changing-room, its slatted floor and benches. In our retrogressive slang it was known as the Swimming-Pool Library and then simply as the Library, a notion fitting to the double lives we led. ‘I shall be in the library,’ I would announce, a prodigy of study. Sometimes I think that shadowy, doorless little shelter—which is all it was really, an empty, empty place—is where at heart I want to be. Beyond it was a wire fence and then a sloping, moonlit field of grass—‘the Wilderness’—that whispered and sighed in the night breeze. Nipping into that library of uncatalogued pleasure was to step into the dark and halt. Then held breath was released, a cigarette glowed, its smoke was smelled, the substantial blackness moved, glimmered and touched. Friendly hands felt for the flies. There was never, or rarely, any kissing—no cloying, adult impurity in the lubricious innocence of what we did. ‘Are you into kids?’

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I have waded through it many times, up to the hips, but somehow I have neither been petrified nor immortalized. I am still burning brightly inside, though outwardly dead as a planet. From this bed I have gotten up to dance, not once but hundreds, thousands of times. Each time I came away I had the conviction that I had danced the skeleton dance on a terrain vague . Perhaps I had wasted too much of my substance on suffering; perhaps I had the crazy idea that I would be the first metallurgical bloom of the human species; perhaps I was imbued with the notion that I was both a sub-gorilla and a super-god. On this bed of ferroconcrete I remember everything and everything is in rock crystal. There are never any animals, only thousands and thousands of human beings all talking at once, and for each word they utter I have an answer immediately, sometimes before the word is out of their mouths. There is plenty of killing, but no blood. The murders are perpetrated with cleanliness, and always in silence. But even if everyone were killed there would still be conversation, and the conversation would be at once intricate and easy to follow. Because it is I who create it! I know it, and that is why it never drives me mad. I have conversations which may take place only twenty years hence, when I meet the right person, the one whom I shall create, let us say, when the proper time comes. All these talks take place in a vacant lot which is attached to my bed like a mattress. Once I gave it a name, this terrain vague : I called it Ubiguchi, but somehow Ubiguchi never satisfied me, it was too intelligible, too full of meaning. It would be better to keep it just terrain vague , which is what I intend to do. People think that vacuity is nothingness, but it is not so. Vacuity is a discordant fullness, a crowded ghostly world in which the soul goes reconnoitering. As a boy I remember standing in the vacant lot as if I were a very lively soul standing naked in a pair of shoes. The body had been stolen from me because I had no particular need of it. I could exist with or without a body then. If I killed a little bird and roasted it over the fire and ate it, it was not because I was hungry but because I wanted to know about Timbuktu or Tierra del Fuego. I had to stand in the vacant lot and eat dead birds in order to create a desire for that bright land which later I would inhabit alone and people with nostalgia. I expected ultimate things of this place, but I was deplorably deceived.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  He’d turn the corner on Hamilton Avenue, roaring off down Broadway to the high school, leaving the rest of us still jumping up and down at the bus stop trying to stay warm. Peter Weber and Castiglia also drove to school every morning or got rides with their new friends. I remember for a long time Mike and Bobby Zimmer were a lot taller than me and Castiglia. Then all of a sudden I was taller than all three of them. We’d stand back to back over at Kenny’s house as his mother checked to see who was the tallest and it was so good for little guys like me and Castiglia to be taller than the other guys. And when we weren’t trying to see who was the tallest, we’d be out on the lawns still playing tag and wrestling on the grass. Steve Jacket was still throwing screwdrivers into his front lawn across from Pete’s house on Hamilton Avenue, telling us all he was going to become a TV sports announcer just like Mel Allen, and Pete was still coming over to my house every once in a while after school to steal beer out of my father’s locker in the garage. Little Tommy Law was hanging out with Billy Meyers, trying to stay out of trouble and graduate from high school like the rest of us. High school was just about over for me and the rest of the guys. We had been on the block together for almost twelve years, running and moving from Toronto Avenue to Lee Place to Hamilton Avenue. No one could remember how we all first got together back then, but we had become friends, “as close as real brothers,” Peter told me one afternoon, and we wanted to believe it would always be that way. * * * President Kennedy got killed that last year and we played football in the huge snowdrifts that had settled on the Long Island streets that afternoon. We played in silence, I guess because you’re supposed to be silent when someone dies. I truly felt I had lost a dear friend. I was deeply hurt for a long time afterward. We went to the movies that Sunday. I can’t remember what was playing, but how ashamed I was that I was even there, that people could sit through a movie or have the nerve to want to go to football games when our president had been killed in Dallas. The pain stuck with me for a long time after he died. I still remember Oswald being shot and screaming to my mother to come into the living room. It all seemed wild and crazy like some Texas shootout, but it was real for all of us back then, it was very real. I remember Johnson being sworn in on the plane and the fear in the eyes of the woman judge from Texas. And then the funeral and the casket.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  I remember it was a beautiful spring day and we were young back then and really alive and the air smelled fresh. This song was playing and I really got into it and was hitting baseballs and feeling like I could live forever. It was all sort of easy. It had all come and gone. POSTSCRIPT 14 February 1968 Dear Mr. and Mrs. Kovic, Just prior to your son Ron’s departure from Vietnam, he very kindly sent me a copy of the letter in which he informed you of his wounds and his paralytic condition. That letter was the most inspirational one I have ever received from any of our Marines in Vietnam—and I receive quite a few. I have written to Ron and my next thought was to write to you to express my sympathy. As I re-read the letter, however, it came to me that, while I quite naturally feel sympathy for Ron and for you, condolence is not what I want to express, but rather gratitude. I am extremely grateful that our country is composed of people like you who can raise so fine a son. Ron’s faith in God, his dedication to his country, and his strength of character reflect the highest credit on the upbringing you gave him. Despite the fact that he is partially paralyzed, I know that his spirit and his faith will continue to flourish and that his future contribution toward a free and peaceful world will be equally as worthy, if not more so, as that which he so gallantly contributed in Vietnam. You have my deepest respect and admiration, as does Ron. He is the type of young man of which Americans and free men everywhere can be proud. Sincerely, L.W. Walt Lieutenant General, U.S. Marine Corps Discussion Guide 1. Discuss the significance to Ron Kovic of being born on the Fourth of July, the nation’s birthday. 2. Why does Kovic use JFK’s famous quote, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country,” at the start of the book? How does this statement relate to Kovic’s story? 3. Kovic describes his childhood and teenage years in a positive light, with nostalgic stories of playing war in the woods with his friends, watching John Wayne movies and TV shows like I Led Three Lives. How does the political and cultural climate of Kovic’s 1950s childhood affect his decision to join the Marines? 4. Kovic is raised a devout Catholic and religion is clearly important to him. Where in the book, if at all, does he begin to question that faith? 5. A simple definition of patriotism is “the love that people feel for their country.” Is Ron Kovic a patriot throughout the book? Do you find him more patriotic before his injury or after? Can you speak out so vehemently against your government’s actions and still be considered a patriot? 6.

• 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.