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 From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Men are lashed for “fornication,” twice as harshly if they are married when they commit the off ense; sex with one’s own slave is subject to public penalties. In these early medieval law codes, both eastern and western, we fi nd Christian values fully expressed within the scaff olding of a new public order, one that owes less than might be imagined to ancient traditions even in so conservative a domain as juristic culture. Th e trajectory we can only wonder about, though, because it is virtually invisible to us, is the erotic tradition, in both life and literature. On occasion its embers fl are, even into the fi fth or sixth century. It was perhaps around the court of Justinian that an erudite litterateur named Aristaenetus composed a fi ctive book of love letters that are charming tales steeped in the ancient erotic tradition, affi rming the enigmatic force of the sex drive in human life. In a historian of the same period we are struck to read a hostile portrait of a Justinianic offi cial whose debauched entertainments with sex servers, both male and female, were described in calculated detail; what is striking is not that exaggerated sexual invective remained a potent form of insult but that the terms of the criticism would have been familiar to Lucian, or for that matter an Athenian of the classical age; the offi cial’s crime was immoderation, in the consumption of unmixed wine and dainty fi sh plates as in the more carnal pleasures. We recall, too, that someone, after all, copied by hand the erotic novels and epigrams that still serve to off er us precious windows into the ways humans in the distant past thought about sex, but these texts become, as time passes, safely stowed in the store house of cultural memory. Inexorably the visible monuments of eros fade, and the celebrations of its power become faint. We can strain to hear men and women who resisted cold counsels and continued to celebrate, in their forgotten wedding songs and in their lost tales that escaped the permanence of writing, the uncanny, earthy power of eros in human life. But in the early Middle Ages, strident affi rmations of joy are hard to hear, because they have lost their place in public forms of expression, and that in itself is a true change, both in the experience of sexual culture and, more selfi shly, in the ways that we can know the past. Th e changes that unfolded in the sixth and seventh centuries marked the end of an ancient Mediterranean world, as the collapse of transmarine connections cut apart the sea, as the great urban monuments became testa-ments of ruin, as a classical way of life— with its rhythms, its modes of  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  “Well then, what was it that got you involved?” I asked in an upbeat voice. “At the time, my girlfriend Carol started going to satsang—you know, group meetings—and I went along. We listened to the people all talk so glowingly about their experience of Knowledge, and how high it made them feel.” I continued to probe. “Did you decide to get initiated first, or did Carol?” “She did. At first I thought the whole thing was a bit strange. But after she started meditating, I got curious and decided to do it, too.” “What year was this?” I asked. “1973.” “And at the time, what did you think of Guru Maharaj Ji?” “I thought he was this young dude from India who was going to usher in an age of world peace,” he said, with a touch of sarcasm. “Were you at that big meeting at the Houston Astrodome?” I asked. “Yes,” he answered. “And what ever became of Carol?” “I don’t know,” Gary said, his face darkening again. “We sort of broke up a few months after we got involved with the group.” “When was the last time you spoke to her?” I asked. “About four years ago she wrote me that she had decided to go back to school and wasn’t going to practice Knowledge anymore.” “Why did she say that she wasn’t going to be part of the group anymore?” “I don’t remember,” he said, staring at the pavement. “So the person who got you involved left the group four years ago?” I repeated. “Uh huh.” “And you have never really sat down with her to find out why she left, after belonging to the group for three years?” “Why are you looking at me like that?” Gary said, looking up at me. I smiled, looked down, then looked him right in the eye. “Well, I don’t understand, Gary. If my ex-girlfriend left the group that she introduced me to, I would certainly want to sit down with her and find out everything I could from her. She must have had some really good reasons why she left after three years. And she obviously cared enough about you to contact you and let you know her decision.” I paused. Gary stood there, silent. I waited some more. Then I continued, “I suppose there’s no way for you to get in touch with her anymore.” “Actually, her parents probably live at the same address. I’m sure I could find it.” My bus pulled up to the stop. “Might be a good idea. Well, I wish you good luck, Gary. It was really good talking to you. Thanks.” He waved to me as my bus pulled away.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I was all these things at once—and beyond that I was something else, something which no one suspected, least of all myself. As a boy of six or seven I used to sit at my grandfather’s workbench and read to him while he sewed. I remember him vividly in those moments when, pressing the hot iron against the seam of a coat, he would stand with one hand over the other and look out of the window dreamily. I remember the expression on his face, as he stood there dreaming, better than the contents of the books I read, better than the conversations we had or the games which I played in the street. I used to wonder what he was dreaming of, what it was that drew him out of himself. I hadn’t learned yet how to dream wide-awake. I was always lucid, in the moment, and all of a piece. His daydreaming fascinated me. I knew that he had no connection with what he was doing, not the least thought for any of us, that he was alone and being alone he was free. I was never alone, least of all when I was by myself. Always, it seems to me, I was accompanied: I was like a little crumb of a big cheese, which was the world, I suppose, though I never stopped to think about it. But I know I never existed separately, never thought myself the big cheese, as it were. So that even when I had reason to be miserable, to complain, to weep, I had the illusion of participating in a common, a universal misery. When I wept the whole world was weeping—so I imagined. I wept very seldom. Mostly I was happy, I was laughing, I was having a good time. I had a good time because, as I said before, I really didn’t give a fuck about anything. If things were wrong with me they were wrong everywhere, I was convinced of it. And things were wrong usually only when one cared too much. That impressed itself on me very early in life. For example, I remember the case of my young friend Jack Lawson. For a whole year he lay in bed, suffering the worst agonies. He was my best friend, so people said at any rate. Well, at first I was probably sorry for him and perhaps now and then I called at his house to inquire about him; but after a month or two had elapsed I grew quite callous about his suffering. I said to myself he ought to die and the sooner he dies the better it will be, and having thought thus I acted accordingly: that is to say, I promptly forgot about him, abandoned him to his fate. I was only about twelve years old at the time and I remember being proud of my decision. I remember the funeral too—what a disgraceful affair it was.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  Ultimately, it is the person’s real identity that shows me how to unlock the doors. They tell me what keys are necessary to use, where to find them, and in what order to use them. This process of discovery can be demonstrated in the following interaction with a young member of a cult that stresses meditation, under the leadership of a man named Guru Maharaj Ji, aka Prem Rawat. A Sample Rescue Effort: Gary and the Divine Light Mission170 A young man and I were both waiting for the bus. I noticed some brochures he was carrying. “I’m curious,” I said. “How long have you been involved with Divine Light Mission?” “For about seven years,” he answered. His eyes moved up slowly until they focused on mine. “That’s a long time,” I said. “How old were you when you first got involved?” I tried to sound innocent, as though I were an old friend. “I was 20.” “Hi. I’m Steve,” I said, holding out my hand to shake his. “I’m sorry if I’m bothering you. What’s your name?” “My name is Gary,” he said, somewhat bewildered. He looked as though he didn’t know what to make of me. “Gary, I’m just curious: what were you doing at that time in your life?” “Why do you want to know?” he asked with a look of puzzlement. “I love to talk to people who have made unorthodox choices in their life. I like trying to figure out why people do what they do,” I shrugged my shoulders a bit. “Oh. Well, back then I was working for a construction company, putting up buildings.” “Anything else?” I asked. “Yeah, well, I liked to hang out with my friends. I was also into animals. I had two dogs, a cat, some tropical fish and a rabbit.” A warm smile lit up his face as he recalled his friends and his pets. “You certainly were into animals. Was any one your favorite?” I asked. “Well, my dog Inferno was pretty special. He and I used to be best buddies.” “What made him so special?” I asked. “He had an independent spirit. He loved adventure. He loved to go with me into the woods.” It was obvious to me that he missed his dog a great deal. I shared that I grew up with dogs and love them too. This increased rapport. “So, you love an independent spirit. Do you admire anyone who stands up and does what they feel is right no matter what others say?” I was trying my best to empower Gary by reminding him of the qualities he used to admire. “That’s right. Inferno did what he wanted to do. And I loved him for that, too.” Gary’s tone was somewhat defensive and self-righteous. “So, Gary, tell me—what was it that made you decide that the Divine Light Mission was the group you wanted to spend your life in?” “I never thought of it that way,” he said, his face growing sullen.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  Connie walked three blocks before hailing a cab. “You think you know what you’re doing, but you don’t,” a huddled drunk informed her. She gave him a dollar bill and walked on, silently agreeing. Why hadn’t she waited for Alice? “Alice loves you, Connie,” Franklin had said. A couple across the street were embracing against a crumbling brick wall; the man’s hand was under the woman’s short leather skirt. Because she’d been ending a cycle and they weren’t friends anymore, Constance thought. She stopped before a garbage-choked wastebasket and pulled Alice’s card from her pocket. She started to throw it away and then changed her mind. You never know. One day she might come upon this card and decide it would be good to talk to somebody she hadn’t spoken to in years. She pocketed the little piece of cardboard and hailed a cab that was roaring down the street like a desperate animal. HeavenWhen Virginia thought of their life in Florida, it was veiled by a blue-and-green tropical haze. Ocean water lapped a white sand beach. Starfish lay on the shore and lobsters awkwardly strolled it. There was a white house with a blue roof. On the front porch were tin cans housing smelly clams and crayfish that walked in circles, brushing the sides of the cans with their antennae; they had been brought by her son Charles, and left for him and his brother, Daniel, to squat over and watch from time to time. She imagined her young daughters in matching red shorts, their blond hair pulled back by rubber bands. The muscles of their long legs throbbed as they jumped rope or chased each other, rubber thongs patting their small, dirty heels with every step. A family picnic was being held in the front yard on an old patchwork quilt. Watermelon juice ran down their sleeves. Jarold was holding Magdalen in the ocean so she could kick and splash without fear. He was laughing, he was pink; his hair lay in wet ridges against his large, handsome head. Twenty years later, Virginia thought of Florida with pained and superstitious but reverent wonder, as though it was a paradise she had forfeited without knowing it. She thought of it almost every night as she lay on the couch before the humming, fuzzing TV set in the den of their New Jersey home. She lay with her head on a hard little throw pillow, staring out of the picture window into the darkened back yard at the faint glimmer of the rusting barbecue tray. She thought that if they had stayed in Florida, her son would still be alive. She knew it didn’t make any sense, but that’s what she thought.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  Connie walked three blocks before hailing a cab. “You think you know what you’re doing, but you don’t,” a huddled drunk informed her. She gave him a dollar bill and walked on, silently agreeing. Why hadn’t she waited for Alice? “Alice loves you, Connie,” Franklin had said. A couple across the street were embracing against a crumbling brick wall; the man’s hand was under the woman’s short leather skirt. Because she’d been ending a cycle and they weren’t friends anymore, Constance thought. She stopped before a garbage-choked wastebasket and pulled Alice’s card from her pocket. She started to throw it away and then changed her mind. You never know. One day she might come upon this card and decide it would be good to talk to somebody she hadn’t spoken to in years. She pocketed the little piece of cardboard and hailed a cab that was roaring down the street like a desperate animal. HeavenWhen Virginia thought of their life in Florida, it was veiled by a blue-and-green tropical haze. Ocean water lapped a white sand beach. Starfish lay on the shore and lobsters awkwardly strolled it. There was a white house with a blue roof. On the front porch were tin cans housing smelly clams and crayfish that walked in circles, brushing the sides of the cans with their antennae; they had been brought by her son Charles, and left for him and his brother, Daniel, to squat over and watch from time to time. She imagined her young daughters in matching red shorts, their blond hair pulled back by rubber bands. The muscles of their long legs throbbed as they jumped rope or chased each other, rubber thongs patting their small, dirty heels with every step. A family picnic was being held in the front yard on an old patchwork quilt. Watermelon juice ran down their sleeves. Jarold was holding Magdalen in the ocean so she could kick and splash without fear. He was laughing, he was pink; his hair lay in wet ridges against his large, handsome head. Twenty years later, Virginia thought of Florida with pained and superstitious but reverent wonder, as though it was a paradise she had forfeited without knowing it. She thought of it almost every night as she lay on the couch before the humming, fuzzing TV set in the den of their New Jersey home. She lay with her head on a hard little throw pillow, staring out of the picture window into the darkened back yard at the faint glimmer of the rusting barbecue tray. She thought that if they had stayed in Florida, her son would still be alive. She knew it didn’t make any sense, but that’s what she thought.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Not long ago I was walking the streets of New York. Dear old Broadway. It was night and the sky was an Oriental blue, as blue as the gold in the ceiling of the Pagode , rue de Babylone, when the machine starts clicking. I was passing exactly below the place where we first met. I stood there a moment looking up at the red lights in the windows. The music sounded as it always sounded—light, peppery, enchanting. I was alone and there were millions of people around me. It came over me, as I stood there, that I wasn’t thinking of her any more; I was thinking of this book which I am writing, and the book had become more important to me than her, than all that had happened to us. Will this book be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God? Plunging into the crowd again I wrestled with this question of “truth.” For years I have been trying to tell this story and always the question of truth has weighed upon me like a nightmare. Time and again I have related to others the circumstances of our life, and I have always told the truth. But the truth can also be a lie. The truth is not enough. Truth is only the core of a totality which is inexhaustible.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  THE BACK YARD, that was the place to be, it was where all the plans for the future, the trips to Africa, the romances with young high-school girls, it was where all those wonderful things took place. Remember the hula hoop, everyone including my mother doing it and my sister, yes my sister, teaching me the twist in the basement. Then out on the basketball court with all the young fine-looking girls watching. Then back on the fence for a walk around the whole back yard. Up there! Can you see me balancing like Houdini? Can you see me hiding in a box, in a submarine, on a jet? Can you see me flying a kite, making a model, breeching a stream? It was all sort of easy, it had all come and gone, the snowstorms, the street lamps telling us there was no school at midnight, the couch, the heater with all of us rolled up beside it in the thick blankets, the dogs, it was lovely. Getting nailed at home plate, studying the cub scout handbook, tying knots, playing Ping-Pong, reading National Geographic. Mickey Mantle was my hero and Joan Marfe was the girl I liked best. It all ended with a bang and it was lovely. There was a song called “Runaway” by a guy named Del Shannon playing one Saturday at the baseball field. 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.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  IT WILL be my turn to speak soon. They have put me up on the platform of this auditorium in this high school that is so much like the one I went to, in this town that is like the one I grew up in. I am looking at all the young faces. Kids. They were laughing, horsing around when they came in, just the way we used to. Now they are silent, looking at me and Bobby Muller, my friend from the V.A. hospital who is speaking to them from his wheelchair. It is like the day the marine recruiters came. I remember it like it was yesterday—their shiny shoes and their uniforms, their firm handshakes, all the dreams, the medals, the hills taken with Castiglia by my side his army-navy store canteen rattling, the movies the books the plastic guns, everything in 3-D and the explosive spiraling colors of a rainbow. Except this time, this time it is Bobby and me. What if I had seen someone like me that day, a guy in a wheelchair, just sitting there in front of the senior class not saying a word? Maybe things would have been different. Maybe that’s all it would have taken. Bobby is telling his story and I will tell mine. I am glad he has brought me here and that all of them are looking at us, seeing the war firsthand—the dead while still living, the living reminders, the two young men who had the shit shot out of them. I have never spoken before but it is time now. I am thinking about what I can tell them. I wheel myself to the center of the platform. I begin by telling them about the hospital.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  My glance traveled now far beyond the cemeteries, far beyond the rivers, far beyond the city of New York or the State of New York, beyond the whole United States indeed. At Point Loma, California, I had looked out upon the broad Pacific and I had felt something there which kept my face permanently screwed in another direction. I came back to the old neighborhood, I remember, one night with my old friend Stanley who had just come out of the army, and we walked the streets sadly and wistfully. A European can scarcely know what this feeling is like. Even when a town becomes modernized, in Europe, there are still vestiges of the old. In America, though there are vestiges, they are effaced, wiped out of the consciousness, trampled upon, obliterated, nullified by the new. The new is, from day to day, a moth which eats into the fabric of life, leaving nothing finally but a great hole. Stanley and I, we were walking through this terrifying hole. Even a war does not bring this kind of desolation and destruction. Through war a town may be reduced to ashes and the entire population wiped out, but what springs up again resembles the old. Death is fecundating, for the soil as well as for the spirit. In America the destruction is complete, annihilating. There is no rebirth, only a cancerous growth, layer upon layer of new, poisonous tissue, each one uglier than the previous one. We were walking through this enormous hole, as I say, and it was a winter’s night, clear, frosty, sparkling, and as we came through the south side toward the boundary line we saluted all the old relics or the spots where things had once stood and where there had been once something of ourselves. And as we approached North Second Street, between Fillmore Place and North Second Street—a distance of only a few yards and yet such a rich, full area of the globe—before Mrs. O’Melio’s shanty I stopped and looked up at the house where I had known what it was to really have a being. Everything had shrunk now to diminutive proportions, including the world which lay beyond the boundary line, the world which had been so mysterious to me and so terrifyingly grand, so delimited. Standing there in a trance I suddenly recalled a dream which I have had over and over, which I still dream now and then, and which I hope to dream as long as I live. It was the dream of passing the boundary line. As in all dreams the remarkable thing is the vividness of the reality, the fact that one is in reality and not dreaming. Across the line I am unknown and absolutely alone. Even the language has changed. In fact, I am always regarded as a stranger, a foreigner. I have unlimited time on my hands and I am absolutely content in sauntering through the streets.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  It hadn’t. Susan had spent most of her New York years typing, proofreading or coat-checking, selling an article maybe twice a year. Little by little she had given up trying to make it as a writer and had taken an entry-level position with a journal that she didn’t think much of. Her editorial career didn’t exactly skyrocket, but it puttered along nicely. In Chicago, where she lived now, she edited a pretentious TV magazine and occasionally wrote film reviews for a local entertainment guide that paid almost nothing but gave her a chance to pontificate about aesthetics. When she thought about the magazine, she despised it and considered herself a failure; when she didn’t think about it, she would catch herself enjoying the work and decide that it was where she belonged. “And what do you think will happen with my career?” Leisha would ask, pulling back her shoulders and revealing her long, alert neck. Susan had answered her cautiously and it had been just as well. Leisha had taken the same acting course repeatedly for three years until the teacher told her she couldn’t take it anymore. She’d had one showcase, a string of auditions and then spent the next few years wringing her hands, seeing therapists and going into debt on her charge cards. Susan passed the Eighth Street Theater and noted the long-haired boys in black pants hanging around the entrance in a communal slouch. She remembered when she and Leisha would stand outside the St. Marks Bar and Grill in the summer wearing black Capri pants and white lipstick. She snapped her tongue against the roof of her mouth, making the classic junior-high-schooler’s noise of contempt for her own sentimentality, then remembered that sentiment was what her visit to New York was all about. She walked up Greenwich Avenue, scanning the Korean fruit stands that she had always liked so much, the tiny hardware stores selling toylike, largely superfluous wares, the cafés with tense outdoor patios and waiters racing to classical music with prim, neurotic steps. It was almost nauseatingly rich compared to clean, terse Chicago. She admired the swaggering young women in their sweaters and leather jackets and the aloof-faced men with arrogant hip-twitching gaits. She imagined Leisha walking with her in a tweed jacket and short black boots, a tiny spike-haired girl with an odd beeline walk and an intent, condensed quality illuminating her angular face.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  For some reason, I remembered the time, a few years before, when my mother had taken me to see a psychiatrist. One of the more obvious questions he had asked me was, “Debby, do you ever have the sensation of being outside yourself, almost as if you can actually watch yourself from another place?” I hadn’t at the time, but I did now. And it wasn’t such a bad feeling at all. Other FactorsConstance was disconcerted by her meeting with Franklin in the East Village, partly because two years before he’d spent exactly one week ardently trying to seduce her, and then had abruptly dropped her to get married to a hitherto undisclosed fiancée. But there were other factors. “Constance!” he yelled. “God, it’s great to see you! You’re looking good! In fact, you’re looking beautiful!” The last time she had seen him had been at his wedding party; he’d been lip-synching to Grand Master Flash and doing an arm-flapping dance that threatened to tear the armpits out of his rented tux. Since then his nose seemed to have grown larger and lumpier, his face broader and his eyes more prone to wander frantically over the head of whomever he was talking to. But he still had his kind demeanor and his air that whatever he was talking about and whomever he was talking to were both equally and desperately important. She remembered something he had said to her sometime before: “Don’t worry, Connie. In fifteen years, I’ll be doing my retrospective at the Whitney and you’ll be publishing regularly in The New Yorker.” He paused. “But by then we’ll be ugly.” She smiled at him on the crowded street and they yelled cheerfully back and forth. He was busy, very busy, writing art criticism for three publications, teaching part-time and painting. She was doing free-lance journalism, and was currently huddled in a cranny of stability as a part-time editor for a slick literary quarterly. They linked arms and went for coffee. “God,” he said, hunching over his tiny brown cup of espresso, “it’s good to see a new face. For weeks I’ve seen nobody but friends of Emily’s who’ve come in from Dallas—these really incredible women who’re all painters, all in their forties, incredibly intelligent and—would you believe it?—all single. They’re great, but I feel like I have to constantly be telling them how attractive and talented they are—and they are attractive! They’re incredibly attractive!—because they’re in their forties, and they’re not married, and they’re not successful.” “What makes you think you always have to tell them how great they are?” “You just do. It’s obvious.” He lifted the little brown cup in his big hands and delicately inserted the tip of his tongue, put it down and played with his napkin. “You wouldn’t have to tell me that if I was forty.” He didn’t respond to this, but stared fixedly into a corner for several seconds and then said, “So, whose heart are you laying waste to now?”

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  She turned again and placed her back in a matching curve against Deana’s. When she was a child, her mother had said, “When boys get angry with each other, they just fight it out and it’s all over. But girls are dirty. They pretend to be your friend and go behind your back.” She remembered herself as the new girl in elementary school trying to belong with the bony-legged clusters of little girls snapping their gum and talking about things that she never discovered the significance of. She saw herself sitting alone in a high school cafeteria eating french fries and a Cap’n Crunch bar. She opened her eyes and could barely see the big-eared outline of the tiny ceramic Siamese cat that her aunt had given her when she was twelve. At the time she had thought that it and its brood of ceramic kittens were the height of taste and elegance, and even though its face had been broken in half and Krazy-glued back together, it still seemed faintly regal and glamorous. It had been one of the items that Alice had in mind when she looked at Connie’s dresser and said, “One of these days you’re going to wake up and look at all this stuff and say, ‘This doesn’t have anything to do with me,’ and throw it out.” But it does have something to do with me, thought Connie. — The next day she had to leave the office because of a sudden and painful toothache. She thought it might’ve been psychosomatically induced by the memory of the exposed-nerve episode with Alice in the theater, but the dentist assured her that it was not. “Nope, nope, nope. This is the real thing, all right. You’ve just got a lulu of a mouth, is all. Just one thing after another. But this isn’t a root canal. Just a deep, nasty filling.” He jabbed her tooth with an instrument and she gasped with pain. “I’m surprised that it hasn’t hurt you before. It’s practically into your navel.” He jabbed her again; she groaned and tried to close her mouth. “Don’t worry, though, we caught it in time.” He swiveled robustly in his chair and began to manipulate his precise, needle-nosed implements. Dr. Fangelli had very large forearms heavily strewn with hair; his hands seemed weirdly placed on his wrists, and his unevenly spaced fingers suggested undue activity in impossibly varied directions. He wasn’t a big man, but when he walked his arms and shoulders rolled like a tank tread, and he seemed to suddenly require a lot of space. “Okay, now, we’re going to inject you with a little—” His face zoomed at her, and she had the disturbing thought that its happy, porous proximity could unhinge her jaw with the projected, exuberant desire that she open wide. “What about the nitrous?” she asked.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  The authorial insistence on the hero’s physical integrity is unusual, and it is symptomatic of the skepticism toward carnal pleasure that animates this novel. The Ethiopian Tale is an erotic romance in form but not in spirit. It is quite as far removed from the earthy sensuality of the earlier romances as is Christian fiction. The story is missing all the wry glances toward physical pleasure that the genre usually allows. It is impossible to imagine the pallid Charicleia as an erotic enthusiast. In the world of Heliodorus, the priestly race condemns the common aphrodisia and descends to intercourse “not for the use of pleasure but for the succession of generations.” In the penultimate scene, as Charicleia and Theagenes are married, the high priest pronounces them solemnly wed by the law of procreation. In the final scene the two are invested as priest and priestess and march into the city to perform even “more sacred” mysteries. In any other ancient novel, such an allusion would clearly be to the rites of the nuptial couch, but here there is no hint of sex. Gone is the warm eroticism of carnal friction, in its place an obsession with purity that is sacerdotal in its tone and timbre.25 The fifth-century church historian Socrates reported, in the fifth book of his ecclesiastical history, that the same Heliodorus who wrote The Ethiopian Tale in his youth became a Christian bishop in Thessaly. Unlike later Byzantine tales which have Achilles Tatius converting to the faith, this biographical note is not so far removed in time and it is not an obvious specimen of literary wish fulfillment. The report deserves credence, as does the detail, added by Socrates, that Heliodorus introduced strict clerical continence in his church. That the author of this final romance, so frigid in its erotic outlook, enjoined sexual abstinence on even the married members of his clergy, is entirely consonant with the hieratic fixation on purity and pollution in The Ethiopian Tale. Heliodorus lived against the backdrop of mass conversion to Christianity and became a leader in the movement at a particularly consequential moment. He may well have found the sexual austerity of the religion congenial and familiar. But what he would have quickly discovered, on the entry to his new faith, was its will to impose rigorous codes of corporal purity on all its adherents, not just a priestly race, set apart, with special privileges of divine communication. The Christians would soon develop a literature adequate to such an ambitious project, and it would entail reworking the conventions of romance so thoroughly that we cannot but wonder if a nostalgic spirit like Heliodorus would have been enthused or scandalized. He lived on the cusp of a tremendous literary revolution. But this revolution was only possible because, from very early on, the conventions of romance—above all the charged symbolism of female purity—had fully entered the bloodstream of Christian fiction.26 THE CHRISTIAN ACTS AND THE INVERSION OF ROMANCE

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  Mother would drive me around to look for jobs. First we would go through ads in the paper, drawing black circles, marking X’s. The defaced newspaper sat on the dining room table in a gray fold and we argued. “I’m not friendly and I’m not personable. I’m not going to answer an ad for somebody like that. It would be stupid.” “You can be friendly. And you are personable when you aren’t busy putting yourself down.” “I’m not putting myself down. You just want to think that I am so you can have something to talk about.” “You’re backing yourself into a corner, Debby.” “Oh, shit.” I picked up a candy wrapper and began pinching it together in an ugly way. My hands were red and rough. It didn’t matter how much lotion I used. “Come on, we’re getting started on the wrong foot.” “Shut up.” My mother crossed her legs. “Well,” she said. She picked up the “Living” section of the paper and cracked it into position. She tilted her head back and dropped her eyelids. Her upper lip became hostile as she read. She picked up her green teacup and drank. “I’m dependable. I could answer an ad for somebody dependable.” “You are that.” — We wound up in the car. My toes swelled in my high heels. My mother and I both used the flowered box of Kleenex on the dashboard and stuck the used tissue in a brown bag that sat near the hump in the middle of the car. There was a lot of traffic in both lanes. We drove past the Amy Joy doughnut shop. They still hadn’t put the letter Y back on the Amy sign. Our first stop was Wonderland. There was a job in the clerical department of Sears. The man there had a long disapproving nose, and he held his hands stiffly curled in the middle of his desk. He mainly looked at his hands. He said he would call me, but I knew he wouldn’t. On the way back to the parking lot, we passed a pet store. There were only hamsters, fish and exhausted yellow birds. We stopped and looked at slivers of fish swarming in their tank of thick green water. I had come to this pet store when I was ten years old. The mall had just opened and we had all come out to walk through it. My sister, Donna, had wanted to go into the pet store. It was very warm and damp in the store, and smelled like fur and hamster. When we walked out, it seemed cold. I said I was cold and Donna took off her white leatherette jacket and put it around my shoulders, letting one hand sit on my left shoulder for a minute. She had never touched me like that before and she hasn’t since.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  They’re great, but I feel like I have to constantly be telling them how attractive and talented they are—and they are attractive! They’re incredibly attractive! —because they’re in their forties, and they’re not married, and they’re not successful.” “What makes you think you always have to tell them how great they are?” “You just do. It’s obvious.” He lifted the little brown cup in his big hands and delicately inserted the tip of his tongue, put it down and played with his napkin. “You wouldn’t have to tell me that if I was forty.” He didn’t respond to this, but stared fixedly into a corner for several seconds and then said, “So, whose heart are you laying waste to now?” “You mean who’s trashing me these days? I’m not so extreme anymore, Franklin.” Franklin smiled in the sly, flatly pleased way he contrived when she simultaneously ridiculed and accepted his flattery. “Actually, I have a girlfriend.” She picked up her croissant as if she were going to bat her eyelashes from behind it. “We’ve been together for a year and a half. We live together.” “Connie, that’s great. That’s really super. Is this a new predilection?” “No, it’s always been there. This is just more serious than usual.” “You know, if she were a boy, I think I’d be jealous. Where’d you meet her?” They burrowed into a conversation that skimmed over the present, then tunneled back through the five years since they’d met in a proofreading booth, where exhausted, languid Connie would sleep on the floor beneath her desk, using Franklin’s balled-up sweater as a pillow. They had nested in that booth every weekend for months, surrounded by literary supplements, plastic take-out containers, boxes of cookies and notebooks in which they furiously scribbled between jobs. It was where they had staged their lengthy, horribly detailed conferences about their sexual relationships. “The nightmare of the two thousand and one dates,” Franklin called it—or maybe she’d invented the nightmare part, she couldn’t remember. The tunnel deepened as they entered a thickly populated realm of old friends, acquaintances, scandals and memories that appeared like frail, large-eyed animals that paused to look at them, then blinked and ran away. Connie stopped a moment as Franklin talked and put her head up to survey the outside world; the dark café was crowded with young people in big jackets and neat, mincing shoes. A grotesquely beautiful girl in pink leather seemed to be staring at them. Did they look like pathetic aging hipsters? Was her hair wrong? Was their conversation too loud? Franklin was talking very loudly about a nasty exchange he’d had with another critic at some club. She winced, then took shelter in his apparently inexhaustible confidence and burrowed again.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  There were other boys who were rebels, and they were admired, but they never became the leader. The majority were clay in the hands of the fearless ones; a few could be depended on, but the most not. The air was full of tension—nothing could be predicted for the morrow. This loose, primitive nucleus of a society created sharp appetites, sharp emotions, sharp curiosity. Nothing was taken for granted; each day demanded a new test of power, a new sense of strength or of failure. And so, up until the age of nine or ten, we had a real taste of life—we were on our own. That is, those of us who were fortunate enough not to have been spoiled by our parents, those of us who were free to roam the streets at night and to discover things with our own eyes. What I am thinking of, with a certain amount of regret and longing, is that this thoroughly restricted life of early boyhood seems like a limitless universe and the life which followed upon it, the life of the adult, a constantly diminishing realm. From the moment when one is put in school one is lost; one has the feeling of having a halter put around his neck. The taste goes out of the bread as it goes out of life. Getting the bread becomes more important than the eating of it. Everything is calculated and everything has a price upon it. My cousin Gene became an absolute nonentity; Stanley became a first-rate failure. Besides these two boys, for whom I had the greatest affection, there was another, Joey, who has since become a letter carrier. I could weep when I think of what life has made them. As boys they were perfect, Stanley least of all because Stanley was more temperamental. Stanley went into violent rages now and then and there was no telling how you stood with him from day to day. But Joey and Gene were the essence of goodness; they were friends in the old meaning of the word. I think of Joey often when I go out into the country because he was what is called a country boy. That meant, for one thing, that he was more loyal, more sincere, more tender, than the boys we knew. I can see Joey now coming to meet me; he was always running with arms wide open and ready to embrace me, always breathless with adventures that he was planning for my participation, always loaded with gifts which he had saved for my coming. Joey received me like the monarchs of old received their guests. Everything I looked at was mine. We had innumerable things to tell each other and nothing was dull or boring. The difference between our respective worlds was enormous.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  He was taken to the hospital with a concussion of the brain from which he never recovered. Returning from the funeral the old man said with a dry eye—“Ned didn’t know what it was to be temperate. It was his own fault. Anyway, he’s better off now. . . .” And as though to prove to the minister that he was not made of the same stuff as Uncle Ned he became even more assiduous in his churchly duties. He had gotten himself promoted to the position of “elder,” an office of which he was extremely proud and by grace of which he was permitted during the Sunday services to aid in taking up the collection. To think of my old man marching up the aisle of a Congregational church with a collection box in his hand; to think of him standing reverently before the altar with this collection box while the minister blessed the offering, seems to me now something so incredible that I scarcely know what to say of it. I like to think, by contrast, of the man he was when I was just a kid and I would meet him at the ferry house of a Saturday noon. Surrounding the entrance to the ferry house there were then three saloons which of a Saturday noon were filled with men who had stopped off for a little bite at the free lunch counter and a schooner of beer. I can see the old man, as he stood in his thirtieth year, a healthy, genial soul with a smile for every one and a pleasant quip to pass the time of day, see him with his arm resting on the bar, his straw hat tipped on the back of his head, his left hand raised to down the foaming suds. My eye was then on about a level with his heavy gold chain which was spread crosswise over his vest; I remember the shepherd plaid suit which he wore in midsummer and the distinction it gave him among the other men at the bar who were not lucky enough to have been born tailors. I remember the way he would dip his hand into the big glass bowl on the free lunch counter and hand me a few pretzels, saying at the same time that I ought to go and have a look at the scoreboard in the window of the Brooklyn Times nearby.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  She was too difficult.” “Yes,” said Virginia. “She was.” “But she has good memories of you,” said Anne. “She used to tell me about going up into the mountains with you. She said that the two of you ate so many olives in the living room together that for years the color of olives made her think of you.” Anne grinned in a hideously open way. Virginia looked at the fruit. “And then do you know what she said? She said, ‘But that’s not right because Virginia’s not like an olive color at all. She’s more golden.’ ” “Oh, stop it,” said Virginia. “But that’s how I always thought of you too, even when you were awful. You were always golden.” Anne was smiling again, her eyes in sad half-moons. She saw that Virginia was embarrassed, so she looked down and picked up a wet piece of melon. She ate it, smiling dimly. The movements of her jaw were neat and careful. Virginia was afraid for a moment that she was going to say something nasty to Anne, though she wasn’t sure why. She had a drink of coffee instead. It was getting cold and oily. “What’s wrong?” Anne was watching her with a dark, naked look. Virginia glanced away. “Nothing.” — They had an old-fashioned family barbecue for Anne’s visit. It was the first one they’d had in a year, and Jarold was excited about it. He was ceremonious and manly beside the smoking barbecue, pronged fork in hand. Anne nervously mixed the salad and talked to Jarold about her job counseling old people in Detroit. Magdalen came out of the house, bringing a flat dish of cold pasta. She put the dish on the card table and her hand on Virginia’s shoulder. “How are you doing, Mama? Did you and Anne have a good time?” “We had a lovely time. We went for a long drive in the mountains.” “Oh, yes,” said Anne. “We actually got out of the car and walked for a long time. I was enthralled. It was just gorgeous.” “Anne must’ve put a pound of rocks in her pockets,” said Virginia. “Every time I turned around, she was picking up something else.” “I love it up there,” said Magdalen. “It’s my salvation.” She moved lightly around the card table, folding napkins. “You know, something I’ve noticed since I’ve gotten older is my sensitivity to nature,” said Anne. “When I was very young—a teenager—the sight of a sunset or a mountain scene was so deeply moving to me, I would get the chills.” She looked at Magdalen and shivered her shoulders. “And then, as I entered my twenties, I lost that sensitivity.” “Well, I’m sure it wasn’t lost. You just had to concentrate on other things,” said Virginia. “I suppose,” said Anne. “But there came a point when I hardly responded to nature at all.

• 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.