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 Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  In this wonderful return you dimly, unconsciously perhaps, realize the significance of that word gamut, that you or “it” (again) are strung along a gamut of being which is not human only but animal, vegetable, mineral. These fantasies which I indulge in occasionally (in the books), are not some of them distinctly mineral, others vegetable, and so on? Of course, I know you and Larry are not objecting to the “fantasies” or even the less valid “excursi,” but rather to a sort of everyday writing or thinking which is supposedly a betrayal of the artist in oneself. Don’t worry about it! Don’t explain it! Think of an adorable “haiku.” (Here a crazy thought intrudes. Not one of the faithful disciples ever spoke of Jesus farting or even blowing his nose. But he must have, what! Would it have been inartistic, sacrilegious, irreverent to introduce such a note? There are many still who can’t excuse him, who refuse to believe, that in his agony on the cross he cried out: “O Lord, why hast thou forsaken me!” A saviour shouldn’t have spoken such words, they will tell you. And yet it is this, just this piece of weakness, of doubt, of complaint, that is the most human thing about Jesus, that keeps him linked to us human-all-too-human trash.) And now a final word about “intentions.” I think you are quite right in thinking that my intentions do not matter much. Or did not. Man proposes, God disposes. How often I think of Rabelais who, while working for the printer, decided that he could write just as lusty and humorous works as those he was printing. And he did. But … then he got caught in his own machinery, as it were. He got terribly serious. He employed his Gargantuan humor to awaken us to greater things. He had intended to do something with his left hand, merely. (“The left hand is the dreamer.”) He got caught. He had stirred the muddy waters of his own being. He awoke the artist in him, the creator, the imaginator. And so, true to his lights, poor devil that he is, he is driven from pillar to post, always trying to save his skin—and tell the truth. And now an “excursus.” … The other day I meant to sit down and tell you lads of the wonderful remembrance which came to me. Suddenly one morning I fell to thinking of that trip abroad in 1953, with Eve. And suddenly it occurred to me how blessed was that trip from one aspect alone: my visits to the homes of certain celebrated men. What a list it is! Rabelais, Da Vinci, Moses Maimonides, El Greco, Ruysbroeck the Admirable, Shakespeare, Proust, van Eyck … And throw in the Cathedral of Chartres and the Mosque of Cordova. Each home, each countryside, each atmosphere was so very different. I say “home.” Not always. Da Vinci, for example—the Château at Amboise, where he died.

• From Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir (2017)

  Shelly and I had a long talk, reminiscing about walking together to school every day, going bowling, playing cards and step ball, and saving baseball cards. The following day, he called again: “Irv, yesterday you said you wanted feedback. Well I’ve just remembered one other thing about you: you had a gambling problem. You kept pressing me to play gin rummy with baseball cards as stakes. You wanted to bet on everything: I remember one day you wanted to bet on the color of the next car to drive down the street. And I remember what a kick you got out of playing the numbers.” “Playing the numbers”—I hadn’t thought about that for years. Shelly’s words stirred up an antique memory. When I was about eleven or twelve, my father converted his grocery store to a liquor store, and life became a little easier for my mother and father: no more spoiled goods to throw out, no more 5 a.m. trips to the wholesale produce market, no more sides of beef to be carved up. But things also became more dangerous: robberies were not infrequent, and on Saturday evenings an armed guard hid out of view in the back of our store. During the day the store was frequently filled with larger-than-life characters: among our regular customers were pimps, prostitutes, thieves, both sweet and sour alcoholics, and the bookies and numbers runners. Once I helped my father carry an order of several cases of scotch and bourbon to Duke’s car. Duke was one of our very best customers and I was fascinated by his style: ivory-headed cane, suave blue cashmere double-breasted overcoat, matching blue fedora, and his mile-long gleaming white Cadillac. When we got to the car parked on a side street, half a block away, I asked if I should put my case of scotch in the trunk and my father and Duke both chuckled. “Duke, why don’t we show him the trunk?” my father said. With a flourish, Duke opened the Cadillac trunk and said, “Not much room here, Sonny.” I looked in and my eyes popped. Seventy years later I still see the scene with striking clarity: the trunk was stuffed to the hilt with cash-stacks of bills of all denominations, tied with thick rubber bands, and several large burlap sacks bulging and overflowing with coins. Duke was in the numbers racket—an enterprise endemic in my Washington, DC, neighborhood. Here’s how it worked: every day, bettors in my neighborhood placed wagers (often as small as ten cents) with their “runners” on a three-digit number. If they guessed correctly, they “hit the number, glory be,” and were paid sixty dollars for a ten-cent bet—600 to 1 odds. But, of course, the real odds were 1,000 to 1, so the bookies made a huge profit. The daily number could not be manipulated, since it was derived by a publicly known formula based on the total amount wagered on three designated horse races at a local track.

• From Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir (2017)

  I became a lifelong Joan Baez fan, and was thrilled, years later, when I had the chance to dance with her after one of her café performances. Like everyone else, we were devastated by the news of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. It shattered the image that our peaceful lives in Palo Alto would be unaffected by the ills of the outside world, and we bought our first television set to witness the events surrounding Kennedy’s death and memorial services. I eschewed all religious belief and practice, but in this instance, Marilyn, feeling the need for community and ritual, took our two older children—Eve, aged eight, and Reid, aged seven—to a religious service at the Stanford Memorial Church. Having not entirely escaped the pull of ceremony, we always held a Passover Seder at our home with family and friends. Never having learned Hebrew, I always asked a friend to read the ceremonial prayers. F AMILY PORTRAIT, CA. 1975. Despite my unpleasant memories of childhood, I continued to favor the type of food I was raised on: Eastern European Jewish cuisine and no pork. Not Marilyn. Whenever I was out of town, the children knew she would serve them pork chops. I clung to some ceremonial rites. I had my sons circumcised, followed by a ceremonial repast with friends and family. Reid, the eldest of my three sons, chose to have a Bar Mitzvah. In addition to these few Jewish traditions, we had a Christmas tree, filled stockings for the children, and laid out a big Christmas Day feast. I’ve often been asked whether my lack of religious belief has been a problem in my life or my psychiatric practice. My answer is always no. First, I should say that I am “nonreligious” rather than “antireligious.” My stance was by no means unusual: for the overwhelming majority of my Stanford community and my medical and psychiatric colleagues, religion played little or no role in their lives. When I’ve spent time with my few devout friends (for example, Dagfinn Føllesdal, my Catholic Norwegian philosopher friend), I always feel tremendous respect for the depth of their faith, and I’m inclined to say that my secular views almost never influence my therapy practice. But I have to admit that in all my years of practice, only a handful of committed religious individuals have sought me out. My most frequent contact with devout individuals has come in my work with dying patients, and in every instance I welcome and support any religious comfort they can find. T hough I was deeply immersed in my work in the 1960s and largely apolitical, I couldn’t help but notice cultural changes. My medical students and psychiatric residents began to wear sandals instead of “proper” shoes, and year by year their hair got longer and wilder. A couple of students brought me gifts of their home-baked bread. Marijuana infiltrated even faculty parties, and sexual mores were radically changing.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  From Scriabin to Prokofiev, to the night I first heard him, Carnegie Hall probably, high up in the gallery, and so excited that when I stood up to applaud or to yell—we all yelled like madmen in those days—I nearly tumbled out of the gallery. A tall, gaunt figure he was, in a frock coat, like something out of the Dreigroschenoper , like Monsieur les Pompes Funèbres. From Prokofiev to Luke Ralston, now departed, an ascetic also, with a face like the death mask of Monsieur Arouet. A good friend, Luke Ralston, who after visiting the merchant tailors up and down Fifth Avenue with his samples of imported woolens, would go home and practice German lieder while his dear old mother, who had ruined him with her love, would make him pigs’ knuckles and sauerkraut and tell him for the ten thousandth time what a dear, good son he was. His thin, cultivated voice too weak, unfortunately, to cope with the freight-laden melodies of his beloved Hugo Wolf with which he always larded his programs. At thirty-three he dies—of pneumonia, they said, but it was probably a broken heart…. And in between come memories of other forgotten figures—minnesinger, flutists, cellists, pianists in skirts, like the homely one who always included Schubert’s Carnaval on her program. (Reminded me so much of Maude: the nun become virtuoso.) There were others too, short-haired and long-haired, all perfectos, like Havana cigars. Some, with chests like bulls, could shatter the chandeliers with their Wagnerian shrieks. Some were like lovely Jessicas, their hair parted in the middle and pasted down: benign madonnas (Jewish mostly) who had not yet taken to rifling the ice-box at all hours of the night. And then the fiddlers, in skirts, left-handed sometimes, often with red hair or dirty orange, and bosoms which got in the way of the bow…. Just looking at a word, as I say. Or a painting, or a book. The title alone, sometimes. Like Heart of Darkness or Under the Autumn Star . How did it begin again, that wonderful tale? Have a look-see. Read a few pages, then throw the book down. Inimitable. And how had I begun? I read it over once again, my imaginary Paul Morphy opening. Weak, wretchedly weak. Something falls off the table. I get down to search for it. There, on hands and knees, a crack in the floor intrigues me. It reminds me of something. What? I stay like that, as if waiting to be “served,” like a ewe. Thoughts whirl through my bean and out through the vent at the top of my skull. I reach for a pad and jot down a few words. More thoughts, plaguey thoughts. (What dropped from the table was a match-box.) How to fit these thoughts into the novel. Always the same dilemma. And then I think of Twelve Men .

• From Another Country (1962)

  “Because I know you ain’t intending to be home before four in the morning,” said Mrs. Scott, smiling. “Well, he ain’t going to be home by then,” said Ida, “and you know it well as I do.” A girl came toward them now, narrow-hipped, swift, and rough-looking. She, too, was bareheaded, with short, dirty, broken-off hair. She wore a man’s suede jacket, too large for her, and she held it at the neck with her hand. Vivaldo watched Ida watching the girl approach. “Here come Willa Mae,” said Mrs. Scott, “Poor little thing.” Then the girl stood before them, and she smiled. When she smiled her face was very different. She was very young. “How you-all today?” she asked. “Rufus, I ain’t seen you for the longest time.” “Just fine,” Rufus said. “How you making it?” He held his head very high and his eyes were expressionless. Ida looked down at the ground and held on to her mother. “Oh”—she laughed—“I can’t complain. Wouldn’t do no good nohow.” “You still at the same place?” “Sure. Where you think I’m going to move to?” There was a pause. The girl looked at Vivaldo, looked away. “Well, I got to be going,” she said. “Nice running into you.” She was no longer smiling. “Nice seeing you,” said Rufus. After the girl had gone, Ida, said disapprovingly, “She used to be your girl friend, too.” Rufus ignored this. He said to Vivaldo, “She used to be a nice girl. Some cat turned her on, and then he split.” He spat on the sidewalk. “Man, what a scene.” Mrs. Scott halted before steps leading up into a tenement. Ida took Rufus by the arm. “I got to leave you children here,” said Mrs. Scott. She looked at Rufus. “What time you going to bring this girl home?” “Oh, I don’t know. It won’t be late. I know she want to go out night-clubbing but I ain’t going to let her get too drunk.” Mrs. Scott smiled and held out her hand to Vivaldo. “Nice meeting you, son,” she said. “You make Rufus bring you by again, you hear? Don’t you be a stranger.” “No ma’am. Thank you, I’ll come up again real soon.” But he never did see her again, not until Rufus was dead. Rufus had never invited him home again. “I’ll be seeing you later, young lady,” she said. She started up the steps. “You children have a good time.” She had been fourteen or fifteen that day. She would be twenty-one or twenty-two now. She had told him that she remembered that day; but he wondered how she remembered it. He had not seen her again until she had become a woman and at that time he had not remembered their first meeting. But he remembered it now. He remembered delight and discomfort. What did she remember?

• From Another Country (1962)

  He entered their building, stepped into the elevator, and told the elevator man where he was going. He had forgotten the style of American elevator men, but now it came back to him. The elevator man, without a surly word, slammed the elevator gates shut and drove the car upward. The nature of his silence conveyed his disapproval of the Silenskis and all their friends and his vivid sense of being as good as they. He rang the bell. Cass opened the door at once, looking as bright as the bright day. “Eric!” She looked him over with the affectionate mockery he now remembered. “How nice you look with your hair so short!” “How nice,” he returned, smiling, “you look with yours so long. Or was it always long. It’s that kind of thing a long absence makes you forget.” “Let me look at you.” She pulled him into the apartment and closed the door. “You really look wonderful. Welcome home.” She leaned forward suddenly and kissed him on the cheek. “Is that the way they do it in Paris?” “You have to kiss me on both cheeks,” he said, gravely. “Oh.” She seemed slightly embarrassed but kissed him again. “Is that better?” “Much,” he said. Then, “Where is everybody?” For the large living room was empty, and filled with the sound of the blues. It was the voice of a colored woman, the voice of Bessie Smith, and it hurled him, with violence, into the hot center of his past: It’s raining and it’s storming on the sea. I feel like somebody has shipwrecked poor me. For a moment Cass looked as though she were sardonically echoing his question. She crossed the room and lowered the volume of the music slightly. “The children are over in the park with some friends of theirs. Richard’s in his study, working. But they should all be appearing almost any moment now.” “Oh,” he said, “then I’m early. I’m sorry.” “You aren’t early, you’re on time. And I’m glad. I was hoping to have a chance to talk to you alone before we go down to this jam session.” “You’ve got a pretty agreeable jam session going on right now,” he said. Cass went over to the bar, and he threw himself down on the sofa. “It’s mighty nice and cool in here. It’s awful outside. I’d forgotten how hot New York could be.” The large windows were open and the water stretched beyond the windows, very bright and peaceful, but murkier than the Mediterranean. The breeze that filled the room came directly from the water; seemed, almost, to bring with it the spice and stink of Europe and the murmur of Yves’ voice. Eric leaned back, held in a kind of peaceful melancholy, comforted by the beat of Bessie’s song, and looked over at Cass.

• From Another Country (1962)

  Richard winked at Paul and reached down to cuff Michael lightly on the head. Michael always reacted to this with a kind of surly, withdrawn delight; seeming to say to himself, each time, that he loved his father enough to overlook an occasional lapse of dignity. “Come on, now,” Richard said. “You want me to walk you to the movies, you got to get a move on.” Then she stood at the window and watched the three of them, under Richard’s umbrella, walking away from her. Twelve years. She had been twenty-one, he had been twenty-five; it was the middle of the war. She eventually ended up in San Francisco and got paid for hanging around a shipyard. She could have done better, but she hadn’t cared. She was simply waiting for the war to be over and for Richard to be home. He ended up in a quartermaster depot in North Africa where he had spent most of his time, as far as she could gather, defending Arab shoeshine boys and beggars against the cynical and malicious French. She was in the kitchen, mixing batter for a cake, when Richard came back. He put his head in the kitchen door, water running from the end of his nose. “How’re you feeling now?” She laughed. “Gloomier than ever. I’m baking a cake.” “That’s a terrible sign. I can see there’s not much hope for you.” He grabbed one of the dish towels and mopped his face. “What happened to the umbrella?” “I left it with the boys.” “Oh, Richard, it’s so big. Can Paul handle that?” “No, of course not,” he said. “The umbrella’s going to get caught in a high wind and they’ll be carried away over the rooftops and we’ll never see them again.” He winked. “That’s why I gave it to them. I’m not so dumb.” He walked into his study and closed the door. She put the cake in the oven, peeled potatoes and carrots and left them in the water and calculated the time it would take for the roast beef. She had changed her clothes and set the cake out to cool when the bell rang. It was Vivaldo. He was wearing a black raincoat and his hair was wild and dripping from the rain. His eyes seemed blacker than ever, and his face paler. “Heathcliff!” she cried, “how nice you could come!”—and pulled him into the apartment, for it did not seem that he was going to move. “Put those wet things in the bathroom and I’ll make you a drink.” “What a bright girl you are,” he said, barely smiling. “Christ, it’s pissing out there!” He took off his coat and disappeared into the bathroom. She went to the study door and knocked on it. “Richard. Vivaldo’s here.” “Okay. I’ll be right out.” She made two drinks and brought them into the living room. Vivaldo sat on the sofa, his long legs stretched before him, staring at the carpet.

• From Another Country (1962)

  The sun surrounded her golden hair which was piled on top of her head and fell over her brow in girlish, somewhat too artless and incongruous curls. This was meant to soften a face, the principal quality of which had always been a spare, fragile boniness. There was a fine crisscross of wrinkles now around the large eyes; the sun revealed that she was wearing a little too much make-up. This, and something indefinably sorrowful in the line of her mouth and jaw, as she stood silently at the bar, looking down, made Eric feel that Cass was beginning to fade, to become brittle. Something icy had touched her. “Do you want gin or vodka or bourbon or Scotch or beer? or tequila?” She looked up, smiling. Though the smile was genuine, it was weary. It did not contain the mischievous delight that he remembered. And there were tiny lines now around her neck, which he had never noticed before. We’re getting old, he thought, and it damn sure didn’t take long. “I think I’d better stick to whiskey. I get too drunk too fast on gin—and I don’t know what this evening holds.” “Ah,” she said, “farsighted Eric! And what kind of whiskey?” “In Paris, when we order whiskey—which, for a very long time, I didn’t dare to do—we always mean Scotch.” “You loved Paris, didn’t you? You must have, you were gone so long. Tell me about it.” She made two drinks and came and sat beside him. From far away, he heard the muffled cling! of a typewriter bell. It’s a long old road, Bessie sang, but I’m going to find an end. “It doesn’t seem so long,” he said, “now that I’m back.” He felt very shy now, for when Cass said You loved Paris he at once thought, Yves is there. “It’s a great city, Paris, a beautiful city—and—it was very good for me.” “I see that. You seem much happier. There’s a kind of light around you.” She said this very directly, with a rueful, conspiratorial smile: as though she knew the cause of his happiness, and rejoiced for him. He dropped his eyes, but raised them again. “It’s just the sun,” he said, and they both laughed. Then, irrepressibly, “I was very happy there, though.” “Well, you didn’t leave because you weren’t happy there any more?” “No.” And when I get there, I’m going to shake hands with a friend. “A guy I know who thinks he has great psychic powers”—he sipped his whiskey, smiling—“Frenchman, persuaded me that I’d become a great star if I came home and did this play. And I just haven’t got the guts to go against the stars, to say nothing of arguing with a Frenchman. So.” She laughed. “I didn’t know the French went in for things like that. I thought they were very logical.”

• From Wild (2012)

  “That was different. It was just a phase and you know it,” I said, trying to keep my voice from sounding defensive. There were a lot of reasons I regretted having gotten involved with heroin, but losing credibility with my brother was the thing I regretted the most. “Let’s take a walk,” he said. “What time is it?” I asked. “Who cares?” I followed him back along the trail, past the silent tents and cars and down our driveway to the gravel road that passed our house. The light was soft and tinged with the slightest shade of pink, so beautiful that my exhaustion didn’t matter. Without discussing it, we walked to the abandoned house a short way down the road beyond our driveway, where we used to go as kids, bored on the long hot summer days before we were old enough to drive. The house had been empty and falling to the ground then. Now it was falling more. “I think her name was Violet, the woman who lived here,” I said to my brother when we mounted the porch, remembering the lore about the house I’d heard from the Finnish old-timers years before. The front door had never been locked and it still wasn’t. We pushed it open and went inside, stepping over places where boards were missing from the floor. The same items that had been scattered around the house a dozen years ago were still there, amazingly, only now they were even more decrepit. I picked up a yellowed magazine and saw that it was published by the Communist Party of Minnesota and dated October 1920. A chipped teacup with pink roses on it sat on its side and I bent to right it. The house was so tiny it took only a few steps to have it all in view. I walked to the back and approached a wooden door that hung diagonally from one hinge, a pane of pristine glass in its top half. “Don’t touch it,” whispered Leif. “Bad karma if it breaks.” We walked carefully past it and into the kitchen. There were gouges and holes and a giant black stain where the stove used to be. In the corner stood a small wooden table that was missing a leg. “Would you carve your name into that?” I asked, gesturing to the table, my voice suddenly flashing with emotion. “Don’t,” said Leif, grabbing my shoulders to give me a firm shake. “Just forget it, Cheryl. It’s reality. And reality is what we have to accept, like it or not.” I nodded and he let go of me. We stood side by side, gazing out the windows to the yard. There was a dilapidated shed that used to be the sauna and a trough that was overrun by weeds and moss now. Beyond it, a wide swampy field gave way to a stand of birch trees in the distance, and beyond that a bog we knew was there but couldn’t see.

• From Another Country (1962)

  By and by they were at peace again, and then they lay there in silence, blue cigarette smoke circling around them in the sunny air, the kitten purring in the sunlight at their feet. Then the sound of Madame Belet in the kitchen told Eric it was time to make tracks. 3 On the Wednesday afternoon that Ida went off to see Ellis, Cass called Vivaldo at the midtown bookshop where he worked and asked if she could buy him a drink when his day was over. The sound of her voice, swift, subdued, and unhappy, had the effect of jolting him out of his own bewilderment. He asked her to pick him up at the shop at six. She arrived at the exact time, wearing a green summer dress which made her look very young, carrying an absurdly large straw handbag. Her hair was pulled back and fell over her shoulders; and, for a moment, watching her push through the doors, both blurred and defined by the heavy sunlight, she looked like the Cass of his adolescence, of years ago. She had then been the most beautiful, the most golden girl on earth. And Richard had been the greatest, most beautiful man. She seemed terribly wound up—seemed to blaze, nearly, with some private, barely contained passion. She smiled at him, looking both young and weary; and for a moment he was faintly aware of her personal heat, her odor. “How are you, Vivaldo? It’s been rather a while since we’ve seen each other.” “I guess it has. And it’s been my fault. How are things with you? ” She shrugged humorously, raising her hands like a child. “Oh. Up and down.” Then, after a moment, “Rather down right now.” She looked around the store. People were peering into bookshelves rather the way children peered in at the glass-enclosed fish in the aquarium. “Are you free? Can we leave now?” “Yes. I was just waiting for you.” He said good night to his employer and they walked into the scalding streets. They were in the Fifties, on the East Side. “Where shall we have this drink?” “I don’t care. Someplace with air conditioning. And without a TV set. I couldn’t care less about baseball.” They started walking uptown, and east, as though each wished to get as far away as possible from the world they knew and their responsibilities in it. The presence of others, walking past them, walking toward them, erupting rudely out of doorways and taxicabs, and springing up from the curbs, intruded painfully on their stillness and seemed to menace their connection. And each man or woman that passed seemed also to be carrying some intolerable burden; their private lives screamed from their hot and discontented faces. “On days like this,” Cass said, suddenly, “I remember what it was like—I think I remember—to be young, very young.”

• From Another Country (1962)

  He did not know what to say. “She’s something like her brother, huh?” “I wouldn’t say that. Yes and no.” Briefly: “You’ll see.” This brought them to another silence, and, after a few seconds, they hung up. He entered their building, stepped into the elevator, and told the elevator man where he was going. He had forgotten the style of American elevator men, but now it came back to him. The elevator man, without a surly word, slammed the elevator gates shut and drove the car upward. The nature of his silence conveyed his disapproval of the Silenskis and all their friends and his vivid sense of being as good as they. He rang the bell. Cass opened the door at once, looking as bright as the bright day. “Eric!” She looked him over with the affectionate mockery he now remembered. “How nice you look with your hair so short!” “How nice,” he returned, smiling, “you look with yours so long. Or was it always long. It’s that kind of thing a long absence makes you forget.” “Let me look at you.” She pulled him into the apartment and closed the door. “You really look wonderful. Welcome home.” She leaned forward suddenly and kissed him on the cheek. “Is that the way they do it in Paris?” “You have to kiss me on both cheeks,” he said, gravely. “Oh.” She seemed slightly embarrassed but kissed him again. “Is that better?” “Much,” he said. Then, “Where is everybody?” For the large living room was empty, and filled with the sound of the blues. It was the voice of a colored woman, the voice of Bessie Smith, and it hurled him, with violence, into the hot center of his past: It’s raining and it’s storming on the sea. I feel like somebody has shipwrecked poor me. For a moment Cass looked as though she were sardonically echoing his question. She crossed the room and lowered the volume of the music slightly. “The children are over in the park with some friends of theirs. Richard’s in his study, working. But they should all be appearing almost any moment now.” “Oh,” he said, “then I’m early. I’m sorry.” “You aren’t early, you’re on time. And I’m glad. I was hoping to have a chance to talk to you alone before we go down to this jam session.” “You’ve got a pretty agreeable jam session going on right now,” he said. Cass went over to the bar, and he threw himself down on the sofa. “It’s mighty nice and cool in here. It’s awful outside. I’d forgotten how hot New York could be.” The large windows were open and the water stretched beyond the windows, very bright and peaceful, but murkier than the Mediterranean.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  But an old, sepia-toned photograph on the bookshelf spoke most eloquently of their roots. It showed Toot’s grandparents, of Scottish and English stock, standing in front of a ramshackle homestead, unsmiling and dressed in coarse wool, their eyes squinting at the sun-baked, flinty life that stretched out before them. Theirs were the faces of American Gothic, the WASP bloodline’s poorer cousins, and in their eyes one could see truths that I would have to learn later as facts: that Kansas had entered the Union free only after a violent precursor to the Civil War, the battle in which John Brown’s sword tasted first blood; that while one of my great-great-grandfathers, Christopher Columbus Clark, had been a decorated Union soldier, his wife’s mother was rumored to have been a second cousin of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy; that although another distant ancestor had indeed been a full-blooded Cherokee, such lineage was a source of considerable shame to Toot’s mother, who blanched whenever someone mentioned the subject and hoped to carry the secret to her grave. That was the world in which my grandparents had been raised, the dab-smack, landlocked center of the country, a place where decency and endurance and the pioneer spirit were joined at the hip with conformity and suspicion and the potential for unblinking cruelty. They had grown up less than twenty miles away from each other—my grandmother in Augusta, my grandfather in El Dorado, towns too small to warrant boldface on a road map—and the childhoods they liked to recall for my benefit portrayed small-town, Depression-era America in all its innocent glory: Fourth of July parades and the picture shows on the side of a barn; fireflies in a jar and the taste of vine-ripe tomatoes, sweet as apples; dust storms and hailstorms and classrooms filled with farm boys who got sewn into their woolen underwear at the beginning of winter and stank like pigs as the months wore on. Even the trauma of bank failures and farm foreclosures seemed romantic when spun through the loom of my grandparents’ memories, a time when hardship, the great leveler that had brought people closer together, was shared by all. So you had to listen carefully to recognize the subtle hierarchies and unspoken codes that had policed their early lives, the distinctions of people who don’t have a lot and live in the middle of nowhere. It had to do with something called respectability—there were respectable people and not-so-respectable people—and although you didn’t have to be rich to be respectable, you sure had to work harder at it if you weren’t.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  But life in London was very different. There I often passed churches that had been converted into warehouses, theaters, or art galleries. I even went to a dinner party in a flat that was cunningly constructed in the shell of a massive Victorian church: we sat under its rose window. None of the guests felt in the least uncomfortable about this sacred ambience; the ecclesiastical touches had simply been an amusing talking point. They had found it hilarious to ring the front-door bell and enter what had once been the church porch. Religion, it appeared, was quite risible. I noticed that I myself was reducing my convent past to a series of entertaining anecdotes. Hostesses often introduced me as an ex-nun, as though pulling a rabbit out of a hat: Look what I’ve got! Top that! My fellow guests might look faintly scandalized—“Do people truly do that anymore!”—or would ply me with endless questions about nuns’ underwear or convent hygiene. It did not usually occur to them that the religious life could be anything other than a joke. “You really should write all this up, Karen,” they would say. “It’s such a hoot!” I was uncomfortable about this but did not know what to do. Rebecca told me that she tried to hide the fact that she had been a nun, and would ask her hostesses not to mention it. But that didn’t seem right either. I didn’t want to make those years a dark secret. After all, I hadn’t robbed a bank or been in prison. But neither did I want to get unduly heavy and ruin the party. Despite all my negative feelings about religion, I still felt protective about the nuns, and still felt sorrow and regret for a lost ideal. I still mourned the girl I had been, with her sense of high adventure, the hope and the crazy optimism that had led me into the religious life. None of this was suitable conversational fodder for a dinner party. So it was really easier to fob my guests off with a couple of funny stories and leave it at that. I realized that I scarcely knew anybody who was religious these days. There were one or two churchgoers at college, but they were not soul mates and I didn’t see much of them. It was odd to think how completely my life had changed. Just five years earlier I had been enveloped in a monastic atmosphere, and now I had swung a full 180 degrees and was living in a wholly secular environment.

• From Dante's Divine Comedy (2001)

  ©2001 The Teaching Company. 71 4. Dante is invoking the Virgilian virtue of pietas, looking to the past to receive guidance for how he should act in the future. II. In Canto 15, Cacciaguida provides a description of the early history of Florence, when division and corruption were all but unknown. A. Cacciaguida’s Florence, unlike the strife-torn Florence of Dante’s time, was small and had a sense of unity. B. The growth of Florence caused political problems. Luxury, vice, and feuding all increased. C. Cacciaguida describes a different moral climate, in which people lived more simply and modestly and in which both parents were present and involved in child rearing. D. Even the Florentine street plan reflected this simplicity. In Cacciaguida’s day, it was rectilinear. In Dante’s time, the welter of streets bespeaks chaos and greed. E. Political exile was not yet a reality. F. Cacciaguida’s own life, as a crusader who dies in the Holy Land, should be seen in relation to this community. 1. His very name means “hunting guide,” a significant etymology given that he guides Dante on a hunt, or quest, of the spirit. 2. Cacciaguida joined the Second Crusade (1147–1148), preached by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux and led by the Emperor Conrad. III. In Canto 16, Cacciaguida continues the history of Florence, bringing it from his own time to that of Dante. A. Cacciaguida’s history causes Dante to reflect on pride of ancestry at the beginning of the canto (cf. Inferno 10 and Dante’s exchange with Farinata). B. But Dante now realizes, and Farinata never will, that nobility is not just an inert “cloak” in which to wrap oneself, but something that one must add to actively. C. The canto ends with a symbol of the change from the original purity of Florence to its present degeneration. D. Much of this account describes the Guelf-Ghibelline feud as it developed in Florence.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  It all looked so peaceful: the sunlit lawns, the nineteenth-century school buildings, the old tower, the noviceship. We came to a halt before the front door. “How does it feel to be back?” Rebecca asked me. I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I said. But in fact, even after the disturbing revelations in the car, as soon as I stepped inside, something within me relaxed. In a strange way, it did feel like home. I could smell the polish, which we had made ourselves out of melted candle stubs. I could see the gleaming rust-and-gold tiles stretching ahead across the large courtyard near the front door, which I must have swept a hundred times. I looked at the huge crucifix on the wall. A bell clanged in the distance, a special signal to summon one of the nuns. Instinctively I counted the strokes: three clangs, then a pause, and then two further beats. Not my bell, then. But, I remembered, I didn’t have a bell anymore, because I didn’t belong. At the far end of the courtyard was the heavy enclosure door. If I opened it, I knew exactly what I would see: the cloister reaching far into the distance, the deep window embrasures, the double doors of the refectory, and at the corner, the pietà, a life-sized statue of Mary holding the dead Christ. But, of course, I was a secular, and the enclosure was barred to me now. Time and again during the next twenty-four hours, I felt caught up in a world that was so familiar that I responded automatically, as though I were still a member of the community: strolling with Rebecca down the country lanes, where we had walked almost every day for three years, frightening courting couples out of their wits when they saw this weird crocodile of nuns bearing down upon them; waking at night to hear the clock of the nearby Anglican church chime every quarter; laying down my book or coffee cup at the first sound of the bell that called the nuns to prayer. I felt drawn toward the old routine. And it was all so restful. The confusions of the outside world receded, and I felt strangely at peace. And yet in other ways the convent was simply not the same. The old hushed silence had gone. Nuns stood in groups, chatting and laughing— sometimes quite loudly. They wore short utilitarian skirts and flighty little veils. Doors closed noisily, and the younger nuns often swung their arms as they walked with defiant casual-ness. Even in church there was a new restlessness. In the old habit you had to kneel perfectly still or the veil fell over your shoulders like a tent and your legs tangled and twisted the voluminous skirts. I had no romantic regrets about the old habit.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  “You know about the night runners, then! Yes, they are very powerful in the darkness. There used to be many in our area, back home. It was said they walked with the hippos at night. I remember once—” As suddenly as they had died, the light bulbs popped back on. Rukia blew out the candles and shook her head. “Alas, in the city the lights do come on eventually. My daughter, she has no use for night runners. You know, her first language is not Luo. Not even Swahili. It is English. When I listen to her talk with her friends, it sounds like gibberish to me. They take bits and pieces of everything—English, Swahili, German, Luo. Sometimes, I get fed up with this. Learn to speak one language properly, I tell them.” Rukia laughed to herself. “But I am beginning to resign myself—there’s nothing really to do. They live in a mixed-up world. It’s just as well, I suppose. In the end, I’m less interested in a daughter who’s authentically African than one who is authentically herself.” It was getting late; we thanked Rukia for her hospitality and went on our way. But her words would stay with me, bringing into focus my own memories, my own lingering questions. On the last weekend of my stay, Auma and I took the train to the coast and stayed at an old beachfront hotel in Mombasa that had once been a favorite of the Old Man’s. It was a modest, clean place, in August filled mostly with German tourists and American sailors on shore leave. We didn’t do much, just read and swam and walked along the beach, watching pale crabs scurry like ghosts into their sandy holes. The following day we visited Mombasa’s Old Town and climbed the worn stairs of Fort Jesus, first built by the Portuguese to consolidate control of trade routes along the Indian Ocean, later overrun by the swift Omani fleets, later still a beachhead for the British as they moved inland in search of ivory and gold, now an empty casing of stone, its massive walls peeling like papier-mâché in strips of pale orange and green and rose, its dormant cannons pointing out to a tranquil sea where a lone fisherman cast out his net. On the way back to Nairobi, Auma and I decided to splurge, buying tickets on a bus line that actually assigned seats. The feeling of luxury was short-lived; my knees were pinched by a passenger who wanted his money’s worth from the reclining seats, and a sudden rainstorm sent water streaming through leaks in the roof, which we tried—unsuccessfully—to plug up with tissue.

• From Wild (2012)

  When we were done with the wine, I went to Monster and pulled out the ziplock bag that held my books. “You need something to read?” I asked Doug, holding The Ten Thousand Things up to him, but he shook his head. I’d finished it a few days before, though I hadn’t been able to burn it because of the rain. Unlike most of the other books I’d read on my hike, I’d already read The Ten Thousand Things when I’d packed it into my resupply box months before. A densely lyrical novel set on the Moluccan Islands in Indonesia, it had been written in Dutch and published to critical acclaim in 1955, but mostly forgotten now. I’d never met anyone who’d read the book, aside from the college writing professor who’d assigned it to me in the fiction workshop I was enrolled in when my mother got sick. The title hadn’t been lost on me as I’d sat dutifully reading it in my mother’s hospital room, attempting to shut out my fear and sorrow by forcing my mind to focus on passages I hoped to refer to in the following week’s class discussion, but it was useless. I couldn’t think of anything but my mom. Besides, I already knew about the ten thousand things. They were all the named and unnamed things in the world and together they added up to less than how much my mother loved me. And me her. So when I was packing for the PCT, I’d decided to give the book another chance. I hadn’t had any trouble focusing this time. From the very first page, I understood. Each of Dermoût’s sentences came at me like a soft knowing dagger, depicting a far-off land that felt to me like the blood of all the places I used to love. “I think I’m going to turn in,” said Doug, holding the empty bottle of wine. “Tom’ll probably catch up to us tomorrow.” “I’ll put the fire out,” I said.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Was it some rookery, where you must sleep ten to a bed with your sisters?’‘A rookery?’ I thought very suddenly, and more vividly than I had in months, of our old front parlour at home - of the cloth with the fringe that dangled, fluttering, above the hearth. I said, ‘I was born in Kent, in Whitstable.’ Maria only stared. I said again, ‘Whitstable - where the oysters come from.’At that, she threw back her head. ‘Why my dear, you’re a mermaid! Diana, did you know it? A Whitstable mermaid ! - though thankfully,’ and here she placed her free hand upon my knee, and patted it, ‘thankfully, without the tail. That would never do, now would it?’I could not answer. Hot into my head after the image of our parlour had come the memory of Kitty, at her dressing-room door. Miss Mermaid, she had called me; and she had said it again that time in Stamford Hill, when she had heard me weeping, come, and kissed my tears ...I gave a gulp, and put my cigarette to my lips. It was smoked right down and almost burned me; and as I fumbled with it, it fell. It struck the sofa, bounced, then rolled between my legs. I reached for it - that made the ladies stare again, and twitch - but it was caught, still smouldering, between my buttock and the chair. I leapt up, found the fag at last, then pulled at the linen that covered my bum. I said, ‘Hell, if I haven’t scorched a hole through these dam’ trousers!’The words came out louder than I meant them to; and as they did, there was an answering cry from the room at my back: ‘Really, Mrs Lethaby, this is intolerable!’ A lady had risen, and was approaching our table.‘I must protest, Mrs Lethaby,’ she said when she arrived at it, ‘I really must protest, on behalf of all the ladies present, and absent, at the very great damage you are inflicting upon our club!’Diana raised languid eyes to her. ‘Damage, Miss Bruce? Are you referring to the presence of my companion, Miss King?’‘I am, ma’am.’‘You don’t care for her?’‘I don’t care for her language, ma’am, or for her clothes!’ She herself wore a silk shirt with a cummerbund and a cravat; in the cravat there was a pin, cast in silver, of the head of a horse. Now she stood expectantly at Diana’s side; and after a moment, Diana sighed.‘Well,’ she said. ‘I see we must bow to the members’ pleasure.’ She rose, then drew me up beside her and leaned rather ostentatiously upon my arm. ‘Nancy, dear, you costume has proved too bold for the Cavendish after all.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  Today the child and I finished the hearth-stone of the house together, quietly talking as we worked. I talk to her as I would to myself if I were alone; she answers in an heroic language of her own invention. We buried the rings Cohen bought for Melissa in the ground under the hearth-stone, according to the custom of this island. This will ensure good luck to the inmates of the house. * * * * * At the time when I met Justine I was almost a happy man. A door had suddenly opened upon an intimacy with Melissa — an intimacy not the less marvellous for being unexpected and totally undeserved. Like all egoists I cannot bear to live alone; and truly the last year of bachelorhood had sickened me — my domestic inadequacy, my hopelessness over clothes and food and money, had all reduced me to despair. I had sickened too of the cockroach-haunted rooms where I then lived, looked after by one-eyed Hamid, the Berber servant. Melissa had penetrated my shabby defences not by any of the qualities one might enumerate in a lover — charm, exceptional beauty, intelligence — no, but by the force of what I can only call her charity, in the Greek sense of the word. I used to see her, I remember, pale, rather on the slender side, dressed in a shabby sealskin coat, leading her small dog about the winter streets. Her blue-veined phthisic hands, etc. Her eyebrows artificially pointed upwards to enhance those fine dauntlessly candid eyes. I saw her daily for many months on end, but her sullen aniline beauty awoke no response in me. Day after day I passed her on my way to the Café Al Aktar where Balthazar waited for me in his black hat to give me ‘instruction’. I did not dream that I should ever become her lover. I knew that she had once been a model at the Atelier — an unenviable job — and was now a dancer; more, that she was the mistress of an elderly furrier, a gross and vulgar commercial of the city. I simply make these few notes to record a block of my life which has fallen into the sea. Melissa! Melissa! * * * * * I am thinking back to the time when for the four of us the known world hardly existed; days became simply the spaces between dreams, spaces between the shifting floors of time, of acting, of living out the topical.… A tide of meaningless affairs nosing along the dead level of things, entering no climate, leading us nowhere, demanding of us nothing save the impossible — that we should be. Justine would say that we had been trapped in the projection of a will too powerful and too deliberate to be human — the gravitational field which Alexandria threw down about those it had chosen as its exemplars.… * * * * *

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  I had to come here in order completely to rebuild this city in my brain — melancholy provinces which the old man* saw as full of the ‘black ruins’ of his life. Clang of the trams shuddering in their metal veins as they pierce the iodine-coloured meidan of Mazarita. Gold, phosphorus, magnesium paper. Here we so often met. There was a little coloured stall in summer with slices of water-melon and the vivid water-ices she liked to eat. She would come a few minutes late of course — fresh perhaps from some assignation in a darkened room, from which I avert my mind; but so fresh, so young, the open petal of the mouth that fell upon mine like an unslaked summer. The man she had left might still be going over and over the memory of her; she might be as if still dusted by the pollen of his kisses. Melissa! It mattered so little somehow, feeling the lithe weight of the creature as she leaned on one’s arm smiling with the selfless candour of those who had given over with secrets. It was good to stand there, awkward and a little shy, breathing quickly because we knew what we wanted of each other. The messages passing beyond conscience, directly through the flesh-lips, eyes, water-ices, the coloured stall. To stand lightly there, our little fingers linked, drinking in the deep camphor-scented afternoon, a part of city.… * * * * * I have been looking through my papers tonight. Some have been converted to kitchen uses, some the child has destroyed. This form of censorship pleases me for it has the indifference of the natural world to the constructions of art — an indifference I am beginning to share. After all, what is the good of a fine metaphor for Melissa when she lies buried deep as any mummy in the shallow tepid sand of the black estuary? But those papers I guard with care are the three volumes in which Justine kept her diary, as well as the folio which records Nessim’s madness. Nessim noticed them when I was leaving and nodded as he said: ‘Take these, yes, read them. There is much about us all in them. They should help you to support the idea of Justine without flinching, as I have had to do.’ This was at the Summer Palace after Melissa’s death, when he still believed Justine would return to him. I think often, and never without a certain fear, of Nessim’s love for Justine. What could be more comprehensive, more surely founded in itself? It coloured his unhappiness with a kind of ecstasy, the joyful wounds which you’d think to meet in saints and not in mere lovers. Yet one touch of humour would have saved him from such dreadful comprehensive suffering. It is easy to criticize, I know. I know. * * * * *