Nostalgia

Passages

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

Page 20 of 45 · 20 per page

• From Best Erotic Romance

  We talked about our jobs and the kids and the books we were reading. Last year, out of the blue, after years of comfortable correspondence, she sent me a Facebook invitation. The moment I realized what a “friends” list was, I knew my days of peaceful isolation were over. “Oh, sweetie, I’ve missed you so! May I please be a FB friend?” This from the woman who’d watched my son while I was in labor with Melissa. “Hey, toots! It’s good to see you!” From Janelle’s Chris, who’d helped Jerry rebuild motorcycles and later on carried his body back, though I hadn’t found out about that until Melissa was in high school. Greetings and welcomes. So many friends, so much quiet acceptance. And some conspicuous absences. I didn’t ask about those. The guys had all been adrenaline junkies, and several had planned to make careers of the military. There had been so many conflicts in the intervening years. I didn’t want to know. Even with the online reunions, I told myself I was going to keep concentrating only on the present. To make my point, I used a real profile picture—then was surprised that several others had, too. With a jolt, I realized their lives allowed that now. They’d moved on as well. Eric had a cartoon character for his profile picture. “I miss you.” His friend request caught me off guard, though in retrospect, I’d been half-expecting it. I could almost hear the warm burr of his voice as I clicked Accept. We’d always had an easy friendship. And if I was honest with myself, I had to admit he’d been easy on the eyes. Eric was tall and slender, with dark blond curls and dancing blue eyes. He was usually laughing, he didn’t understand the concept of “subtle,” and he had the most gorgeously pinchable butt. Not that I’d ever pinched him, but Janelle and the other girls sure had. There’d been a few times I’d been ticked at Jerry and wondered “what if” I hadn’t been married, and if Eric hadn’t had that constant string of girlfriends. But, hell, my fantasies had never gone beyond innocent daydreams. I wondered what Eric looked like now. Sharing status updates segued into private messages. I was surprised to hear he’d never married. He’d known through Janelle that I was still single, but he said he was surprised that even my occasional dating had never gotten particularly serious. “The kids were around.” My face heated as I typed. “I didn’t want to set a bad example by staying out all night with someone they knew I didn’t care that much about.” I could almost hear Eric’s low chuckle, see his eyebrows rise as he looked knowingly at his computer screen. “Are the kids there now?” He knew they weren’t. As always, he kept things light and friendly.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  I remember the table. I remember the table made of words given to me from your mouth. I remember the room burning. The room was burning because Lan spoke of fire. I remember the fire as it was told to me in the apartment in Hartford, all of us asleep on the hardwood floor, swaddled in blankets from the Salvation Army. I remember the man from the Salvation Army handing my father a stack of coupons for Kentucky Fried Chicken, which we called Old-Man Chicken (Colonel Sanders’s face was plastered on every red bucket). I remember tearing into the crispy meat and oil like it was a gift from saints. I remember learning that saints were only people whose pain was notable, noted. I remember thinking you and Lan should be saints. “Remember,” you said each morning before we stepped out in cold Connecticut air, “don’t draw attention to yourself. You’re already Vietnamese.” — It’s the first day of August and the sky’s clear over central Virginia, now thick with summer’s growth. We’re visiting Grandpa Paul to celebrate my graduating college the spring before. We’re in the garden. The first colors of evening fall upon the wooden fence and everything ambers, as if we’re in a snowglobe filled with tea. You’re in front of me, walking away, toward the far fence, your pink shirt shifting in and out of the shade. It catches, then loses the shadows under the oaks. — I remember my father, which is to say I am putting him back together. I am putting him together in a room because there must have been a room. There must have been a square in which a life would occur, briefly, with or without joy. I remember joy. It was the sound of coins in a brown paper bag: his wages after a day scaling fish at the Chinese market on Cortland. I remember the coins spilling onto the floor, how we ran our fingers through the cold pieces, inhaling their copper promise. How we thought we were rich. How the thought of being rich was a kind of happiness. I remember the table. How it must have been made of wood. — The garden is so lush it seems to pulse in the weak light. Vegetation fills every inch of it, tomato vines robust enough to hide the chicken wire they lean on, wheatgrass and kale crowded in galvanized tubs the size of canoes. The flowers I know now by name: magnolias, asters, poppies, marigolds, baby’s breath—all of it, every shade equalized by dusk. What are we if not what the light says we are? Your pink shirt glows ahead of me. Crouched, your back poised as you study something on the ground between your feet. You brush your hair behind your ears, pause, study it closer. Only the seconds move between us.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  to the past as your only anchor. And as you age, and more and more young people occupy the public stage, you narrow your audience. It is not that you should abandon the spirit that marked you, a rather impossible task anyway. Trying to ape the styles of the younger generation will only make you seem ludicrous and inauthentic. What you want is to modernize your spirit, to possibly adopt some of the values and ideas of the younger generation that appeal to you, gaining a new and wider audience by blending your experience and perspective with the changes going on, making yourself into an unusual and appealing hybrid. For the film director Alfred Hitchcock, the decade that shaped him and his work was the 1920s, when he entered the industry and became a director. What mattered most in these silent films was perfecting a visual language for telling a story. Hitchcock mastered the art of using camera angles and movement to make the audience feel as if it were in the middle of the story. He never abandoned this obsession with visual language throughout the six decades he worked as a director, but he continually adapted his style—to the color spectacles so much in vogue in the 1950s and to the popular thrillers and horror films of the sixties and seventies. Unlike other aging film directors, who either fell completely out of fashion or simply tried to mimic the current style, Hitchcock created a hybrid of the past and the present. This gave his later films tremendous depth, as he had incorporated all of the adaptations from earlier in his career. His films could have mass appeal, but they were made unique by these layers of innovations embedded in the film. Such depth will always have an uncanny effect on any audience, as your work seems beyond time itself. The Human Beyond Time and Death We humans are masters of transforming whatever we get our hands on. We have completely transformed the environment of the planet Earth to suit our purposes. We have transformed ourselves from a physically weak species into the preeminent and most powerful social animal, effectively enlarging and rewiring our brains as we did so. We are restless and endlessly inventive. But one area seems to defy our transformational powers—time itself. We are born and enter the stream of life, and each day it carries us closer to death. Time is linear, always advancing, and there is nothing we can do to stop its course. We move through the various phases of life, which mark us according to patterns beyond our control. Our bodies and minds slow down and lose their youthful elasticity. We watch helplessly as more and more young people fill the stage of life, pushing us to the side. We are born into a period of history and into a generation that are not of our choice and that seem to determine so much of who we are

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  We passed the tenement building on New Britain Ave. where we lived for three years. Where I rode my pink bike with training wheels up and down the linoleum halls so the kids on the block wouldn’t beat me up for loving a pink thing. I must’ve ridden down those halls a hundred times a day, the little bell clinking as I hit the wall at each end. How Mr. Carlton, the man who lived in the last apartment, kept coming out and yelling at me each day, saying, “Who are you? What are you doing here? Why don’t you do that outside? Who are you? You’re not my daughter! You’re not Destiny! Who are you?” But all that, the whole building, is gone now—replaced by a YMCA—even the tenement parking lot (where nobody parked since no one had cars), busted through with weeds nearly four feet high, is gone, all of it bulldozed and turned into a community garden with scarecrows made from mannequins thrown out by the dollar store off Bushnell. Entire families are swimming and playing handball where we used to sleep. People are doing butterfly strokes where Mr. Carlton eventually died, alone, in his bed. How no one knew for weeks until the whole floor started to reek and the SWAT team (I don’t know why) had to come bust down the door with guns. How for a whole month Mr. Carlton’s things were left out in a big iron dumpster out back, and a wooden hand-painted pony, its tongue-lolled face, peeked out of the dumpster’s top in the rain. Trevor and I kept riding, past Church St. where Big Joe’s sister OD’d, then the parking lot behind the MEGA XXXLOVE DEPOT where Sasha OD’d, the park where Jake and B-Rab OD’d. Except B-Rab lived, only to be caught, years later, stealing laptops from Trinity College and got four years in county—no parole. Which was heavy, especially for a white kid from the suburbs. There was Nacho, who lost his right leg in the Gulf War and whom you could find on weekends sliding under jack-raised cars with a skateboard at the Maybelle Auto Repair where he worked. Where he once pulled a beautiful screaming red-faced baby from the trunk of a Nissan left in the back of the shop during a blizzard. How he let his crutches fall and cradled the baby with both hands and the air held him up for the first time in years as the snow came down, then rose back up from the ground so bright that, for a blurred merciful hour, everyone in the city forgot why they were trying to get out of it.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  I saw life in the country change, too. When the big wineries took over the flat land, it got harder to keep the little family vineyards on the hills alive. The call of the cities lured people to work and shop.” I smiled. “I always thought country life didn’t change much.” Ruth laughed gently. ““That’s the view from the city.” “T know how it felt to grow up in Buffalo. But it must have been hard growing up in such a small place.” I wondered if what I'd said sounded too personal. Ruth sighed and leaned back in her chair. “I don’t know if it was hard. I just know it wasn’t easy. I'd be surprised if the population of the whole valley is more than two hundred. But in a way, I think that’s why I survived. We didn’t have outside help for the vineyards—we all had to rely on each other. So those old bonds of cooperation weren’t completely broken. I had a place there. But if I hadn’t left I would never 274 = Leslie Feinberg have discovered Miles Davis, and my hair might always have been brown as dirt.” Ruth got up and spooned soft rhubarb into a dish, then crumbled brown sugar over it. I slipped a spoonful into my mouth and sighed. “I had forgotten about taste.” She frowned. “What do you mean?” “Oh, I eat just because I’m hungry. Fast food, take-out. I don’t really taste it. But this tastes so good it makes me want to cry.” Ruth nodded without smiling. “I cook for my own pleasure. I enjoy the preparing as much as the eating,” I shrugged. “I’m not really set up to cook.” She leaned forward. “This is very personal. You don’t have to answer, but why don’t you have curtains?” “Well, my apartment is just where I sleep.” Ruth shook her head. “That’s strange to me. I really live here.” “It’s different working nights.” I made excuses. “T just crash when I get home. Besides, I lost everything in a fire last summer. I had really cared about fixing that place up and making a home out of it. Now I don’t want to care.” Ruth pursed her lips. “You mean if you don’t have anything you care about, then you won’t have anything to lose?” I nodded. “Yeah, something like that.” Ruth looked at me wistfully. “Then I guess everything’s already been taken from you. You’ve nothing left to lose, have your” I didn’t know why she had finally decided to invite me in, but suddenly I felt stripped and vulnerable. So I took a last swig of coffee, and the last tart mouthful of rhubarb, and stood up to go. “Thank you,” I told her. “That was a treat.” Ruth saw me to the door. “I go to the farmet’s market at Union Square today. Can I get you anything?”

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  of a younger generation, not as a parent or authority figure but as a peer. You allow yourself to absorb their spirit, their different way of thinking, and their enthusiasm. You approach them with the idea that they have something to teach you. In interacting on a more authentic level with those of different generations, you are creating a unique bond—that of people alive at the same time in history. This will only enhance your grasp of the zeitgeist. Past generations: When we think about history, we tend to render the past into a kind of dead and spiritless caricature. Perhaps we feel smug and superior to past eras, and so we focus on those aspects of history that indicate backward ideas and values (not realizing that future generations will do the same to us), seeing what we want to see. Or we project onto the past the ideas and values of the present, which have little relation to how those of the past experienced the world. We drain away their own generational perspective, something we see most obviously in filmed versions of history, where people talk and act just like us, only in costumes. Or we simply ignore history, imagining it has no relevance to our present experience. We must rid ourselves of such absurd notions and habits. We are not as superior to those in the past as we like to imagine (see previous chapters on irrationality, shortsightedness, envy, grandiosity, conformity, and aggression). There are cultural moments in history that were superior to our own when it comes to participatory democracy, or creative thinking, or cultural liveliness. There are periods in the past in which people had a deeper grasp of human psychology and a bracing realism that would make us look quite deluded by comparison. Although human nature remains a constant, those in the past faced different circumstances with different levels of technology and had values and beliefs quite different from our own, and not necessarily inferior. They had the values that reflected their different circumstances, and we would have shared them as well. Most important of all, however, we must understand that the past is by no means dead. We do not emerge in life as blank slates, divorced from millions of years of evolution. All that we think and experience, our most intimate thoughts and beliefs, are shaped by the struggles of past generations. So many ways we relate to the world now came from changes in thinking long ago. Whenever we see people who completely sacrifice everything for some cause, they are reliving a shift in values initiated by the early Christians of the first century, who revolutionized our way of thinking by devoting all aspects of life to some ideal. Whenever we fall in love and idealize the beloved, we are reliving the emotions that the troubadours of the twelfth century introduced into the Western world, a sentiment that had never existed before. Whenever we extol emotions and spontaneity over the intellect

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  a point of lessening the influence of the group on us and not being so fixated on what others are thinking and doing. We can make ourselves more inwardly directed, more in harmony with our uniqueness (see chapter 13 for more on this). We can consciously develop more of that inner distance that comes naturally with the years, think more deeply about our experiences, learn the lessons from them, and develop a premature wisdom. As we age, we can strive to retain the positive youthful qualities that often fade with the years. For instance, we can regain some of the natural curiosity we had as children by dropping some of the smugness and know-it-all attitude that often come over us as we get older. We keep looking at the world through a fresh framework, questioning our own values and preconceptions, making our minds more fluid and creative in the process. As part of this, we can learn a new skill or study a new field to return us to the joy we once had in learning something new. We can also meditate on some of the more intense experiences in our youth, putting ourselves back in those moments through our imagination, connecting more deeply to who we were. We can feel that youthful intensity return to some degree in our present experiences. Part of the reason we become less gregarious with the years is that we become judgmental and intolerant of people’s quirks, all of which does not enhance our experience of life. We can alter that as well by coming to understand human nature more deeply and accepting people as they are. Aging has a psychological component and can be a self-fulfilling prophecy—we tell ourselves we are slowing down and cannot do or attempt as much as we did in past, and as we act on these thoughts, we intensify the aging process, which makes us depressed and prone to slow down even more. We can see icons in the past like Benjamin Franklin, who went in the opposite direction, continually challenging his mind and body as he aged, and who by all accounts retained the most delightfully childlike and jovial disposition well into his seventies and eighties. Present generations: Your goal here is to be less a product of the times and to gain the ability to transform your relationship to your generation. A key way of doing this is through active associations with people of different generations. If you are younger, you try to interact more with those of older generations. Some of them, who seem to have a spirit you can identify with, you can try to cultivate as mentors and role models. Others you relate to as you would your peers—not feeling superior or inferior but paying deep attention to their values, ideas, and perspectives, helping to widen your own. If you are older, you reverse this by actively interacting with those

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  A swarm of gnats, a veil suspended over no one’s face. Everything here seems to have just finished overflowing, resting, at last, spent and spilled from the summer’s frothing. I walk toward you. — I remember walking with you to the grocery store, my father’s wages in your hands. How, by then, he had beaten you only twice—which meant there was still hope it would be the last. I remember armfuls of Wonder Bread and jars of mayo, how you thought mayo was butter, how in Saigon, butter and white bread were only eaten inside mansions guarded by butlers and steel gates. I remember everyone smiling back at the apartment, mayonnaise sandwiches raised to cracked lips. I remember thinking we lived in a sort of mansion. I remember thinking this was the American Dream as snow crackled against the window and night came, and we lay down to sleep, side by side, limbs tangled as the sirens wailed through the streets, our bellies full of bread and “butter.” — Inside the house, Paul is in the kitchen bent over a bowl of pesto: thick shiny basil leaves, machete-crushed garlic cloves, pine nuts, onions roasted till their gold edges blacken, and the bright scent of lemon zest. His glasses fog as he leans in, struggling to steady his arthritic hand as he pours the steaming pasta over the mixture. A few gentle tosses with two wooden spoons and the bow ties are bathed in a moss-green sauce. The windows in the kitchen sweat, replacing the view of the garden with an empty movie screen. It is time to call the boy and his mother in. But Paul lingers for a while, watches the blank canvas. A man with nothing, finally, in his hands, waiting for everything to start. I remember the table, which is to say I am putting it together. Because someone opened their mouth and built a structure with words and now I am doing the same each time I see my hands and think table, think beginnings. I remember running my fingers along the edges, studying the bolts and washers I created in my mind. I remember crawling underneath, checking for chewed gum, the names of lovers, but finding only bits of dried blood, splinters. I remember this beast with four legs hammered out of a language not yet my own. — A butterfly, pinked by the hour, lands on a blade of sweetgrass, then flits off. The blade twitches once, then stills. The butterfly tumbles the length of the yard, its wings resembling that corner of Toni Morrison’s Sula I dog-eared so many times the tiny ear broke off one morning in New York, fluttered down the liquid winter avenue. It was the part where Eva pours gasoline on her drug-doomed son and lights the match in an act of love and mercy I hope to both be capable of—and never know.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  There’s the upstairs window where, one night when I was little, I woke to a blizzard outside. I was five or six and didn’t know things ended. I thought the snow would continue to the sky’s brim—then beyond, touching god’s fingertips as he dozed in his reading chair, the equations scattered across the floor of his study. That by morning we would all be sealed inside a blue-white stillness and no one would have to leave. Ever. After a while, Lan found me, or rather her voice appeared beside my ear. “Little Dog,” she said as I watched the snow, “you want to hear a story? I tell you a story.” I nodded. “Okay,” she went on, “long ago. One woman hold her daughter, like this,” she squeezed my shoulders, “on a dirt road. This girl, name Rose, yes, like flower. Yes, this girl, her name Rose, that’s my baby. . . . Okay, I hold her, my daughter. Little Dog,” she shakes me, “you know her name? It’s Rose, like flower. Yes, this little girl I hold in dirt road. Nice girl, my baby, red hair. Her name is. . . .” And we went on like that, till the street below glowed white, erasing everything that had a name. — What were we before we were we? We must’ve been standing by the shoulder of a dirt road while the city burned. We must’ve been disappearing, like we are now. Maybe in the next life we’ll meet each other for the first time—believing in everything but the harm we’re capable of. Maybe we’ll be the opposite of buffaloes. We’ll grow wings and spill over the cliff as a generation of monarchs, heading home. Green Apple. Like snow covering the particulars of the city, they will say we never happened, that our survival was a myth. But they’re wrong. You and I, we were real. We laughed knowing joy would tear the stitches from our lips. Remember: The rules, like streets, can only take you to known places. Underneath the grid is a field—it was always there—where to be lost is never to be wrong, but simply more. As a rule, be more. As a rule, I miss you. As a rule, “little” is always smaller than “small.” Don’t ask me why. I’m sorry I don’t call enough. Green Apple. I’m sorry I keep saying How are you? when I really mean Are you happy? If you find yourself trapped inside a dimming world, remember it was always this dark inside the body. Where the heart, like any law, stops only for the living. If you find yourself, then congratulations, your hands are yours to keep. Take a right on Risley. If you forget me, then you’ve gone too far. Turn back. Good luck. Good night. Good lord, Green Apple.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  And I do. Endlessly sing them, that is. Every time I reread this chapter while writing this book, “Voices Carry” was in my head—and my voice—for days afterward. While working on the final draft, I took a break to stand on a beach in Rio de Janeiro watching blue-green waves curl in toward the shore. Around me people were playing soccer and dogs were running into the surf chasing after sticks and the light was amber-soft, and I realized I was singing it. Hush hush, I sang to no one, keep it down now. Dream House as Half CreditWhen I was a child, my father told me that if I ever was struggling to answer a question on a test, I should, instead, write down everything I knew about the topic. I took this advice seriously. Where I had doubt, I’d fill the space with what I remembered, what I knew to be true, what I could say. I waxed poetic on those scenes in a novel I could visualize clearly, instead of striving to evoke the ones I couldn’t. I recorded everything I knew about a particular lab experiment when I couldn’t correctly balance equations on my exam. When I couldn’t explain how particular historical moments shifted the tide of major world events, I wrote down the little stories I did remember. Let it never be said I didn’t try. Dream House as Exercise in StyleIt would make sense if, during the time in the Dream House, your work suffered. Why not? You were miserable; you spent what probably added up to weeks or months of your life crying and snotting and howling in agony. But instead, your creativity explodes. You are brimming with ideas, so many that you sign up for six workshops in your last semester of school. You begin to experiment with fragmentation. Maybe “experiment” is a generous word; you’re really just unable to focus enough to string together a proper plot. Every narrative you write is smashed into pieces and shoved into a constraint, an Oulipian’s wet dream—lists and television episode synopses and one with the scenes shattered and strung backward. You feel like you can jump from one idea to the next, searching for a kind of aggregate meaning. You know that if you break them and reposition them and unravel them and remove their gears you will able to access their truths in a way you couldn’t before. There is so much to be gained from inverting the gestalt. Back up, cross your eyes. Something is there.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  This syndrome has very deep roots in our nature. The earliest recorded example can be found in the Old Testament, in the story of the exodus from Egypt. Chosen by God to bring the Hebrews to the Promised Land, Moses led them into the wilderness, where they would wander for forty years. In Egypt the Hebrews had served as slaves and their lives had been difficult. Once they suffered hardships in the desert, however, they suddenly grew nostalgic for their previous life. Facing starvation, God provided them with manna from heaven, but they could only compare it unfavorably to the delicious melons and cucumbers and meats they had known in Egypt. Not sufficiently excited by God’s other miracles (the parting of the Red Sea, for example), they decided to forge and worship a golden calf, but once Moses punished them for this, they quickly dropped their interest in this new idol. All along the way they griped and complained, giving Moses endless headaches. The men lusted after foreign women; the people kept looking for some new cult to follow. God himself was so irritated by their endless discontent that he barred this entire generation, including Moses, from ever entering the Promised Land. But even after the next generation established itself in the land of milk and honey, the grumbling continued unabated. Whatever they had, they dreamed of something better over the horizon. Closer to home, we can see this syndrome at work in our daily lives. We continually look at other people who seem to have it better than us—their parents were more loving, their careers more exciting, their lives easier. We may be in a perfectly satisfying relationship, but our minds continually wander toward a new person, someone who doesn’t have the very real flaws of our partner, or so we think. We dream of being taken out of our boring life by traveling to some culture that is exotic and where people are just happier than in the grimy city where we live. The moment we have a job, we imagine something better. On a political level, our government is corrupt and we need some real change, perhaps a revolution. In this revolution, we imagine a veritable utopia that replaces the imperfect world we live in. We don’t think of the vast majority of revolutions in history in which the results were more of the same, or something worse.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  In all these cases, if we got closer to the people we envy, to that supposed happy family, to the other man or woman we covet, to the exotic natives in a culture we wish to know, to that better job, to that utopia, we would see through the illusion. And often when we act on these desires, we realize this in our disappointment, but it doesn’t change our behavior. The next object glittering in the distance, the next exotic cult or get-rich-quick scheme will inevitably seduce us. One of the most striking examples of this syndrome is the view we take of our childhood as it recedes into the past. Most of us remember a golden time of play and excitement. As we get older, it becomes even more golden in our memory. Of course, we conveniently forget the anxieties, insecurities, and hurts that plagued us in childhood and more than likely consumed more of our mental space than the fleeting pleasures we remember. But because our youth is an object that grows more distant as we age, we are able to idealize it and see it as greener than green. Such a syndrome can be explained by three qualities of the human brain. The first is known as induction , how something positive generates a contrasting negative image in our mind. This is most obvious in our visual system. When we see some color—red or black, for instance—it tends to intensify our perception of the opposite color around us, in this case green or white. As we look at the red object, we often can see a green halo forming around it. In general, the mind operates by contrasts. We are able to formulate concepts about something by becoming aware of its opposite. The brain is continually dredging up these contrasts. What this means is that whenever we see or imagine something, our minds cannot help but see or imagine the opposite. If we are forbidden by our culture to think a particular thought or entertain a particular desire, that taboo instantly brings to mind the very thing we are forbidden. Every no sparks a corresponding yes. (It was the outlawing of pornography in Victorian times that created the first pornographic industry.) We cannot control this vacillation in the mind between contrasts. This predisposes us to think about and then desire exactly what we do not have. Second, complacency would be a dangerous evolutionary trait for a conscious animal such as humans. If our early ancestors had been prone to feeling content with present circumstances, they would not have been sensitive enough to possible dangers that lurked in the most apparently safe environments. We survived and thrived through our continual conscious alertness, which predisposed us to thinking and imagining the possible negative in any circumstance.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  himself with Cicero, whose speeches and actions in favor of the Roman Republic and against tyranny naturally resonated with many French people and gave Danton’s mission the added weight of the ancient past. The filmmaker Akira Kurosawa brought back to life the world of the samurai warrior, so celebrated in Japanese culture, but re-created it in such a way as to make judicious comments on the issues and moods of postwar Japan. When running for president, John F. Kennedy wanted to herald a new American spirit that was moving past the staleness of the 1950s. He called the programs he would initiate the New Frontier, associating his ideas with the pioneer spirit so reverentially ingrained in the American psyche. Such imagery became a powerful part of his appeal. Resurrect the spirit of childhood. By bringing to life the spirit of your early years—its humor, its decisive historical events, the styles and products of the period, the feeling in the air as it affected you—you will reach a vast audience of all those who experienced those years in a similar way. It was a time of life of great emotional intensity, and by re-creating it in some form, but reflected through the eyes of an adult, your work will resonate with your peers. You must use this strategy only if you feel a particularly powerful connection to your childhood. Otherwise your attempt to re-create the spirit will seem flat and contrived. Keep in mind that you are not aiming for a literal re-creation of the past but capturing its spirit. To have real power, it should connect to some issue or problem in the present and not simply be some mindless bit of nostalgia. If you are inventing something, try to update and incorporate the styles of that childhood period in a subtle manner, exploiting the unconscious attraction we all feel to that early period in life. Create the new social configuration. It is human nature for people to crave more social interaction with those with whom they feel an affinity. You will always gain great power by forging some new way of interacting that appeals to your generation. You organize a group around new ideas or values that are in the air or the latest technology that allows you to bring people together of a like mind in a novel way. You eliminate the middlemen who used to set up barriers that prevented freer associations of people. In this new form of a group, it is always wise to introduce some rituals that bond the members together and some symbols to identify with. We see many examples of this in the past—the salons of seventeenth-century France, where men and women could talk freely and openly; the lodges of the Freemasons in eighteenth- century Europe, with their secret rituals and air of subversion; the speakeasies and jazz clubs of the 1920s, where the mood was “anything goes”; or more recently, online platforms and groups, or

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  In doing this, think in grand, mythic terms. Danton associated himself with Cicero, whose speeches and actions in favor of the Roman Republic and against tyranny naturally resonated with many French people and gave Danton’s mission the added weight of the ancient past. The filmmaker Akira Kurosawa brought back to life the world of the samurai warrior, so celebrated in Japanese culture, but re-created it in such a way as to make judicious comments on the issues and moods of postwar Japan. When running for president, John F. Kennedy wanted to herald a new American spirit that was moving past the staleness of the 1950s. He called the programs he would initiate the New Frontier, associating his ideas with the pioneer spirit so reverentially ingrained in the American psyche. Such imagery became a powerful part of his appeal. Resurrect the spirit of childhood. By bringing to life the spirit of your early years—its humor, its decisive historical events, the styles and products of the period, the feeling in the air as it affected you—you will reach a vast audience of all those who experienced those years in a similar way. It was a time of life of great emotional intensity, and by re-creating it in some form, but reflected through the eyes of an adult, your work will resonate with your peers. You must use this strategy only if you feel a particularly powerful connection to your childhood. Otherwise your attempt to re-create the spirit will seem flat and contrived. Keep in mind that you are not aiming for a literal re-creation of the past but capturing its spirit. To have real power, it should connect to some issue or problem in the present and not simply be some mindless bit of nostalgia. If you are inventing something, try to update and incorporate the styles of that childhood period in a subtle manner, exploiting the unconscious attraction we all feel to that early period in life. Create the new social configuration. It is human nature for people to crave more social interaction with those with whom they feel an affinity. You will always gain great power by forging some new way of interacting that appeals to your generation. You organize a group around new ideas or values that are in the air or the latest technology that allows you to bring people together of a like mind in a novel way. You eliminate the middlemen who used to set up barriers that prevented freer associations of people.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  After we got there, we took an air-conditioned car from Havana to Varadero, then a hot, fragrant bus from Varadero to Santa Clara. I barely speak Spanish; my brother does and had also been there before, and he was sweet and supportive and vulnerable and took good care of me. As if my stomach sensed my stress, I got sick, very sick, and one morning spent four hours within twenty feet of my grandfather’s childhood home vomiting so hard I strained my diaphragm in the watery dawn light. Afterward, the owner of the casa particular did a spell on me; performed some sort of obscure prayer with a measuring tape, banished my indigestion (as she called it) to somewhere else. “It’s not me,” she said. “I am merely a conduit to God, praise God.” Then she made me drink an entire bottle of tonic water, which I’d never had without gin. Walking around Santa Clara was beautiful and eerie, because I couldn’t stop thinking about my grandfather walking through these streets. I also kept imagining that we were walking around a parallel map in Bloomington, Indiana. That’s how sister cities should work: I could walk around both at the same time, separated by some thin, mystical scrim, and if I went to the right place at the right time I could peek into the other one. I could twitch a curtain next to a certain chicken and be staring at the Dream House, at the people who live there now. The streets were filled with people and taxis drawn by bikes and horses and midcentury cars in varying states of disrepair. The famous hotel on the square was the same color scheme as my grandparents’ former house in Maryland. We approached a school, where children in uniform were pouring out of the entrance. “That’s where Granddaddy went to school,” my brother said. “Right there.” He swung his finger to a nearby bank on the same square. “When I was here with Granddaddy,” he said, “he told me a story about how one day he was heading home from school when he got caught in a downpour, so he went under the roof of the bank to stay dry until it stopped. An expensive car pulled up and the window rolled down. It was a rich, white Cuban man. He summoned Granddaddy to the window.” “What did he want?” “I don’t know. But he probably thought, ‘Oh, I can summon this little brown kid out into the rain to do, I know, whatever, and he’ll do it.’ But Granddaddy refused, and the man kept gesturing, and eventually Granddaddy told him to go fuck himself.”

• From Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  If we were to go through your garage or storage shelves or sock drawer, I guarantee we would find the strangest things. I have a trophy from when I was fourteen. The little man on the top fell off sometime in the ’90s, the lettering that says what it’s for has faded, and the years have revealed that, shockingly, that isn’t real marble. But I’ve kept it. I haven’t thrown it away because it’s more than a trophy to me. That trophy is the first time I actually won something on my own. It represents a certain period of my life and the struggles of being fourteen and finding my identity and wondering if I’d ever be good at anything. It’s a trophy, but it’s more than a trophy. Jewelry, pictures, sculptures made by children, antiques that have been in the family for years, art projects, souvenirs, velvet paintings—we hold on to them because they point beyond themselves. If we were to ask you about a certain picture and why you have it displayed in such a prominent place in your home or office or why you carry it in your purse or wallet everywhere you go, you’d probably respond by talking about the people in the picture, where it was taken, when it was taken. But that would only be the start. Those relationships and that place and that time are all about something else, something more. If we kept exploring, you’d probably end up using words like trust and love and belonging and commitment and celebration. So it’s a picture, but it’s more than a picture. This physical thing—this picture, trophy, artifact, gift—is actually about that relationship, that truth, that reality, that moment in time. This is actually about that. Whether it’s what we do with our energies or how we feel about our bodies or wanting to have the control in relationships or trying to recover from heartbreak or dealing with our ferocious appetites or the difficulty of communicating clearly with those we love or longing for something or someone better, much of life is in some way connected with our sexuality. And when we begin to sort through all of the issues surrounding our sexuality, we quickly end up in the spiritual, because this is always about that. And so this guy always has a girlfriend, and it has become a joke among his family and friends that the day he loses one girlfriend, he finds another—they actually use the phrase “trade her in” behind his back—which raises the question, Why does he need to have a girl? What is his real need, the one that drives him to need a girl? And if we could get at that, would he not need a girl so much? And she’s got a coldness in her heart toward her husband, but it’s really about something that happened years before she even met him.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  In the mansion on the property, the furniture was gathered to the center of the room and draped in sheets. I saw a painting of the dead children, dressed in black. I thought I heard my name in a half whisper, but when I turned around there was no one. “Sound moves weirdly in here,” one of the residents explained. The rooms were, in turn, monastic, bombastic. I nursed a crush on a playwright and a nonfiction writer both, rolled my eyes at a sculptor, felt great fondness for badass visual artists who were breaking into the fine arts boys’ club before I was born. I talked about supplements with a painter and comforted a composer. Donald Trump was elected president. People cried at the dinner table. Toward the end, I told the story about the Dream House, the funny version: the version where the irony of my relationship with Val and the universality of shitty exes are at the forefront. I kept my eyes open: for deer, for ghosts. Dream House as Prisoner’s DilemmaMany years later, you stick a memory card into your SLR and find dozens of naked photos of the woman in the Dream House. You jerk involuntarily when the first image comes onto the preview screen. You remember the afternoon so clearly: how the soft, indirect natural light filtered into the room; how she was naked and pale and lounging, and how her cunt was flushed maroon with blood. (It was either just before fucking or just afterward.) You got down between her knees and took dozens of photos, loving the ombre of her, from white to pink to purple. The memory is not sexual; it is distant and removed, as if you are watching a movie about someone else. You sit there for a while, thinking about the photos. You could keep them, but there is no reason to, good or bad. You have no desire for blackmail or the kind of revenge they could make possible; you do not find them erotic anymore. (How quickly your desire curdled when you saw her for what she was, like the scene in The Shining when Jack Nicholson pulls away from a sexy woman to find a decomposing creature in her place.) They are simply a memory, and as you overwrite the data card, erasing them forever, you feel an irrational twinge of loss.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Sex and Death In June, you drive from Iowa to San Diego for a genre-writing workshop on the UCSD campus. On the way you stop in Berkeley, where you lived so long ago. You leave your things at a friend’s house and meet up with your ex-boyfriend for dinner. After a few drinks, you tell him about her, about the Dream House. He listens intently, his eyes soft with kindness. It is so good to see him your heart aches. You realize you have missed him so much because what was wrong with you as a couple was so contained, so clear. Even the cosmic agony of his departure felt like a normal (if terrible) part of life, like a broken leg or being fired from a job. As dinner winds to a close, you ask if he wants to go get a drink. But when you step out onto the street you remember how early things close around there. “I’ve got a lot of booze back at my place,” he says. The sentence is careful but he’s smiling sidelong at you. Your heart and cunt twitch simultaneously. You text your friend, the one you’re staying with. I understand, she responds. Have fun. Breakfast tomorrow? Your ex-boyfriend gestures to a car on the street; a comically tiny convertible. You laugh, genuinely pleased. “You have a convertible?” It comes out weirdly; you say it again and again, changing inflections. “You have a convertible? You have a convertible?” You might be a little tipsy already. “Should I leave the roof down?” he asks. “Um, yes,” you say. He starts the engine and you drop the seat back and watch Berkeley and then Oakland this way the whole drive back, the tips of buildings at the circumference of your vision, a sky streaked with clouds with stars in the gaps between them. The car is going so fast that you feel wild, you feel like you could die right now and it would be thrilling. You realize you are laughing, and he goes even faster. In his apartment, you scratch his cat’s head hard with your fingernails. He makes you a drink. You sit down across from each other. “I’ve missed you,” he says. I’ve missed myself, you want to say, but you don’t. “I’ve missed you too,” you say. “I mean, I don’t miss men, but I did miss you. I’m glad we did this.” You straddle him and kiss him and later, when you are standing in the bathroom doing your best to wash semen out of your hair, he says something from the other side of the door. “What?” you ask, and open it. “It’s gonna be okay,” he says. “I mean, you’re gonna be okay.” You call him a weirdo and then return to the sink, dunking half your head under the faucet. When you look back in the mirror, you are smiling a little. You have breakfast with your friend; you tell her about the night before. You feel so good, you say. At peace, or something. The next day, her house burns to the ground. Your friend is fine, but one of her roommate’s houseguests is killed in the blaze. You are thinking about fire inspectors examining your hot bones among the cinders as you drive out of town and south through the Central Valley. The air is dry and the traffic terrible, but you can see orchards for miles. The light is gold.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as L’esprit de L’escalier When I was preparing to fly to Cuba with my brother to see our ancestral home, I discovered that Santa Clara, Cuba—the city where my grandfather was born and raised, where he was once forced to eat a soup made from his pet rooster—is the sister city of Bloomington, Indiana. How was this possible? Of all the cities in the world, how were these two connected by such an arbitrary umbilical cord? After we got there, we took an air-conditioned car from Havana to Varadero, then a hot, fragrant bus from Varadero to Santa Clara. I barely speak Spanish; my brother does and had also been there before, and he was sweet and supportive and vulnerable and took good care of me. As if my stomach sensed my stress, I got sick, very sick, and one morning spent four hours within twenty feet of my grandfather’s childhood home vomiting so hard I strained my diaphragm in the watery dawn light. Afterward, the owner of the casa particular did a spell on me; performed some sort of obscure prayer with a measuring tape, banished my indigestion (as she called it) to somewhere else. “It’s not me,” she said. “I am merely a conduit to God, praise God.” Then she made me drink an entire bottle of tonic water, which I’d never had without gin. Walking around Santa Clara was beautiful and eerie, because I couldn’t stop thinking about my grandfather walking through these streets. I also kept imagining that we were walking around a parallel map in Bloomington, Indiana. That’s how sister cities should work: I could walk around both at the same time, separated by some thin, mystical scrim, and if I went to the right place at the right time I could peek into the other one. I could twitch a curtain next to a certain chicken and be staring at the Dream House, at the people who live there now. The streets were filled with people and taxis drawn by bikes and horses and midcentury cars in varying states of disrepair. The famous hotel on the square was the same color scheme as my grandparents’ former house in Maryland. We approached a school, where children in uniform were pouring out of the entrance. “That’s where Granddaddy went to school,” my brother said. “Right there.” He swung his finger to a nearby bank on the same square. “When I was here with Granddaddy,” he said, “he told me a story about how one day he was heading home from school when he got caught in a downpour, so he went under the roof of the bank to stay dry until it stopped. An expensive car pulled up and the window rolled down. It was a rich, white Cuban man. He summoned Granddaddy to the window.” “What did he want?” “I don’t know. But he probably thought, ‘Oh, I can summon this little brown kid out into the rain to do, I know, whatever, and he’ll do it.’ But Granddaddy refused, and the man kept gesturing, and eventually Granddaddy told him to go fuck himself.” This was how my brother told the story. I can’t exactly imagine my grandfather—a funny, affable man who left Santa Clara and Cuba altogether, and loved Radio Shack and free pens and watches and tinkering with electronics and building birdhouses, who at that moment was back in the United States slipping down the embankment of dementia—telling anyone to go fuck himself, and yet I recognize this version of my grandfather all the same. He didn’t apologize, or sob, or beg. My brother and I drank watery El Presidentes at a café near the bank underneath a tapestry of Che, and I let the phrase go fuck yourself roll around in my mouth; a satisfying response, years too late.

• 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.