Nostalgia

Passages

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

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• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  The ear picked up a constant faint rumble of traffic, but the little clock sounded far louder; no one passed by outside and it was hard to imagine a breeze ruffling the papers strewn about in the rich stuffy air of the room where we sat. ‘It’s a shady little street,’ he added. ‘In the old days it was known as Gropecunt Lane, where the lightermen and what-have-you used to come up for the whores. There’s a reference to it in Pepys—I can’t find it now.’ ‘It’s a beautiful house.’ ‘Do you like it? It’s a very special house, more special than you might think. I bought it at the end of the war—it was all knocked to hell round here of course by the bloomin’ Blitz. I was wandering about with Sandy Labouchère, seeing the extent of the damage. This was several years later but there was still all the rubble, covered in flowers and so on—frightfully pretty, actually. Look at this little street, he said—this little bit seemed to have survived O K. Down we came. You could do that up, Charles, he said. You wouldn’t believe the state it was in, broken windows and plants and things growing out of it. We asked about it in a little grocer’s there used to be over the road.’ He paused and looked around rather bashfully. ‘It is now very sadly closed, but the grocer’s son … my dear William, you cannot imagine how handsome he was … seventeen, big strong lad of course, carrying sacks of flour—it was like pollen on his hair and hands, big strong hands of course. Well, my dear, said Sandy afterwards, if you don’t buy it I will, just for that, you know. Of course, that was him all over.’ I smiled at the story, though I hadn’t the least idea who Sandy Labouchère was. It was Charles’s most sustained utterance to date, and in the chair of his own little library he was far more in command than in his wavering and insane peregrinations outside. Or at least so it seemed until Lewis came in with the tea. ‘He joined the merchant navy and went sailing about all over the place,’ Charles said, looking at Lewis picking his way among the books, but referring, I imagined, to the beautiful grocer’s boy. ‘Thank you, I’m sure William will pour if you’d like to put it down here.’ ‘I’m sure he will, sir,’ said Lewis, slamming the tray on to the table between us. The wide china cups with their twig-like handles jumped in their saucers. ‘He looks the type who’d pour out very nicely, sir, in my opinion.’ He was sulking terribly about something. Charles reddened with irritation and anxiety. ‘You’re ridiculous today,’ he muttered.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Looking always backward, we became mired in nostalgia. We both liked old movies, which Mrs. Gayle allowed us to watch all night when I slept over, and whose fatuous obsession with aristocracy fed our own. We preferred old cars to new ones. We used antique slang. Arthur played the piano pretty well, and when we were alone in his house we sang old songs together, our voices quavering with loss: I wandered today to the hill, Maggie, To watch the scene below . . . The creek and the old rusty mill, Maggie, Where we sat in the long long ago One night he kissed me, or I kissed him, or we kissed each other. It surprised us both. After that, whenever we felt particularly close we turned on each other. Arthur was an easy target. His voice cracked. He bathed twice a day but always gave off an ammoniac hormonal smell, the smell of growth and anxiety. He played no sports and was still a Second Class Scout, a truly pitiful rank for someone his age. As long as I didn’t call him a sissy I could cut him to pieces. I was a sitting duck myself, and Arthur had a map of my nerves. With feline insouciance he could produce a word that would knock me breathless and send me stumbling blind from the house. Sometimes he set Pepper on me. Pepper would yap at my heels all the way down the street while Arthur stood at his door and urged him on, knowing that I liked the little mutt too much to defend myself. We had these blowups often. We’d stay clear of each other for a few days, then Arthur would call up and invite me over as if nothing had happened, and I would go. THE GATHERING OF the Tribes was held in a high school just outside Seattle. My event was the swimming meet. I carried an overnight bag with my swimming trunks and towel, and a change of clothes for Arthur and me so our uniforms wouldn’t give us away when we left: Glenvale later that day and began hitching our way north. During the Gathering I kept my distance from Arthur. I didn’t want to be associated with him, and not only because of what we were planning. His uniform was baggy and unadorned, his manner supercilious. He stood at the edges of the events and made sarcastic remarks. He didn’t look like a serious Scout. I did. I held Star rank. I had a new uniform and plenty of things to wear on it. Patrol leader’s insignia. The Order of the Arrow. A sash with several merit badges. To look at my merit badges you would have thought I could be dropped anywhere, in any season, just as I was, and in no time improvise a shelter and kindle a fire and snare an animal for dinner. You would have thought I could navigate by the stars. Name trees.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  There are no hallucinations, exactly, except for a strange buzzing on the edge of your hearing, like, your friend observes, cicadas at the height of summer. The buzzing isn’t there, of course; your minds are simply imbuing the silence. You could go mad if you stay here too long, you think. Your mind would fill in the gaps and the blanks and God knows what it would fill them with. What happens when there are no echoes, here in this underground crypt? You clap and clap but nothing answers back. Dream House as Generation StarshipEventually, everyone forgets. That’s the worst part, maybe. It’s been so long since anyone’s seen Earth; so long since that first crew made their way shipward, leaving behind their beloved planet wreathed in smoke and ice. They had to get out—they knew it, everyone knew it, but they were lucky, and found a ship. And they set course to Somewhere Else and settled down, and when they had children they told their children the story of where they used to live. They left out the worst parts, maybe, because even now, surrounded by chrome and glass and stars, the acute bite of the planet’s betrayal has lessened. And by the time they passed on, and the ship was still careening Away, the children of the children of the first crew had only the faintest wisps of understanding of what Used to Be. By the time they got to Somewhere Else (a beautiful planet, with singing stones and citrine trees and soil that smelled like cumin and water you could walk over), no one could even remember why they’d left Earth to begin with. “I suppose it must have been terrible,” they said uncertainly. “We took so much effort to leave. It must have been the worst place.” But that nagging sense of doubt was so profound they eventually gave it a name: Nonstalgia (noun) The unsettling sensation that you are never be able to fully access the past; that once you are departed from an event, some essential quality of it is lost forever. A reminder to remember: just because the sharpness of the sadness has faded does not mean that it was not, once, terrible. It means only that time and space, creatures of infinite girth and tenderness, have stepped between the two of you, and they are keeping you safe as they were once unable to. Dream House as L’esprit de L’escalierWhen 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?

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  I bring this up because it is important to remember that the Dream House is real. It is as real as the book you are holding in your hands, though significantly less terrifying. If I cared to, I could give you its address, and you could drive there in your own car and sit in front of that Dream House and try to imagine the things that have happened inside. I wouldn’t recommend it. But you could. No one would stop you. Dream House as PicaresqueBefore I met the woman from the Dream House, I lived in a tiny two-bedroom in Iowa City. The house was a mess: owned by a slumlord, slowly falling apart, full of eclectic, nightmarish details. There was a room in the basement—my roommates and I called it the murder room—with blood-red floors, walls, and ceiling, further improved by a secret hatch and a nonfunctional landline phone. Elsewhere in the basement, a Lovecraftian heating system reached long tentacles up into the rest of the house. When it was humid, the front door swelled in its frame and refused to open, like a punched eye. The yard was huge and pocked with a fire pit and edged with poison ivy, trees, a rotting fence. I lived with John and Laura and their cat, Tokyo. They were a couple; long-legged and pale, erstwhile Floridians who’d gone to hippie college together and had come to Iowa for their respective graduate degrees. The living embodiment of Florida camp and eccentricity, and, ultimately, the only thing that, post–Dream House, would keep the state in my good graces.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  My girlfriend, the driver said, she yells at me all the time, she says I work too hard, she wants me to spend more time with her, you know, she doesn’t understand. She’s from the mountains, her parents still live in the village, she likes to go there on the weekends, she wants me to go too. But tell me, he said, how do I have the time to go, I work twelve, fifteen hours a day, every day, you understand, I never take a day off. I love the mountains, he said, as if defending himself, running his fingers through his hair, which was cut close to the skull, I would love to go to the mountains, to get out of Sofia, in the mountains it’s clean, the air is good, you can breathe there, it’s not like here. Sofia used to be clean, he said, when I was a kid, I hated the Communists but you have to be honest, they kept things clean, it wasn’t like it is now. And people took care of each other then, he said, we were all fucked but we had solidarity. Now people just say fuck off—maika ti, he said, which means your mother, it’s a kind of contraction, when people are really angry they say maika ti da eba, I fuck your mother—nobody cares about the others, everybody steals whatever they can. Do people take care of each other in America, he said then, the first question he had asked me though he didn’t want an answer, he went on right away, I know they do, he said, I’ve never been to America but I have the idea that you care for each other there. We were still stopped in traffic, he shifted anxiously in his seat. That’s good about the protests, maybe, he said, they show that people believe in solidarity, the young people, we’ve forgotten but to them it’s still important. Mozhe bi, he said again, maybe, I don’t know. He took his pack of cigarettes from a cupholder in the center console and knocked one into his palm. Well, he said, lighting it, buddy, priyatelyu, this traffic isn’t going to move anytime soon. He suggested I get out and walk, that way he could take the next exit and head back to Mladost. We settled up then, I grabbed my backpack from between my legs and hooked my fingers through the latch of the door. Blagodarya, I said, hesitating a moment before leaving the little intimacy his speech had made, and he held out his hand. Uspeh, he said as I took it, good luck, and then he released it to fiddle with the radio, dismissing me with a blast of American rock.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Gayle carried herself as one betrayed into an inferior version of life. The articles of this betrayal remained unpublished, but it was understood that Cal was to blame; also, to some degree, Arthur. Mrs. Gayle was disappointed. Every couple of weeks she dulled her disappointment by shopping in Mount Vernon with Liz Dempsey, a friend of hers from another Founding Family. They got all dressed up and had boozy lunches and bought things. Mostly they bought useless little things Mrs. Gayle called notions, but sometimes they concluded more serious purchases. I was in the house one night when Mrs. Gayle came back with an expensive lamp that had at its base a rickshaw pulled by a grinning coolie whose legs churned furiously when you pressed down on his hat. The two women took Arthur and me along on a couple of their sprees. I enjoyed listening to Mrs. Gayle talk about other people in the camp, impaling them with a word or phrase so uncanny I could never see them afterward without remembering it. She knew that I admired her tongue. She liked me for that, and for the fact that my brother Geoffrey was a student at Princeton. She said the words Ivy League often, and tenderly. I was a big snob myself, so we got along fine. Arthur’s disappointment was more combative. He refused to accept as final the proposition that Cal and Mrs. Gayle were his real parents. He told me, and I contrived to believe, that he was adopted, and that his real family was descended from Scottish liege men who had followed Bonnie Prince Charlie into exile in France. I read the same novels Arthur read, but managed not to notice the correspondences between their plots and his. And Arthur in turn did not question the stories I told him. I told him that my family was descended from Prussian aristocrats—“Junkers,” I said, pronouncing the word with pedantic accuracy—whose estates had been seized after the war. I got the idea for this narrative from a book called The Prussians . It was full of pictures of Crusaders, kings, castles, splendid hussars riding to the attack at Waterloo, cold-eyed Von Richthofen standing beside his triplane. Arthur was a great storyteller. He talked himself into reveries where every word rang with truth. He repeated ancient conversations. He rendered the creak of oars in their oarlocks. He spoke in the honest brogue of the crofter, the despicable whine of the traitor. In Arthur’s voice the mist rose above the loch and the pipes skirled; bold deeds were done, high words of troth plighted, and I believed them all. I was his perfect witness and he was mine. We listened without objection to stories of usurped nobility that grew in preposterous intricacy with every telling. But we did not feel as if anything we said was a lie. We both believed that the real lie was told by our present unworthy circumstances.

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

  “Let’s get the fancy chocolates,” you’d say, pointing to the Godiva chocolatier. We would get a small paper bag containing maybe five or six squares of chocolate we had picked at random. This was often all we bought at the mall. Then we’d walk, passing one back and forth until our fingers shone inky and sweet. “This is how you enjoy your life,” you’d say, sucking your fingers, their pink nail polish chipped from a week of giving pedicures. The time with your fists, shouting in the parking lot, the late sun etching your hair red. My arms shielding my head as your knuckles thudded around me. Those Saturdays, we’d stroll the corridors until, one by one, the shops pulled shut their steel gates. Then we’d make our way to the bus stop down the street, our breaths floating above us, the makeup drying on your face. Our hands empty except for our hands. — Out my window this morning, just before sunrise, a deer stood in a fog so dense and bright that the second one, not too far away, looked like the unfinished shadow of the first. You can color that in. You can call it “The History of Memory.” — Migration can be triggered by the angle of sunlight, indicating a change in season, temperature, plant life, and food supply. Female monarchs lay eggs along the route. Every history has more than one thread, each thread a story of division. The journey takes four thousand eight hundred and thirty miles, more than the length of this country. The monarchs that fly south will not make it back north. Each departure, then, is final. Only their children return; only the future revisits the past. What is a country but a borderless sentence, a life? That time at the Chinese butcher, you pointed to the roasted pig hanging from its hook. “The ribs are just like a person’s after they’re burned.” You let out a clipped chuckle, then paused, took out your pocketbook, your face pinched, and recounted our money. What is a country but a life sentence? — The time with a gallon of milk. The jug bursting on my shoulder bone, then a steady white rain on the kitchen tiles. The time at Six Flags, when you rode the Superman roller coaster with me because I was too scared to do it alone. How you threw up afterward, your whole head in the garbage can. How, in my screeching delight, I forgot to say Thank you.

• 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 Stripped: Las Vegas (2021)

  I did get scholarships, over $76,000 worth of scholarships, over three schools. - Growing up, my dad did a lot of show business work. He also was in the circus for much of my life. [upbeat music] [audience cheering] Growing up, my dad was in a unicycle troupe called The King Charles Troupe. It consisted of all my uncles, they rode unicycles. My early memories of my dad were very good. We grew up around some exciting stuff, some stuff that most kids don't ever get to see. It trickled down to all of his kids as well. So, we all know how to ride the unicycle. - By the time I could remember it, I think maybe I was three or four. [placid music] Modeling was always something that was already there. My mom had me in baby modeling things, and I just remember taking pictures. We would have little mini photo shoots outside and take pictures, I would dance around the living room, get dressed up in all of her scarves and hats. Every kid wants to fit in. I don't think there's a single kid that doesn't wanna fit in. I wasn't the popular kid, I was kinda shy. Certain people wouldn't hang out with me because I wasn't hood enough. And then certain people wouldn't hang out with me because I was of color. So I kinda just stayed focused on my world, and my artistic world, and my creative world. And that worked for me. [birds chirping] [upbeat music] [clothes rustling] [birds chirping] - My teenage years were really rough, I was on my own most of the time. Middle school hit, and I had just gotten out of foster care. I kinda grew up in the hood to where I got beat up a lot. I had to learn how to fight on my own. [chattering] Fighting for myself physically, but also mentally fighting for myself. I was really depressed, I was really socially just confused. Give it to me. - [Boy] Get up. - [Girl] That's it, come on, get up. [chattering] - I just wanted to be wanted by somebody. I just didn't know how to be me. [upbeat music] [traffic droning] - I actually used to joke when I was younger that I would make a bomb ass stripper, and I am [laughs]. [upbeat music] I had a really good childhood. My parents put me into dance, did ballet, contemporary, tap, jazz, hip hop. When I was seven, I got onto the dance company at my studio. When I got into high school, I was on the dance company there. I traveled, I competed and performed everywhere I could. [placid music] - I actually learned how to swim before I learned how to walk. I was one of the best swimmers in my town, in my county. And so, it made me feel really important.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  Most of them were for small venues, clubs and cafés, but there was a series of performances held within the walls of the ruined fortress, too; the stage of ages, they called it, symphony and opera and ballet. We had been saving Tsarevets for the evening anyway; it would be brutal in the day, exposed to the sun and with almost no shade to be found. I saw that there was a concert that night, members of the Sofia Opera and Ballet performing Lakmé , the opera by Delibes. I had never seen it live, I told R., but it was the first opera I owned on CD, two discs I had played again and again. It was like a door opening onto my adolescence, I felt, a chance to share it with him, and suddenly it seemed important that we go, Please, I said, can we go, please, surprising us both with my insistence. He had never been to an opera before, but he was willing; it would be a new experience, he said, he was eager for new experiences. We had a late lunch at a restaurant near the hotel. It was almost empty, there were only a few solitary men nursing beers, though the air was still heavy with smoke from the afternoon rush. The large windows along the back wall offered the same view as our room, and R. and I sat at a table next to one of them, looking out at the hills and their crowded houses. These had been grand once, I thought, they rose three or sometimes four stories high; the grandest were built at the very edge of the rock, their walls flush with the cliff. Most of the façades were white, and they gleamed where the sun struck them, their windows shuttered against the heat, but there were other colors too, the bright yellows and blues and reds of the National Revival. I’d be scared to live here, R. said, it looks like the houses could just slide down the hill. I hummed a reply and he laughed. You love it, don’t you, he said, you always love sad places. Then he lifted himself up in his seat to look down the slope of our own hill, toward the banks of the river. Look, he said, and pointed to a series of shacks, what seemed almost like temporary shelters among the trees that filled the valley, with cinder block walls and roofs of corrugated metal.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Her face tightens sternly, and she steps back away from me. I rush to add, “Not because I don’t like you but because I want what’s good for all of us—for me and for you too. You should have your own dreams in life. Surely you can understand that.” “Oyvin, still you think I understand nothing and that you understand everything. But I look, too, into life. And death. I understand about death—more than you. Believe me. And I understand about being alone—more than you.” “But Momma, you don’t face being alone. You stay with me. You don’t leave me. You wander about in my thoughts. In my dreams.” “No, Sonny.” “Sonny”: I haven’t heard that name for fifty years, had forgotten that that’s what she and my father often called me. “It’s not the way you think it is, Sonny,” she continues. “There’s some things you don’t understand, some things you’ve got turned upside down. You know that dream, the one with me standing there in the crowd, watching you in the cart waving to me, calling to me, asking me how you did in life?” “Yes, of course I remember my dream, Momma. That’s where this all started.” “Your dream? That’s what I want to say to you. That’s the mistake, Oyvin—your thinking I was in your dream. That dream was not your dream, Sonny. It was my dream. Mothers get to have dreams too.” 2 [image file=image_154.jpg] Travels with Paula As a medical student I was taught the fine art of looking, listening, and touching. I looked at vermilion throats, bulging eardrums, and the serpentine arterial rivulets in the retina. I listened to the hiss of mitral murmurs, the gurgling tubas of the intestines, the cacophony of respiratory rales. I felt the slippery edges of spleens and livers, the tautness of ovarian cysts, the marbled hardness of prostatic cancer. Learning about patients—yes, that was the business of medical school. But to learn from patients—that aspect of my higher education came much later. Perhaps it began with my professor, John Whitehorn, who often said, “Listen to your patients; let them teach you. To grow wise you must remain a student.” And he meant much more than the banal truth that the good listener learns more about the patient. He meant quite literally that we should allow our patients to teach us. A formal, awkward, courtly man whose gleaming pate was fringed with a fastidiously clipped crescent of gray hair, John Whitehorn was the distinguished chairman of the Johns Hopkins Department of Psychiatry for thirty years. He wore gold-rimmed spectacles and had no superfluous features—not a wrinkle in his face, or in the brown suit he wore every day of the year (he must have, we surmised, two or three identical ones in his closet). And no superfluous expressions: when he lectured his lips moved; all else—hands, cheeks, eyebrows—remained remarkably still.

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

  There’s Mozzicato’s on Franklin, where I had my first cannoli. Where nothing I knew ever died. Where I sat looking out the window one summer night from the fifth floor of our building, and the air was warm and sweet like it is now, and there were the low voices of young couples, their Converses and Air Force Ones tapping against each other on the fire escapes as they worked to make the body speak its other tongues, the sound of matches, or flames sparked from lighters the shape and shine of 9mms or Colt .45s, which was how we turned death into a joke, how we reduced fire to the size of cartoon raindrops, then sucked them through cigarillo tips, like myths. Because eventually the river rises here. It overflows to claim it all and to show us what we lost, like it always had. The bike spokes whirred. The smell of sewage from the water plant stung my eyes just before the wind did with it what it does with the names of the dead, swept it behind me. We crossed it, we left it all behind, the spokes ticking us deeper toward the suburbs. When we hit the pavement in East Hartford, the scent of wood smoke blown from the hills came down and cleared the mind. I stared at Trevor’s back as we rode, his brown UPS jacket, the one his daddy got from working there a week before getting fired after downing a six-pack on his break and waking up near midnight in a pile of cardboard boxes, now purplish under the moon. We made our way down Main Street. When we came upon the Coca-Cola bottling plant, its neon sign burning huge above the building, Trevor shouted, “Fuck Coca-Cola! Sprite for life, motherfucker!” He glanced back and laughed brokenly. “Yeah, fuck them,” I offered. But he didn’t hear. The streetlights fell away and the sidewalk led up to a grassy shoulder, which meant we’re heading up the hills, to the mansions. Soon we were deep in the burbs, in South Glastonbury, and the house lights started appearing, first as orange sparks flitting through the trees, but as we got closer, they grew into wide, fat sheets of gold. You could peer through these windows, windows free of steel bars, their curtains drawn wide open. Even from the street you could see the sparkling chandeliers, dining tables, multicolored Tiffany lamps shaded with decorative glass. The houses were so large you could look in all the windows and never see a single person. As we climbed the road up the steep hill, the starless sky opened up, the trees fell slowly back, and the houses grew further and further apart from one another. One set of neighbors was separated by an entire orchard, whose apples had already begun to rot across the fields, no one to pick them. The fruit rolled into the street where their flesh burst, pulped and browned, under the passing cars.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  Maybe he would stand there all night, I thought, but I didn’t see any television or radio to keep him company, anything at all, there was nothing but the sea to mark the time. Or maybe there was an office or booth he would retreat to once we had passed, maybe he had only emerged on hearing our approach. I nodded to him as I moved toward the stairs, murmuring Dobur vecher , but he just raised his eyes again and flicked his spent cigarette to the ground. There was a wooden platform at the bottom of the stairs, beside which the others had piled their shoes. I could see the whole coast, stretching from the old town, where we had eaten, which was quiet and dark, to the new town with its high-rise hotels, their windows facing the sea. One restaurant was still open, brightly lit in red and blue, and I could hear music, Balkan pop, the uneven drums and pipes, a woman’s voice singing restlessly around them. I couldn’t make out the words but they were always the same: something about love, I thought, something about loss. The beach was artificial, someone had told us, they trucked tons of sand in to this particular cove; the rest of the coast was rocky, there was nowhere to bathe, though young men, despite the posted warnings, climbed the rock walls each summer to jump into the sea. The Roman wall along the old town was perpetually lit by floodlights bolted to the rocks beneath it. I had walked beside it earlier that day, with a friend who had traveled from Burgas so we could spend an hour or two together, and he had shown me where the original wall ended and modern reconstruction began, a thin strip of metal running between them. Only the lowest stones were ancient, and I knelt to lay my hands on them, jagged and pocked from the salt air, imagining the hands that, generations ago, had placed them there. This city had been a major port once, the Romans had dedicated it to Apollo, setting a great statue of the god like a guard against the sea, though the statue had disappeared long ago.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  There was a wooden platform at the bottom of the stairs, beside which the others had piled their shoes. I could see the whole coast, stretching from the old town, where we had eaten, which was quiet and dark, to the new town with its high-rise hotels, their windows facing the sea. One restaurant was still open, brightly lit in red and blue, and I could hear music, Balkan pop, the uneven drums and pipes, a woman’s voice singing restlessly around them. I couldn’t make out the words but they were always the same: something about love, I thought, something about loss. The beach was artificial, someone had told us, they trucked tons of sand in to this particular cove; the rest of the coast was rocky, there was nowhere to bathe, though young men, despite the posted warnings, climbed the rock walls each summer to jump into the sea. The Roman wall along the old town was perpetually lit by floodlights bolted to the rocks beneath it. I had walked beside it earlier that day, with a friend who had traveled from Burgas so we could spend an hour or two together, and he had shown me where the original wall ended and modern reconstruction began, a thin strip of metal running between them. Only the lowest stones were ancient, and I knelt to lay my hands on them, jagged and pocked from the salt air, imagining the hands that, generations ago, had placed them there. This city had been a major port once, the Romans had dedicated it to Apollo, setting a great statue of the god like a guard against the sea, though the statue had disappeared long ago.

• 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 This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Chuck felt good too. His trunk had no guns in it. He had escaped Tina Flood, he had escaped prison, and before long he would escape me. We weren’t friends any more, but we both had cause to rejoice and this helped us imagine we were friends. We sang along with the radio and shared a bottle of Canadian Club that Chuck had brought along. The deejay was playing songs from two and three years before, songs that already made us nostalgic. The farther we got from Seattle the louder we sang. We were rubes, after all, and for a rube the whole point of a trip to the city is the moment of leaving it, the moment it closes behind his back like a trap sprung too late. The night was hazy. There was no moon. Farmhouse windows burned with a soft buttery light, as if they were under water. We went from farmland to forest and then picked up the river and followed the river into the mountains. I looked at the country we passed through with a lordly eye, allowing myself small stirrings of fondness for what I thought had failed to hold me. I did not know that the word home would forever after be filled with this place. The air grew clearer as we climbed, and colder. The curves followed fast on one another as the road took the snaky shape of the river. We could see the moon now, a thin silver moon swinging between the black treetops overhead. Chuck kept losing the radio station. Finally he turned off the radio, and we sang Buddy Holly songs for a while. When we got tired of those, we sang hymns. First we sang “I Walk to the Garden Alone” and “The Old Rugged Cross,” and a few other quiet ones, just to find our range and get in the spirit. Then we sang the roofraisers. We sang them with respect and we sang them hard, swaying from side to side and dipping our shoulders in counterpoint. Between hymns we drank from the bottle. Our voices were strong. It was a good night to sing and we sang for all we were worth, as if we’d been saved.

• From Story of O (1954)

  II Sir StephenThe apartment where O lived was situated on the Ile Saint-Louis, under the eaves of an old house which faced south and overlooked the Seine. All the rooms, which were spacious and low, had sloping ceilings, and the two rooms at the front of the house each opened onto a balcony set into the sloping roof. One of them was O’s room; the other, in which bookshelves filled one wall from floor to ceiling on either side of the fireplace, served as a living room, a study, and even as a bedroom in case of necessity. Facing the two windows was a big couch, and there was a large antique table before the fireplace. It was here that they dined whenever the tiny dining room, which faced the interior courtyard and was decorated with dark green serge, was really too small to accommodate the guests. Another room, which also looked onto the courtyard, was René’s, and it was here that he dressed and kept his clothes. O shared the yellow bathroom with him; the kitchen, also yellow, was tiny. A cleaning woman came in every day. The flooring of the rooms overlooking the courtyard was of red tile, those antique hexagonal tiles which in old Paris hotels are used to cover the stairs and landings above the second story. Seeing them again gave O a shock and made her heart beat faster: they were the same tiles as the ones in the hallways at Roissy. Her room was small, the pink and black chintz curtains were closed, the fire was glowing behind the metallic screen, the bed was made, the covers turned back. “I bought you a nylon nightgown,” René said. “You’ve never had one before.” Yes, a white pleated nylon nightgown, tailored and tasteful like the clothing of Egyptian statuettes, an almost transparent nightgown was unfolded on the edge of the bed, on the side where O slept. O tied a thin belt around her waist, over the elastic waistband of the nightgown itself, and the material of the gown was so light that the projection of the buttocks colored it a pale pink. Everything—save for the curtains and the panel hung with the same material against which the head of the bed was set, and the two small armchairs upholstered with the same chintz—everything in the room was white: the walls, the fringe around the mahogany four-poster bed, and the bearskin rug on the floor. Seated before the fire in her white nightgown, O listened to her lover.

• From Story of O (1954)

  After the Alma intersection, the Cours la Reine was visible because the trees were bare, and the Place de la Concorde sparkling and dry with, above it, the sort of sky which promises snow, but from which snow has not yet fallen. O heard a little click and felt the warm air rising around her legs: Sir Stephen had turned on the heater. René was still keeping to the Right Bank of the Seine, then he turned at the Pont Royal to cross over to the Left Bank: between its stone yokes, the water looked as frozen as the stone, and just as black. O thought of hematites, which are black. When she was fifteen her best friend, who was then thirty and with whom she was in love, wore a hematite ring set in a cluster of tiny diamonds. O would have liked a necklace of those black stones, without diamonds, a tight-fitting necklace, perhaps even a choker. But the necklaces that were given to her now—no, they were not given to her—would she exchange them for the necklace of hematites, for the hematites of the dream? She saw again the wretched room where Marion had taken her, behind the Turbigo intersection, and remembered how she had untied—she, not Marion—her two big schoolgirl pigtails when Marion had undressed her and laid her down on the iron bed. How lovely Marion was when she was being caressed, and it’s true that eyes can resemble stars; hers looked like quivering blue stars. René stopped the car. O did not recognize the little street, one of the cross streets which joins the rue de l’Université and the rue de Lille. Sir Stephen’s apartment was situated at the far end of a courtyard, in one wing of an old private mansion, and the rooms were laid out in a straight line, one opening into the next. The room at the very end was also the largest, and the most reposing, furnished in dark English mahogany and pale yellow and gray silk drapes. “I shan’t ask you to tend the fire,” Sir Stephen said to O, “but this sofa is for you. Please sit down, René will make coffee. I would be most grateful if you would hear what I have to say.”

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  Their puzzlement did not reflect theological naiveté, but the different significance of Paul for Protestants and Catholics. Crossan: I, on the other hand, grew up blissfully unaware of those battling interpretations of Paul or even of the fierce Reformation controversies about him. As a Catholic, I knew him first as the latter half of a June 29 feast day dedicated to Sts. Peter and Paul, and my memory says that in the Ireland of the late 1930s and early 1940s that was a Holy Day of Obligation—like a Sunday. Then, in 1945, in a classical boarding school in Ireland, I ran into “Romulus et Remus” and realized that the twin heroes of pagan Rome had been displaced by “Petrus et Paulus,” the twin heroes of Christian Rome—the double R ceding smoothly to the double P —with both individuals always in that given order. Next, in 1959, when I first stood in St. Peter’s Square in Rome and looked at the statues of St. Peter (on the basilica’s primary, or gospel, side) and St. Paul (on its secondary, or epistle, side), I realized that their unity was as apostles martyred together in Rome. Paul was not there as an author or a theologian, but as a martyr. But, of course, while Peter held his keys, Paul did not hold his epistles. I knew, by then, that there was already tension between Peter and Paul within the New Testament itself. Paul accused Peter “to his face” of “hypocrisy”—twice (Gal. 2:11–13). And, later, an author writing in Peter’s name noted that “our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given him…in all his letters. There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures” (2 Pet. 3:15–16). So those twin Roman statues in front of St. Peter’s represented a visual reconciliation of a process that went back to the fourth century, when Peter and Paul were emphasized together as the martyred founders of the new Christian Rome (match that, Constantinople!). Finally, then, I conclude with an iconic image of that foundational reconciliation from the later fourth century. It is a bronze hanging lamp from the villa of the aristocratic Valerii on the Celian Hill in Rome, now preserved in the National Archaeological Museum in Florence. The lamp is shaped like a boat. Peter is seated in the stern at the tiller. Paul is standing in the prow looking forward. Peter steers. Paul guides. And the boat sails full before the wind. In coauthoring this book in the “Year of Paul,” June 29, 2008, to June 29, 2009, as proclaimed by Pope Benedict XVI, our common hope is that we can get Paul out of the Reformation world and back into the Roman world, to see him properly as contrasting not Christianity to Judaism or Protestantism to Catholicism, but Jewish covenantal traditions to Roman imperial theology.

• 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.