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 Every Woman's Battle: Discovering God's Plan for Sexual and Emotional Fulfillment (2003)

  Take your Bible, pen and paper (or a laptop computer), and plenty of Kleenex tissues for this retreat. The goal is to think back over your life and recall the most spiritually significant moments that shaped who you are. Make a “spiritual time line” from birth to present and map out the spiritual highs and lows of your life. Ask God to show you these spiritual markers and why He caused or allowed these things to happen. Discern how all these things have worked together for your good and for God’s glory. Seek to understand what your divine purpose in life has been. Then write a letter to your children explaining these events and communicating how the God who carried you through all of these mountaintops and valleys in life will also be the God who carries them through their brightest and bleakest days. Tell them what you hope they’ve learned from you and what you want them to remember after you are gone. My Great-uncle Dorsey (who was also a pastor) did something like this not long before he died. Using a handheld tape recorder and cassette tapes, he told stories from his childhood, memories from his days in World War II, and many of his favorite stories from the pulpit. There are not many family heirlooms treasured more than our own set of Uncle Dorsey’s tapes. Taking time to leave behind this unforgettable legacy of love will speak volumes to your children about your faith in Christ and your love for them. It will strengthen their own faith as well. [image file=image_rsrc244.jpg] As you are planning for your special retreat, don’t forget to take along a few things to make your time alone with God special and pleasurable to you. Here’s a packing list to help you prepare for a memorable retreat: • intimate worship or powerful Christian contemporary music and a CD player • an aromatic candle and matches • bubble bath and a razor to shave your legs • facial scrub and fragrant body lotion • manicure kit and nail polish • duraflame log for a fire in the fireplace if there is one • your favorite delicacies (leave the peanut butter and jelly at home, Mom! Go for the petite filet mignon and chocolate-covered strawberries!) • comfy pj’s, slippers, and your favorite blanket and pillow • Bible, a devotional book, a journal, and a pen • clothes and shoes to walk in Anticipate this experience as an exciting date. You are running away with your Lover, not confining yourself to a convent. Be creative and bask in the beauty of intimate time alone with God.

• From Another Country (1962)

  There was a pause. The girl looked at Vivaldo, looked away. “Well, I got to be going,” she said. “Nice running into you.” She was no longer smiling. “Nice seeing you,” said Rufus. After the girl had gone, Ida, said disapprovingly, “She used to be your girl friend, too.” Rufus ignored this. He said to Vivaldo, “She used to be a nice girl. Some cat turned her on, and then he split.” He spat on the sidewalk. “Man, what a scene.” Mrs. Scott halted before steps leading up into a tenement. Ida took Rufus by the arm. “I got to leave you children here,” said Mrs. Scott. She looked at Rufus. “What time you going to bring this girl home?” “Oh, I don’t know. It won’t be late. I know she want to go out night-clubbing but I ain’t going to let her get too drunk .” Mrs. Scott smiled and held out her hand to Vivaldo. “Nice meeting you, son,” she said. “You make Rufus bring you by again, you hear? Don’t you be a stranger.” “No ma’am. Thank you, I’ll come up again real soon.” But he never did see her again, not until Rufus was dead. Rufus had never invited him home again. “I’ll be seeing you later, young lady,” she said. She started up the steps. “You children have a good time.” She had been fourteen or fifteen that day. She would be twenty-one or twenty-two now. She had told him that she remembered that day; but he wondered how she remembered it. He had not seen her again until she had become a woman and at that time he had not remembered their first meeting. But he remembered it now. He remembered delight and discomfort. What did she remember? He thought, “I’ve got to get some sleep.” I’ve got to get some sleep . But the people in his novel massed against him. They seemed to watch him with a kind of despairing, beseeching reproach. His typewriter, a dark shapeless presence, accused him, reminding him of the days and nights, the weeks, the months, the years by now, that he had spent without sleep, pursuing easier and less honorable seductions. Then he turned on his belly and his sex accused him, his sex immediately filled with blood. He turned on his back with a furious sigh. He thought, I’m twenty-eight years old. I’m too old for this bit . He closed his eyes and he groaned. He thought, I’ve got to finish that damn novel , and he thought, Oh, God, make her love me, oh God, let me love . “What a wonderful day!” cried Ida.

• From Another Country (1962)

  He smiled—I bet mine’s bigger than yours is—but remembered occasional nightmares in which this same vanished buddy pursued him through impenetrable forests, came at him with a knife on the edge of precipices, threatened to hurl him down steep stairs to the sea. In each of the nightmares he wanted revenge. Revenge for what? He sat down again at his worktable. The page on the typewriter stared up at him, full of hieroglyphics. He read it over. It meant nothing whatever. Nothing was happening on that page. He walked back to the window. It was daylight now, and there were people on the streets, the expected, daytime people. The tall girl, with the bobbed hair and spectacles, wearing a long, loose coat, walked swiftly down the street. The grocery store was open. The old Rumanian who ran it carried in the case of milk which had been deposited on the sidewalk. He thought again that he had better get some sleep. He was seeing Ida today, they were having lunch with Richard and Cass. It was eight o’clock. He stretched out on the bed and stared up at the cracks in the ceiling. He thought of Ida. He had seen her for the first time about seven years ago. She had been about fourteen. It was a holiday of some kind and Rufus had promised to take her out. And perhaps the reason he had asked Vivaldo to come with him was because Vivaldo had had to loan him the money. Because I can’t disappoint my sister, man. It had been a day rather like today, bright, cold, and hard. Rufus had been unusually silent and he, too, had been uncomfortable. He felt that he was forcing himself in where he did not belong. But Rufus had made the invitation and he had accepted; neither of them could get out of it now. They had reached the house around one o’clock in the afternoon. Mrs. Scott had opened the door. She was dressed as though she, too, were going out, in a dark gray dress a little too short for her. Her hair was short but had lately been treated with the curling iron. She kissed Rufus lightly on the cheek. “Hey, there,” she said, “how’s my bad boy?” “Hey, yourself,” said Rufus, grinning. There was an expression on his face which Vivaldo had never seen before. It was a kind of teasing flush of amusement and pleasure; as though his mother, standing there in her high heels, her gray dress, and with her hair all curled, had just done something extraordinarily winning. And this flush was repeated in his mother’s darker face as she smiled—gravely—back at him. She seemed to take him in from top to toe and to know exactly how he had been getting along with the world. “This here’s a friend of mine,” Rufus said, “Vivaldo.”

• From Another Country (1962)

  This was not entirely true. He had run away from his mother at fifteen. Or, more accurately, they had established a peculiar truce, to the effect that he would make no trouble for her—that is, he would stay out of the hands of the law; and she would make no trouble for him—that is, she would not use his minority status as a means of having him controlled by the law. So Yves had lived by his wits in the streets of Paris, as a semi-tapette, and as a rat d’hôtel, until he and Eric had met. And during all this time, at great intervals, he visited his mother—when he was drunk or unbearably hungry or unbearably sad; or, rather, perhaps, he visited the bistro, which was different now. The long, curving counter had been replaced by a long, straight one. Neon swirled on the ceiling and above the mirrors. There were small, plastic-topped tables, in bright colors, and bright, plastic chairs instead of the wooden tables and chairs Yves remembered. There was a juke box now where the soldiers had clumsily manipulated the metal football players of the baby-foot; there were Coca-Cola signs, and Coca-Cola. The wooden floor had been covered with black plastic. Only the WC remained the same, a hole in the floor with foot-rests next to it, and torn newspaper hanging from a string. Yves went to the bistro blindly, looking for something he had lost, but it was not there any longer. He sat in the old, vanished corner and watched his mother. The hair which had been brown was now of a chemical and improbably orange vitality. The figure which had been light was beginning to thicken and spread and sag. But her laugh remained, and she still seemed, in a kind of violent and joyless helplessness, to be seeking and fleeing the hands of men. Eventually, she would come to his end of the bar. “Je t’offre quelque chose, M’sieu?” With a bright, forced, wistful smile. “Un cognac, Madame.” With a wry grin, and the sketch of a sardonic bow. When she was halfway down the bar, he yelled. “Un double!” “Ah! Bien sûr, M’sieu.” She brought him his drink and a small drink for herself, and watched him. They touched glasses. “A la vôtre, Madame.” “A la vôtre, M’sieu.” But sometimes he said: “A nos amours.” And she repeated dryly: “A nos amours!” They drank in silence for a few seconds. Then she smiled. “You look very well. You have become very handsome. I’m proud of you.” “Why should you be proud of me? I am just a good-for-nothing, it is just as well that I am good-looking, that’s how I live.” And he watched her. “Tu comprends, hein?” “If you talk that way, I want to know nothing, nothing, of your life!” “Why not? It is just like yours, when you were young. Or maybe even now, how can I tell?”

• From Every Woman's Battle: Discovering God's Plan for Sexual and Emotional Fulfillment (2003)

  The following is a list of personal convictions I have incorporated into my life about what I look at and listen to, along with explanations of why I’ve made these choices. (You’ll recognize the three-question filter mentioned earlier.) These convictions give me freedom to enjoy life without subjecting myself to temptations that might prove overwhelming. I hope they will spur your thinking about the ways that you can guard your mind against temptation as well. • I avoid looking at any form of pornography. I believe it is forbidden in Scripture according to number 4 on the Intimate Issues list of God’s sexual prohibitions (Impurity). It does not benefit my sex life, and it involves someone else outside my marriage. I don’t want to have my focus pulled away from my husband and on to a stranger. • I limit my television viewing and avoid watching daytime or evening soap operas. They do not benefit me in any way and are a waste of my time. Scripture prohibits the illicit scenarios on these shows. (They usually involve sex outside of marriage.) If there is a television show that I know will be uplifting and supportive of my Christian values, I’ll sit down to watch it. But once it’s over, so is my viewing time. I get up and move on to something more productive and beneficial. • I don’t listen to secular music. I have a lot of sexual memories that are attached to particular songs from my past. When I am out in public, I occasionally hear a song that sends me back to a particular place, time, or relationship, evoking memories I’d much rather forget. Funny how music has the power to do that. That is why I switched over ten years ago from my regular radio station to one that plays nothing but Christian contemporary music. Now when I hear a Christian song from my past, it brings to mind where I was spiritually when I first heard it. These musical spiritual markers remind me of how far God has brought me. With the wide variety of quality music today, Christian music is every bit as entertaining (and much more edifying!) as anything on the secular market. • I choose not to read romance novels. I consider steamy romance novels to be pornography for females. (The sexually graphic pictures are mental rather than visual, which is more alluring to women.) They often glamorize sex outside of marriage and can arouse us sexually. I am also careful about Christian romance novels if I find myself comparing my husband to the hero in the story and thinking about all the ways Greg doesn’t measure up. I want to protect my marriage by resisting any thoughts that may evoke feelings of disillusionment and disappointment with reality.

• From Another Country (1962)

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

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

  I can’t sing, but I was singing to myself. I’m certain, too, that the mountain of charts around me, thousands of patient stories, seeped into my consciousness as I began my foreword: It always wrenches me to find old appointment books filled with the half-forgotten names of patients with whom I have had the most tender experiences. So many people, so many fine moments. What has happened to them? My many-tiered file cabinets, my mounds of tape recordings often remind me of some vast cemetery: lives pressed into clinical folders, voices trapped on electromagnetic bands mutely and eternally playing out their drama. Living with these monuments imbues me with a keen sense of transiency. Even as I find myself immersed in the present, I sense the specter of decay watching and waiting—a decay that will ultimately vanquish lived experience and yet, by its very inexorability, bestows a poignancy and beauty. The desire to relate my experience with Ginny is a very compelling one; I am intrigued by the opportunity to stave off decay, to prolong the span of our brief life together. How much better to know that it will exist in the mind of the reader rather than in the abandoned warehouse of unread clinical notes and unheard electromagnetic tapes. Writing that foreword was a vital moment of transition. I searched for a more lyrical voice and at the same time turned my attention to the phenomenon of transiency, my entry point into an existential worldview. A bout the same time that I was seeing Ginny in therapy, I had another literary encounter. One of Marilyn’s colleagues presented us with a rare behind-the-scenes glance at Ernest Hemingway, who had committed suicide in 1961. In a university library her colleague had seen a cache of unpublished letters Hemingway had written to his friend Buck Lanham, the commanding general of one of the Normandy invasion armies. Though he was not permitted to copy them, Marilyn’s colleague furtively dictated the letters into a small recorder, transcribed them, and lent us his copy for a few days, permitting us to paraphrase but not quote from them. The letters shed considerable light on Hemingway’s psyche. I collected some more information by traveling to Washington, DC, to visit Buck Lanham, at that time an executive at Xerox, who was kind enough to speak to me of his friendship with Hemingway. After rereading many of Hemingway’s works, Marilyn and I hired babysitters and took off for a long, secluded weekend at the Villa Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, California, to collaborate on an article. Our article, “Hemingway: A Psychiatric View,” was published in 1971 in the Journal of the American Psychiatric Association and was instantaneously picked up by hundreds of newspapers around the world. Nothing that either of us has written, before or since, has ever attracted such attention. In the article we examined the sense of inadequacy underlying Hemingway’s blustering exterior.

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

  The procedure was straightforward: I read and reread the clinical incidents in this file until one seemed to quiver with energy, and I then proceeded to build my story around it. Many of the stories are of single consultations, and many describe older patients dealing with issues of later life, such as retirement, aging, and confrontation with death. As with all my writing (aside from The Spinoza Problem ), my target audience is still the young therapist needing guidance in the art of psychotherapy. As always, I sent my patients the final draft and obtained written permission—aside from two deceased patients who I knew would have given permission; I took care to disguise their identities even more deeply. The title Creatures of a Day comes from one of the meditations of Marcus Aurelius: “All of us are but creatures of a day: the rememberer and the remembered alike.” In the title story I describe a therapy session in which I learn that a patient has withheld important information from me, for fear of damaging my favorable image of him. As I explored his longing to persist in my mind, a longing so strong that it jeopardized his own therapy, I thought of Marcus Aurelius, whose Meditations I then happened to be reading. I walked over to my desk and showed him my copy of The Meditations and suggested he might find the book useful, because one meditation stressed the transient nature of existence and the idea that each of us is but a creature of a day. My story contains a subplot involving a second patient, to whom I also suggested reading Marcus Aurelius. Not uncommonly when I am in the midst of reading and relishing the work of an outstanding thinker, something arises in a therapy session that leads me to recommend that particular author to my patient. More often than not, this suggestion is a total fiasco, but in this true story (there are no fictional events in Creatures of a Day ), both patients embraced the book. Ironically, neither valued the particular message I had in mind but found other wise counsel in Marcus Aurelius. Nor is this unusual. The patient and the therapist are fellow travelers, and it is not uncommon for the patient to see and be nourished by sights along their journey that entirely escape the therapist.

• From Wild (2012)

  It seemed like years ago now—as I stood barefoot on that mountain in California—in a different lifetime, really, when I’d made the arguably unreasonable decision to take a long walk alone on the PCT in order to save myself. When I believed that all the things I’d been before had prepared me for this journey. But nothing had or could. Each day on the trail was the only possible preparation for the one that followed. And sometimes even the day before didn’t prepare me for what would happen next. Such as my boots sailing irretrievably off the side of a mountain. The truth is, I was only half sorry to see them go. In the six weeks I’d spent in those boots, I’d trekked across deserts and snow, past trees and bushes and grasses and flowers of all shapes and sizes and colors, walked up and down mountains and over fields and glades and stretches of land I couldn’t possibly define, except to say that I had been there, passed over it, made it through. And all the while, those boots had blistered my feet and rubbed them raw; they’d caused my nails to blacken and detach themselves excruciatingly from four of my toes. I was done with those boots by the time I lost them and those boots were done with me, though it’s also true that I loved them. They had become not so much inanimate objects to me as extensions of who I was, as had just about everything else I carried that summer—my backpack, tent, sleeping bag, water purifier, ultralight stove, and the little orange whistle that I carried in lieu of a gun. They were the things I knew and could rely upon, the things that got me through. I looked down at the trees below me, the tall tops of them waving gently in the hot breeze. They could keep my boots, I thought, gazing across the great green expanse. I’d chosen to rest in this place because of the view. It was late afternoon in mid-July, and I was miles from civilization in every direction, days away from the lonely post office where I’d collect my next resupply box. There was a chance someone would come hiking down the trail, but only rarely did that happen. Usually I went days without seeing another person. It didn’t matter whether someone came along anyway. I was in this alone. I gazed at my bare and battered feet, with their smattering of remaining toenails. They were ghostly pale to the line a few inches above my ankles, where the wool socks I usually wore ended. My calves above them were muscled and golden and hairy, dusted with dirt and a constellation of bruises and scratches. I’d started walking in the Mojave Desert and I didn’t plan to stop until I touched my hand to a bridge that crosses the Columbia River at the Oregon-Washington border with the grandiose name the Bridge of the Gods.

• From Another Country (1962)

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

• From Another Country (1962)

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

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  It is virtually inconceivable to us today how slow, unreliable and expensive it was to go online, how much patience it took to make a cantankerous modem do what it was supposed to, how much tweaking and troubleshooting it took for a process that never seemed to go smoothly. It is astounding that anyone ever followed through. Moses Znaimer had to jump through hoops just to get people to fiddle with a second dial on their TVs. What would it take for people to adopt this vastly more difficult device? What “killer event” would reward those who put in the hours to make this new technology a go? “It was for bonding and hanging out and exchanging porn,” recalled Annalee Newitz, on the phone from her home in Berkeley, California. Newitz, a journalist and author, writes about science, technology, science fiction and all things nerdy. She and the online world came of age at essentially the same time. “Hanging out” was a cumbersome process in those early days. Technological limitations allowed only a few people to log on simultaneously to a BBS, which meant that most communication happened asynchronously. The system allowed users to leave messages either publicly or privately, meaning that getting to know someone bore more resemblance to having a pen pal than attending a mixer. It was an intersection of intense geekery and old-fashioned courtship. “It’s like courtly love, because courtly love was based on love letters, on the exchange of text,” Newitz said. “I mean, there was also fucking and that’s great, but it was a very strong model of romantic love. I met one of my boyfriends in high school online through the courtly love method. It was romantic.” Romance and online erotica might seem mutually incompatible. But one of the most surprising things about the sexuality that drove people into cyberspace is that much of it was deeply personal, passionate and intimate. Investigating the power of pornography and erotica to transform how we communicate requires examining one most unexpected aspect of sexuality: passionate love. This idea was first suggested to me in a very different context. I was trading emails with Gaetan Brulotte, a professor of erotic literature who studied in France and now teaches at the University of South Florida in Tampa. “I am already convinced that erotica and also passionate love had a progressive influence on communication means throughout history,” he wrote. He was referring to a recurring motif whereby artists and writers were perpetually driven to find new ways to express love and sexual desire, to seduce and to tantalize. Time and time and time again, passionate love appears where you would least expect it in the story of technological development. BBSs and the Internet were without a doubt breeding grounds for the most perverted, skanky and cheap trade in pornography, but they were also places where people found new kinds of emotional connections and sexual liberation.

• From Another Country (1962)

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

• From Another Country (1962)

  She looked up at him. “When everything, touching and tasting—everything—was so new, and even suffering was wonderful because it was so complete.” “That’s hindsight, Cass. I wouldn’t want to be that young again for anything on earth.” But he knew what she meant. Her words had taken his mind away—for a moment—from his cruel visions of Ida and Ellis. (“You told me you hadn’t seen him since that party.” “Well. I did go to see him once, just to tell him about the jam session.” “Why did you have to see him, why didn’t you just call?” “I wasn’t sure he’d remember me from just over the phone. And then I didn’t tell you because I knew how you’d behave.” “I don’t care what you say, baby, I know what he’s after, he just wants to get inside your drawers.” “Oh, Vivaldo. You think I don’t know how to handle little snots like that?” And she gave him a look, which he did not know how to answer, which almost stated Look how I handled you .) But now he thought of himself at fifteen or sixteen—swimming in the Coney Island surf, or in the pool in his neighborhood; playing handball in the playground, sometimes with his father; lying in the gutter after a street fight, vomiting, praying that no enemy would take this occasion to kick his brains in. He remembered the fear of those days, fear of everything, covered with a mocking, staccato style, defended with the bullets of dirty words. Everything was for the first time; at fifteen or sixteen; and what was her name? Zelda. Could that possibly be right? On the roof, in the summertime, under the dirty city stars. All for the first time, in the days when acts had no consequences and nothing was irrecoverable, and love was simple and even pain had the dignity of enduring forever: it was unimaginable that time could do anything to diminish it. Where was Zelda now? She might easily have been transformed into the matron with fleshy, spreading buttocks and metallically unlikely blonde hair who teetered on high heels just before them now. She, too, somewhere, some day, had looked on and touched everything for the first time and felt the summer air on her breasts like a blessing and been entered and had the blood run out, for the first time. And what was Cass thinking? “Oh, no,” she said, slowly, “I certainly don’t mean that I want to be that miserable girl again. I was just remembering how different it was then—how different from now.” He put one arm around her thin shoulders. “You sound sad, Cass. Tell me what’s the matter.” He guided her into a dark, cool cocktail lounge. The waiter led them to a small table for two, took their orders, and disappeared.

• From Wild (2012)

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

• From Wild (2012)

  There was no house. No one had ever had a house on that land. Our forty acres were a perfect square of trees and bushes and weedy grasses, swampy ponds and bogs clotted with cattails. There was nothing to differentiate it from the trees and bushes and grasses and ponds and bogs that surrounded it in every direction for miles. Together we repeatedly walked the perimeter of our land in those first months as landowners, pushing our way through the wilderness on the two sides that didn’t border the road, as if to walk it would seal it off from the rest of the world, make it ours. And, slowly, it did. Trees that had once looked like any other to me became as recognizable as the faces of old friends in a crowd, their branches gesturing with sudden meaning, their leaves beckoning like identifiable hands. Clumps of grass and the edges of the now-familiar bog became landmarks, guides, indecipherable to everyone but us. We called it “up north” while we were still living in the town an hour outside of Minneapolis. For six months, we went up north only on weekends, working furiously to tame a patch of the land and build a one-room tarpaper shack where the five of us could sleep. In early June, when I was thirteen, we moved up north for good. Or rather, my mother, Leif, Karen, and I did, along with our two horses, our cats and our dogs, and a box of ten baby chicks my mom got for free at the feed store for buying twenty-five pounds of chicken feed. Eddie would continue driving up on weekends throughout the summer and then stay come fall. His back had healed enough that he could finally work again, and he’d secured a job as a carpenter during the busy season that was too lucrative to pass up. KarenCherylLeif were alone with our mother again—just as we’d been during the years that she’d been single. Waking or sleeping that summer, we were scarcely out of one another’s sight and seldom saw anyone else. We were twenty miles away from two small towns in opposite directions: Moose Lake to the east; McGregor to the northwest. In the fall we’d attend school in McGregor, the smaller of the two, with a population of four hundred, but all summer long, aside from the occasional visitor—far-flung neighbors who stopped by to introduce themselves—it was us and our mom. We fought and talked and made up jokes and diversions in order to pass the time. Who am I? we’d ask one another over and over again, playing a game in which the person who was “it” had to think of someone, famous or not, and the others would guess who it was based on an infinite number of yes or no questions: Are you a man? Are you American? Are you dead? Are you Charles Manson?

• From Wild (2012)

  “Okay, I made mine. Now it’s your turn,” he said. I stared at a star, but my mind only went from one thing to the next. “How early are you taking off tomorrow?” I asked. “At first light.” “Me too,” I said. I didn’t want to say goodbye to him the next morning. Trina, Stacy, and I had decided to hike and camp together the next couple of days, but Brent hiked faster than us, which meant he’d go on alone. “So did you make your wish?” he asked. “I’m still thinking.” “It’s a good time to make one,” he said. “It’s our last night in the Sierra Nevada.” “Goodbye, Range of Light,” I said to the sky. “You could wish for a horse,” Brent said. “Then you wouldn’t have to worry about your feet.” I looked at him in the dark. It was true—the PCT was open to both hikers and pack animals, though I hadn’t yet encountered any horseback riders on the trail. “I used to have a horse,” I said, turning my gaze back to the sky. “I had two, actually.” “Well then, you’re lucky,” he said. “Not everyone gets a horse.” We were silent together for several moments. I made my wish. PART FOUR WILDWhen I had no roof I made Audacity my roof. ROBERT PINSKY, “Samurai Song” Never never never give up. WINSTON CHURCHILL 11 THE LOU OUT OF LOUI was standing by the side of the highway just outside the town of Chester, trying to hitch a ride, when a man driving a silver Chrysler LeBaron pulled over and got out. Over the past fifty-some hours, I’d hiked fifty miles with Stacy and Trina and the dog, from Belden Town to a place called Stover Camp, but we’d split up ten minutes before when a couple in a Honda Civic had stopped, announcing that they only had room for two of us. “You go,” we’d each said to the other; “no, you go”—until I insisted and Stacy and Trina got in, Odin lumbering behind them to sit wherever he could, while I assured them I’d be fine. And I would be fine, I thought, as the man who drove the Chrysler LeBaron made his way toward me on the gravel shoulder of the road, though I felt a sick flutter in my gut as I attempted to discern, in the flash of a second, what his intentions were. He looked like a nice enough guy, a few years older than me. He was a nice guy, I decided, when I glanced at the bumper of his car. On it, there was a green sticker that said IMAGINE WHIRLED PEAS. Has there ever been a serial killer who imagined whirled peas?

• From Another Country (1962)

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

• From Another Country (1962)

  For to remember Leona was also—somehow—to remember the eyes of his mother, the rage of his father, the beauty of his sister. It was to remember the streets of Harlem, the boys on the stoops, the girls behind the stairs and on the roofs, the white policeman who had taught him how to hate, the stickball games in the streets, the women leaning out of windows and the numbers they played daily, hoping for the hit his father never made. It was to remember the juke box, the teasing, the dancing, the hard-on, the gang fights and gang bangs, his first set of drums—bought him by his father—his first taste of marijuana, his first snort of horse. Yes: and the boys too far out, jackknifed on the stoops, the boy dead from an overdose on a rooftop in the snow. It was to remember the beat: A nigger, said his father, lives his whole life, lives and dies according to a beat. Shit, he humps to that beat and the baby he throws up in there, well, he jumps to it and comes out nine months later like a goddamn tambourine. The beat: hands, feet, tambourines, drums, pianos, laughter, curses, razor blades; the man stiffening with a laugh and a growl and a purr and the woman moistening and softening with a whisper and a sigh and a cry. The beat—in Harlem in the summertime one could almost see it, shaking above the pavements and the roof. And he had fled, so he had thought, from the beat of Harlem, which was simply the beat of his own heart. Into a boot camp in the South, and onto the pounding sea.

• From Little Women (1868)

  IN THE GARRET Four little chests all in a row, Dim with dust, and worn by time, All fashioned and filled, long ago, By children now in their prime. Four little keys hung side by side, With faded ribbons, brave and gay When fastened there, with childish pride, Long ago, on a rainy day. Four little names, one on each lid, Carved out by a boyish hand, And underneath there lieth hid Histories of the happy band Once playing here, and pausing oft To hear the sweet refrain, That came and went on the roof aloft, In the falling summer rain. "Meg" on the first lid, smooth and fair. I look in with loving eyes, For folded here, with well-known care, A goodly gathering lies, The record of a peaceful life— Gifts to gentle child and girl, A bridal gown, lines to a wife, A tiny shoe, a baby curl. No toys in this first chest remain, For all are carried away, In their old age, to join again In another small Meg's play. Ah, happy mother! Well I know You hear, like a sweet refrain, Lullabies ever soft and low In the falling summer rain. "Jo" on the next lid, scratched and worn, And within a motley store Of headless dolls, of schoolbooks torn, Birds and beasts that speak no more, Spoils brought home from the fairy ground Only trod by youthful feet, Dreams of a future never found, Memories of a past still sweet, Half-writ poems, stories wild, April letters, warm and cold,