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 Another Country (1962)

  It made him remember days and nights, days and nights, when he had been inside, on the stand or in the crowd, sharp, beloved, making it with any chick he wanted, making it to parties and getting high and getting drunk and fooling around with the musicians, who were his friends, who respected him. Then, going home to his own pad, locking his door and taking off his shoes, maybe making himself a drink, maybe listening to some records, stretching out on the bed, maybe calling up some girl. And changing his underwear and his socks and his shirt, shaving, and taking a shower, and making it to Harlem to the barber shop, then seeing his mother and his father and teasing his sister, Ida, and eating: spareribs or pork chops or chicken or greens or cornbread or yams or biscuits. For a moment he thought he would faint with hunger and he moved to a wall of the building and leaned there. His forehead was freezing with sweat. He thought: this is got to stop, Rufus. This shit is got to stop. Then, in weariness and recklessness, seeing no one on the streets and hoping that no one would come through the doors, leaning with one hand against the wall he sent his urine splashing against the stone-cold pavement, watching the faint steam rise. He remembered Leona. Or a sudden, cold, familiar sickness filled him and he knew he was remembering Leona. And he began to walk, very slowly now, away from the music, with his hands in his pockets and his head down. He no longer felt the cold. 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.

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

  I realized that the disease must have a deeper root cause than this, but this ridiculous arrangement could have focused Rebecca’s attention on food, making it a symbol of a deeper discontent. “Supper was no better,” I recalled. “I had to read to the community for fifteen minutes and bolt down my food in ten; you were up and down serving throughout the entire meal. They meant it kindly, I suppose. They wanted us to be free to go to compline with them after dinner.” Rebecca might joke about it, but the religious life had damaged her, as, in a different way, it had me. She took the car into the long drive, and through the avenue of cedars toward the fourteenth-century chapel. It all looked so peaceful: the sunlit lawns, the nineteenth-century school buildings, the old tower, the noviceship. We came to a halt before the front door. “How does it feel to be back?” Rebecca asked me. I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I said. But in fact, even after the disturbing revelations in the car, as soon as I stepped inside, something within me relaxed. In a strange way, it did feel like home. I could smell the polish, which we had made ourselves out of melted candle stubs. I could see the gleaming rust-and-gold tiles stretching ahead across the large courtyard near the front door, which I must have swept a hundred times. I looked at the huge crucifix on the wall. A bell clanged in the distance, a special signal to summon one of the nuns. Instinctively I counted the strokes: three clangs, then a pause, and then two further beats. Not my bell, then. But, I remembered, I didn’t have a bell anymore, because I didn’t belong. At the far end of the courtyard was the heavy enclosure door. If I opened it, I knew exactly what I would see: the cloister reaching far into the distance, the deep window embrasures, the double doors of the refectory, and at the corner, the pietà, a life-sized statue of Mary holding the dead Christ. But, of course, I was a secular, and the enclosure was barred to me now. Time and again during the next twenty-four hours, I felt caught up in a world that was so familiar that I responded automatically, as though I were still a member of the community: strolling with Rebecca down the country lanes, where we had walked almost every day for three years, frightening courting couples out of their wits when they saw this weird crocodile of nuns bearing down upon them; waking at night to hear the clock of the nearby Anglican church chime every quarter; laying down my book or coffee cup at the first sound of the bell that called the nuns to prayer. I felt drawn toward the old routine. And it was all so restful. The confusions of the outside world receded, and I felt strangely at peace.

• From Wild (2012)

  “Sometimes,” I said. “But not as much as you’d think.” My wet hair dripped onto my dirty shirt at the shoulders. I was conscious that my clothes stank, though beneath them I felt cleaner than I’d ever been. The shower had been an almost holy experience after days of sweating in the cold beneath my clothes, the hot water and soap scorching me clean. I noticed a few books scattered on the far end of the table—Norman Rush’s Mating, A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley, and The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx. They were books I’d read and loved, their covers like familiar faces to me, the mere sight of them making me feel as if I was somewhere like home. Perhaps Jeff and Christine would let me stay here with them, I thought nonsensically. I could be like one of their daughters, reading magazines while getting a tan on the deck. If they’d offered, I’d have said yes. “Do you like to read?” Christine asked. “That’s what we do when we come up here. That’s our idea of relaxation.” “Reading’s my reward at the end of the day,” I said. “The book I have right now is Flannery O’Connor’s Complete Stories.” I still had the entire book in my pack. I’d not burned it page by page as I went along, mindful that with the snow and the changes in my itinerary I didn’t know how long it’d be before I reached my next resupply box. I’d already read the whole thing and started back in on page one the night before. “Well, you’re welcome to one of these,” said Jeff, rising to take Mating in his hand. “We’re done with them. Or if that’s not your taste, you could probably take this one,” he said, and disappeared into the bedroom off the kitchen. He returned a moment later with a fat paperback by James Michener that he set near my now-empty plate. I looked at the book. It was called The Novel, which I’d never heard of or read, though James Michener had been my mother’s favorite author. It wasn’t until I’d gone off to college that I learned there was anything wrong with that. An entertainer for the masses, one of my professors had scoffed after inquiring what books I’d read. Michener, he advised me, was not the kind of writer I should bother with if I truly wanted to be a writer myself. I felt like a fool. All those years as a teen, I’d thought myself sophisticated when I’d been absorbed in Poland and The Drifters, Space and Sayonara. In my first month at college, I quickly learned that I knew nothing about who was important and who was not. “You know that isn’t a real book,” I’d said disdainfully to my mother when someone had given her Michener’s Texas as a Christmas gift later that year. “Real?” My mother looked at me, quizzical and amused.

• From Another Country (1962)

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

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

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

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

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

• From Dante's Divine Comedy (2001)

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

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  He had, somehow, acquired copies of all the keys to all the Britannia’s dusty, secret places - the cellars and the attics and the ancient property-rooms - and he would show me hampers full of costumes from the shows of the ‘fifties, papier-mâché crowns and sceptres, armour made of foil. Once or twice he led me up the great high ladders at the side of the stage, into the flies: here we would stand with our chins upon the rails, sharing a cigarette, gazing at the ash as it fluttered through the web of ropes and platforms to the boards, sixty feet below us.It was quite like being at Mrs Dendy’s again, with all our friends around us - except, of course, that Walter wasn’t one of them. He came only occasionally to the Brit, and hardly at all to Stamford Hill; when he did, I couldn’t bear to see him so ill at ease, and so found business of my own to keep me occupied elsewhere, and left Kitty to deal with him. She, I noticed, was as awkward and self-conscious as he when he came calling, and seemed to prefer his letters to his person - for he sent his news to her by post, these days, so drastically had our old friendship dwindled. But she said she did not mind, and I understood she didn’t wish to talk of something that was painful to her. I knew it must be very hard for her, to think that Walter had guessed her secret, and hated it. Chapter 7 [image "009" file=wate_9781101078198_oeb_009_r1.jpg] We had opened at the Brit on Boxing Day, and rehearsed all through the weeks before it. Christmas, therefore, had been rather swallowed up; and when Mother had written - as she had the year before - to ask me home for it, I had had to send another apologetic note, to say I was again too busy. It was now almost a year and a half since I had left them; a year and a half since I had seen the sea and had a decent fresh oyster-supper. It was a long time - and no matter how gloomy and spiteful Alice’s letter had made me, I could not help but miss them all and wonder how they fared. One day in January I came across my old tin trunk with its yellow enamel inscription. I lifted the lid - and found Davy’s map of Kent pasted on the underside, with Whitstable marked with a faded arrow, ‘To show me where home was, in case I forgot.’

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

  Jenifer had been right. Jacob did hunger for something that he could never have put into words. And I too had once had a similar hunger. I had wanted to be filled with God, transformed by a holiness that would bring me a fuller and more satisfying existence. But instead I had starved my mind and my heart, and that hunger had atrophied, died, and been replaced by a malaise with all things religious. And yet when I looked at Jacob, I felt nostalgia for what I had once been. Jacob did find something at Blackfriars, though none of us could explain what that was. His face was clear and peaceful; he was enjoying a little respite from the demons that plagued us both. “Now bend forward, Jacob,” Geoffrey said gently. Sprinkling a few drops of water on Jacob’s head, he raised his voice, which filled the little chapel triumphantly: “Jacob, I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” Jacob gave a long, audible sigh of satisfaction, while Jenifer and I, excluded from the source of this peace for very different reasons, exchanged glances and smiled slightly. The long, hot summer of 1976 was my last at Bedford College. In the autumn I would begin a new career as a schoolteacher, a prospect that filled me with gloom. Thanks to the failure of my thesis, I had no luck in my applications for academic posts, but when I started applying to high schools, I got the very first job I put in for. It was a good position in a prestigious school in South London, and there was a strong possibility of my being promoted to head of department in a year or so. But I just did not want to do it. I felt shades of the prison house begin to close around me, and I was determined, during these few sultry months, to have fun. I was befriended by a group of mature students at Bedford who were about my own age, and they invited me to their parties, introduced me to their friends, and life took on the hectic, crazy quality of a delayed adolescence. And of course, there were men. I would not dignify these encounters with the term “love affairs,” but there was at least some good humor and affection. I have not spoken at all in these pages about my so-called love life, because it has been a dead end. My more serious relationships have usually been (to paraphrase Hobbes) nasty, brutish, and not as short as they should have been. Last summer I was having dinner with two gay friends in upstate New York. They quizzed me about my single state, perhaps expecting me to come out to them. But to their delight and to the utter astonishment of the young waiter, who was uncorking our bottle of wine, I explained that I was a “failed heterosexual.”

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

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

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

  At each phrase, Jacob nodded to himself. There was poignancy in the phrase “with your whole mind,” but Jacob did know how to love, and Blackfriars had welcomed him lovingly. He approached Geoffrey slowly and stood quite still, while Geoffrey made the sign of the cross on his forehead and breast. I quailed slightly when he put a few grains of salt on Jacob’s tongue: at any other time, he would have spat it out with scant ceremony, but now he swallowed it gravely, while Geoffrey said the prescribed words: “Grant, we pray you, Lord, that your servant who tastes the savor of salt may no longer hunger but be filled with heavenly nourishment.” Jenifer had been right. Jacob did hunger for something that he could never have put into words. And I too had once had a similar hunger. I had wanted to be filled with God, transformed by a holiness that would bring me a fuller and more satisfying existence. But instead I had starved my mind and my heart, and that hunger had atrophied, died, and been replaced by a malaise with all things religious. And yet when I looked at Jacob, I felt nostalgia for what I had once been. Jacob did find something at Blackfriars, though none of us could explain what that was. His face was clear and peaceful; he was enjoying a little respite from the demons that plagued us both. “Now bend forward, Jacob,” Geoffrey said gently. Sprinkling a few drops of water on Jacob’s head, he raised his voice, which filled the little chapel triumphantly: “Jacob, I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” Jacob gave a long, audible sigh of satisfaction, while Jenifer and I, excluded from the source of this peace for very different reasons, exchanged glances and smiled slightly. The long, hot summer of 1976 was my last at Bedford College. In the autumn I would begin a new career as a schoolteacher, a prospect that filled me with gloom. Thanks to the failure of my thesis, I had no luck in my applications for academic posts, but when I started applying to high schools, I got the very first job I put in for. It was a good position in a prestigious school in South London, and there was a strong possibility of my being promoted to head of department in a year or so. But I just did not want to do it. I felt shades of the prison house begin to close around me, and I was determined, during these few sultry months, to have fun.

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

  In my first years with the Harts, I used to make the effort to hear Mass every Sunday at the Catholic Church in Mevagissey, which meant getting up extremely early and walking five miles over the cliffs. It had been a pleasant walk, even though I’d had to brave a field full of bullocks and sometimes tore my clothes on barbed-wire fences. The service itself, however, was less rewarding, the words of the Mass soullessly intoned by a priest who seemed bored and irritated with his congregation of holidaymakers, who were patently longing to get back to the beach as quickly as possible. But this Easter, I did not attempt the trek to Mevagissey. If anybody at Lamledra noticed this, they all tactfully forbore to mention it. I was surprised, even slightly shocked, that such a final break with religion had affected me so little. From the Harts’ atheist stronghold, the events of that first Holy Week —the suffering and death of Jesus and his rising from the tomb—seemed an obvious fiction, a mere myth, an arbitrary sequence of improbable events that bore no relevance to life in the twentieth century. But in the convent, when we had lived that myth step by step, moment by moment, from Ash Wednesday through the long journey of Lent all the way to Golgotha, the myth had meant something entirely different. Holy Week, the culmination of Lent, had always been a special time. We had sung the whole of the divine office every day, instead of chanting an abridged version. Each novice had to sing a chapter from the Lamentations of Jeremiah. The plaintive cadences of the Gregorian chant had penetrated our hearts; then there had been the drama of the Easter Vigil. I had never seriously questioned the myth itself because the liturgy, the fasting, and the strict silence of the convent during these days had re- created it, so that in some sense, whatever had happened in Jerusalem two thousand years before was not as important as the fact that the events had somehow been brought to life here and now. But without these rituals, the myth was dead. If you wanted to preserve your faith, the trick clearly was to keep practicing. If you stopped and looked at those rites and stories from the outside, they seemed absurd. Ludicrous, in fact. “Isn’t it Easter tomorrow?” one of the guests asked at supper. “Don’t talk about Easter and all that boring stuff!” Jacob commanded. Everybody laughed but broke off raggedly, looking rather warily at me. “Karen, do you insist on doing the washing up, so that Nanny can come upstairs with me?” “Yes, of course,” I said, grateful for the diversion. “As long as you don’t use the dishwasher,” Herbert muttered darkly. “I absolutely forbid anybody to use that dishwasher. It’s an absurd waste of—” “Karen, do you absolutely insist?” “Karen.”

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

  Put like that, it sounded so simple. Why had we tied ourselves up in such knots, sewing at needleless machines, performing archaic penances, and treating one another so coldly? And how could we have loved our neighbors and sisters in religion, when we had been taught to despise ourselves? At each phrase, Jacob nodded to himself. There was poignancy in the phrase “with your whole mind,” but Jacob did know how to love, and Blackfriars had welcomed him lovingly. He approached Geoffrey slowly and stood quite still, while Geoffrey made the sign of the cross on his forehead and breast. I quailed slightly when he put a few grains of salt on Jacob’s tongue: at any other time, he would have spat it out with scant ceremony, but now he swallowed it gravely, while Geoffrey said the prescribed words: “Grant, we pray you, Lord, that your servant who tastes the savor of salt may no longer hunger but be filled with heavenly nourishment.” Jenifer had been right. Jacob did hunger for something that he could never have put into words. And I too had once had a similar hunger. I had wanted to be filled with God, transformed by a holiness that would bring me a fuller and more satisfying existence. But instead I had starved my mind and my heart, and that hunger had atrophied, died, and been replaced by a malaise with all things religious. And yet when I looked at Jacob, I felt nostalgia for what I had once been. Jacob did find something at Blackfriars, though none of us could explain what that was. His face was clear and peaceful; he was enjoying a little respite from the demons that plagued us both. “Now bend forward, Jacob,” Geoffrey said gently. Sprinkling a few drops of water on Jacob’s head, he raised his voice, which filled the little chapel triumphantly: “Jacob, I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” Jacob gave a long, audible sigh of satisfaction, while Jenifer and I, excluded from the source of this peace for very different reasons, exchanged glances and smiled slightly.

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

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

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  That was with Agnes - how we laughed!’ Her voice sank a little. ‘It was just after that, that my troubles started ...’I remembered the Peckham Palace very well, for Kitty and I had only played there once. It had been in the December before we opened at the Brit, so rather near to the start of my own troubles. I said, ‘To think of you sitting there, with Agnes beside you; and me upon the stage, with Kitty Butler ...’She must have caught something in my tone, for she raised her eyes to mine and said: ‘And you don’t see Miss Butler at all, these days ... ?’ And when I shook my head, she looked knowing. ‘Well,’ she said then, ‘it’s something, ain’t it, to have been a star upon the stage!’I sighed. ‘I suppose it is. But -’ I had thought of something else. ‘You oughtn’t to let Mrs Lethaby hear you say it. She, well, she don’t quite care for the music hall.’She nodded. ‘I dare say.’ Then the clock upon the mantel struck the hour and, hearing it, she rose, and stubbed her fag out, and flapped her hand before her mouth to wave away the flavour of the smoke. ‘Lord, look at me!’ she cried. ‘I shall have Mrs Hooper after me.’ She reached for my empty coffee-cup, then picked up her tray and went to her scuttle of coal.Then she turned, and grew pink again. She said: ‘Will there be anything else, miss?’We gazed at one another for the space of a couple of heart-beats. She still had the smudge of coal-dust at her brow. I shifted beneath the sheets, and felt again that slippery spot between my thighs - only now, it was slipperier than ever. I had been fucking Diana every night, almost, for a year and a half. Fucking had come to seem to me like shaking hands - you might do it, as a kind of courtesy, with anyone. But would Zena have come and let me kiss her, if I had called her to the bed?I cannot say. I did not call her. I only said: ‘Thank you, Zena; there’s nothing else, just now.’ And she picked up the scuttle, and went.I had some squeamishness upon me about such matters, yet.And Diana, I knew, would have been furious. This, as I have said, was sometime in the autumn of that year. I remember that time, and the two or three months that followed it, very well, for they were busy ones: it was as if my stay with Diana were acquiring a kind of hectic intensity, as some sick people are said to do, as it hurtled towards its end.

• From Wild (2012)

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

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

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

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I think, one night, I might have stood outside the Britannia, collecting money for the dockers...’ She smiled. ‘I should have liked a chocolate sovereign, though.’ ‘Well, I should have made sure to throw you one...’ She lifted her glass to her lips, then thought of something else. ‘What happened,’ she asked, ‘to make you leave the theatre? If you were doing so well, why did you stop? What did you do?’ I had admitted to some things; but I wasn’t ready to admit to them all. I pushed my plate towards her. ‘Eat this pie for me,’ I said. Then I leaned past her and called down the table. ‘I say, Annie. Give me a cigarette, will you? This one’s a dud.’ ‘Well, since you’re a celebrity...’ Florence ate the pie, helped out by Ruth. The singers at the piano grew weary and hoarse, and went back to their billiards. The gay girls in the stall next door got up, and pinned on their hats: they were off, I suppose, to start work, in the more ordinary publics of Wapping and Limehouse. Nora yawned and, seeing her, we all yawned, and Florence gave a sigh. ‘Shall we go?’ she asked. ‘I think it must be very late.’ ‘It is almost midnight,’ said Miss Raymond. We stood, to button our coats on. ‘I must just have a word with Mrs Swindles,’ I said, ‘to thank her for my pie’; and when I had done that - and been seized and saluted by half-a-dozen women on the way — I wandered over to the billiard corner, and nodded to Jenny. ‘Good-night to you,’ I said. ‘I’m glad you won your shilling.’ She took my hand and shook it. ‘Good-night to you, Miss King! The shilling was nothing compared to the pleasure of having you here among us all.’ ‘Shall we see you here again, Nan?’ her friend with the tattoo called then. I nodded: ‘I hope so.’ ‘But you must sing us a proper song next time, on your own, in all your gentleman’s toggery.’ ‘Oh yes, you must!’ I made no answer, only smiled, and took a step away from them; then I thought of something, and beckoned to Jenny again. ‘That picture,’ I said quietly when she was close. ‘Do you think - would Mrs Swindles mind - do you think that I might have it, for myself?’ She put her hand to her pocket at once, and drew out the creased and faded photograph, and passed it to me. ‘You take it,’ she said; then she could not help but ask, a little wonderingly, ‘But have you none of your own?

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

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

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

  These are the sort of fragments which tease the waking mind on evenings like these, walking about in the wintry darkness; until at last I turn back to the crackling fire of olive-wood in the old-fashioned arched hearth where Justine lies asleep in her cot of sweet-smelling pine. How much of him can I claim to know? I realize that each person can only claim one aspect of our character as part of his knowledge. To every one we turn a different face of the prism. Over and over again I have found myself surprised by observations which brought this home to me. As for example when Justine said of Pombal, ‘one of the great primates of sex.’ To me my friend had never seemed predatory; only self-indulgent to a ludicrous degree. I saw him as touching and amusing, faintly to be cherished for an inherent ridiculousness. But she must have seen in him the great soft-footed cat he was (to her). And as for Pursewarden, I remember, too, that in the very act of speaking thus about religious ignorance he straightened himself and caught sight of his pale reflection in the mirror. The glass was raised to his lips, and now, turning his head he squirted out upon his own glittering reflection a mouthful of the drink. That remains clearly in my mind; a reflection liquefying in the mirror of that shabby, expensive room which seems now so appropriate a place for the scene which must have followed later that night. * * * * * Place Zagloul — silverware and caged doves. A vaulted cave lined with black barrels and choking with the smoke from frying whitebait and the smell of retzinnato. A message scribbled on the edge of a newspaper. Here I spilt wine on her cloak, and while attempting to help her repair the damage, accidentally touched her breasts. No word was spoken. While Pursewarden spoke so brilliantly of Alexandria and the burning library. In the room above a poor wretch screaming with meningitis.… * * * * * Today, unexpectedly, comes a squinting spring shower, stiffening the dust and pollen of the city, flailing the glass roof of the studio where Nessim sits over his croquis for his wife’s portrait. He has captured her sitting before the fire with a guitar in her hands, her throat snatched up by a spotted scarf, her singing head bent. The noise of her voice is jumbled in the back of his brain like the sound-track of an earthquake run backwards. Prodigious archery over the parks where the palm-trees have been dragged back taut; a mythology of yellow-maned waves attacking the Pharos. At night the city is full of new sounds, the pulls and stresses of the wind, until you feel it has become a ship, its old timbers groaning and creaking with every assault of the weather.