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 Birthday Girl (2018)

  Se aclara la garganta y se endereza. —Bueno, es como Bruce Willis —explica—. Podría verlo fumar durante días. Es como si estuviese comiendo. Comiendo un agradable, suculento... —Filete —termino por ella, comprendiéndolo. —Exacto. —Me lanza una suave sonrisa—. Lo posee totalmente. Es parte de su vestuario. —Bueno. —Suspiro, recogiendo nuestros platos—. No comiences a fumar. —Tú lo haces. Me detengo, bajando la mirada hacia ella. Solo he fumado una vez desde que se mudaron y nunca fumo en casa. Ni siquiera creo que Cole sepa que fumo. Probablemente viendo la confusión en mi rostro, aclara: —Noté la colilla de cigarro en el cenicero de afuera. Ah. Me dirijo a la cocina, rodeando la mesa de café mientras llevo los platos. —En raras ocasiones, sí. Me gusta el olor. —¿Por qué? —Se levanta del sofá, tomando las latas vacías de soda y servilletas mientras me sigue. —Simplemente me gusta. —Limpio los platos y los coloco en el lavavajillas—. Mi abuelo fumaba, así que... Parecía natural comenzar a compartir, pero de repente se siente estúpido. —¿Así que...? —insiste. Pero simplemente sacudo la cabeza, cerrando el lavavajillas y poniéndolo en marcha. —Solo me gusta el olor, es todo. —Termino bruscamente. No estoy seguro de por qué estoy teniendo problemas para hablar con ella. No hay ningún misterio. Mi abuelo era increíble, tuve una gran infancia, pero mientras más crezco, más alejado me siento del sentimiento de cuando tenía ocho años. El sentimiento de estar en algún lugar que amaba y sintiendo lo que sentía. Felicidad. Fumo cigarros de vez en cuando para transportarme allí. Aunque no es el tipo de cosas con las que me siento cómodo compartiendo. Pero es divertido lo cerca que llegué a estar de hacer eso con ella hace un momento.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  The letter’s informality just might free you from the tyranny of perfectionism. You might address the letter to your children, if you have a few lying around, or to a niece or nephew, or to a friend. Write that person’s name at the top of the page, and then in your first line, explain that you are going to tell them part of your story, entrust it to them, because this part of your life meant so much to you. Some of the best pieces to come out of my classes have been written by people who wanted to tell their children about their own childhoods, or about their children’s childhoods, what the years were like just before these children were born and then after, in that first house the family lived in, down the hill from the little white church, or about those years in the Peace Corps, in that tiny wild brilliant African village, or what it was like to work on a whaling ship in the forties. A man in one of my classes, who was raised in a family of foot-washing Baptists, wrote a two-hundred-page letter to his children about his childhood in the South, how he escaped, and his years on an Alaskan whaler, where he found God and later, in port, their mother. A woman in a class many years ago wrote a novella-length letter to her daughter about life as a Chinese American nurse living in São Paulo; it included everything she could remember having seen and felt and thought. She read part of it to our class. It was just beautiful, intimate, funny in places, and sad. People cried. Then she used it as a plot treatment for a novel. A magazine editor recently asked me to write an essay about being a lifelong Giants fan, which I have been, but the anxiety about publication made my mind go suddenly blank. All I could remember at first was coming into the kitchen of the little coffee-colored house where I grew up to find my mother and older brother hunched over the radio listening to a Giants game with such concentration that it might have been the first news reports from Pearl Harbor.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  Just the best ones.” Dad, who usually liked debates on questions such as whether a bag of things is one thing, was not in the mood and told me the rocks were too heavy. “You can bring one,” he said. “There are plenty of rocks in Phoenix,” Mom added. I picked out a single geode, its insides coated with tiny white crystals, and held it in both hands. As we pulled out, I looked through the rear window for one last glimpse of the depot. Dad had left the upstairs light on, and the small window glowed. I thought of all those other families of miners and prospectors who had come to Battle Mountain hoping to find gold and who had to leave town like us when their luck ran out. Dad said he didn’t believe in luck, but I did. We’d had a streak of it in Battle Mountain, and I wished it had held. We passed the Green Lantern, with the Christmas lights twinkling over its door, and the Owl Club, with the winking neon owl in a chef’s hat, and then we were out in the desert, the lights of Battle Mountain disappearing behind us. In the pitch-black night, there was nothing to look at but the road ahead, lit by the car’s headlights. GRANDMA SMITH’S BIG white house had green shutters and was surrounded by eucalyptus trees. Inside were tall French doors and Persian carpets and a huge grand piano that would practically dance when Grandma played her honky-tonk music. Whenever we stayed with Grandma Smith, she brought me into her bedroom and sat me down at the vanity table, which was covered with little pastel-colored bottles of perfumes and powders. While I opened the bottles and sniffed them, she’d try to run her long metal comb through my hair, cursing out of the corner of her mouth because it was so tangled. “Doesn’t that goddamn lazy-ass mother of yours ever comb your hair?” she once said. I explained that Mom believed children should be responsible for their own grooming. Grandma told me my hair was too long anyway. She put a bowl on my head, cut off all the hair beneath it, and told me I looked like a flapper. That was what Grandma used to be. But after she had her two children, Mom and our uncle Jim, she became a teacher because she didn’t trust anyone else to educate them. She taught in a one-room schoolhouse in a town called Yampi. Mom hated being the teacher’s daughter. She also hated the way her mother constantly corrected her both at home and at school. Grandma Smith had strong opinions about the way things ought to be done—how to dress, how to talk, how to organize your time, how to cook and keep house, how to manage your finances—and she and Mom fought each other from the beginning. Mom felt that Grandma Smith nagged and badgered, setting rules and punishments for breaking the rules.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  In musical harmony, in the rain on your face and the sun on your bare shoulders, in the morning dew that soaked your sneakers and the wildflowers you picked for free in the roadside ditch, in love at first sight and those sad memories of the one who got away. "Find the magic," Mom always said. "And if you can't find the magic," she added, "then make the magic." The three of us were magic, Mom liked to say. She assured us that no matter how famous she became, nothing would ever be more important to her than her two girls. We were a tribe of three, she said. Three was a perfect number, she'd go on. Think of it. The holy trinity, three musketeers, three kings of Orient, three little pigs, three stooges, three blind mice, three wishes, three strikes, three cheers, three's a charm. The three of us were all we needed, Mom said. But that didn't keep her from going out on dates with tire-kickers. Continue Reading… [image "The Silver Star Cover" file=Image00015.jpg] The Silver Star Jeannette Walls Jeannette Walls on her second novel Half Broke Horses This is a book about my grandmother, Lily Casey Smith. It was originally meant to be about my mother's childhood growing up on a 180,000-acre cattle ranch in Arizona. But as I talked to Mom about those years, she kept insisting that her mother was the one who had led the truly interesting life and that the book should be about Lily. My grandmother was—and I say this with all due respect—quite a character. Born in a dugout house off the Pecos River, she'd been at times a cowgirl, horse trainer, mustang breaker, jockey, airplane pilot, and Chicago flapper as well as a mother and teacher who helped her husband run that huge ranch. However, at first I resisted writing about her. While I had been close to her as a child, she died when I was eight, and most of what I knew about her came secondhand. Still, I'd been hearing the stories about Lily Casey Smith all my life, stories she told over and over to my mother, who told them to me. Lily was a spirited woman, a passionate teacher and talker who explained in great detail what had happened to her, why it had happened, what she'd done about it, and what she'd learned from it, all with the idea of imparting life lessons to my mother. My mother—who struggles to remember my phone number—has an astonishing recall for details about her mother and father and about their parents as well as an amazing knowledge of the history and geology of Arizona. She never once told me something, whether about the Havasupai tribe or the Mogollon Rim, slaughtering cattle or breaking horses, that I could not confirm.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  Life really is so short. And finally I felt that my jealousy and I were strangely beautiful, like the men in the AIDS movie, doing the dance of the transformed self, dancing like an old long-legged bird. Part ThreeHelp Along the Way Index CardsI like to think that Henry James said his classic line, “A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost,” while looking for his glasses, and that they were on top of his head. We have so much to remember these days. So we make all these lists, filled with hope that they will remind us of all the important things to do and buy and mail, all the important calls we need to make, all the ideas we have for short stories or articles. And yet by the time you get around to everything on any one list, you’re already behind on another. Still, I believe in lists and I believe in taking notes, and I believe in index cards for doing both. I have index cards and pens all over the house—by the bed, in the bathroom, in the kitchen, by the phones, and I have them in the glove compartment of my car. I carry one with me in my back pocket when I take my dog for a walk. In fact, I carry it folded lengthwise, if you need to know, so that, God forbid, I won’t look bulky. You may want to consider doing the same. I don’t even know you, but I bet you have enough on your mind without having to worry about whether or not you look bulky. So whenever I am leaving the house without my purse—in which there are actual notepads, let alone index cards—I fold an index card lengthwise in half, stick it in my back pocket along with a pen, and head out, knowing that if I have an idea, or see something lovely or strange or for any reason worth remembering, I will be able to jot down a couple of words to remind me of it. Sometimes, if I overhear or think of an exact line of dialogue or a transition, I write it down verbatim. I stick the card back in my pocket. I might be walking along the salt marsh, or out at Phoenix Lake, or in the express line at Safeway, and suddenly I hear something wonderful that makes me want to smile or snap my fingers—as if it has just come back to me—and I take out my index card and scribble it down. I have an index card beside me right now on which I scribbled, “Pammy, Demi Moore.” Those words capture an entire movie for me, of one particular day last year, six months before Pammy died. We were outside in her garden. The sky was blue and cloudless, everything was in bloom, and she wore a little lavender cotton cap. She was doing very well that day, except that she was dying.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  And all I can say is that I have them, I took notes on them, and the act of having written something down gives me a fifty-fifty shot at having it filed away now in my memory. If I’m working on a book or an article, and I’ve taken some notes on index cards, I keep them with that material, paperclip them to a page of rough draft where that idea or image might bring things to life. Or I stack them on my desk along with the pages for the particular chapter or article I’m working on, so I can look at them. When I get stuck or lost or the jungle drums start beating in my head, proclaiming that the jig is about to be up and I don’t know what I’m doing and the well has run dry, I’ll look through my index cards. I try to see if there’s a short assignment on any of them that will get me writing again, give me a small sense of confidence, help me put down one damn word after another, which is, let’s face it, what writing finally boils down to. There are index cards on my desk that record things I thought of or saw or remembered or overheard in the last week or so. There are index cards from a couple of years ago. There is even one index card from six or seven years ago, when I was walking along the salt marsh between Sausalito and Mill Valley. Bicyclists were passing me on both sides, and I wasn’t paying much attention until suddenly a woman rode past wearing some sort of lemon perfume. And in a split second I was in one of those Proustian olfactory flashbacks, twenty-five or so years before, in the kitchen of one of my aunts, with her many children, my cousins, on a hot summer’s day. I was the eldest, at eight or so, and my aunt and uncle had just gotten divorced. She was sad and worried, and I think to soothe herself and help her wounded ego, she had done a little retail therapy: she’d gone to the store and spent several dollars on a lemonade-making contraption. Of course, it goes without saying that to make lemonade, all you need is a pitcher, a lemon-juice squeezer, ice cubes, water, lemons, and sugar. That’s all. Oh, and a long spoon. But my aunt was a little depressed, and this lemonade-making thing must have seemed like something that would be fun and would maybe hydrate her life a little, filling her desiccated spirit with nice, cool, sweet lemonade.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  Bad juju. If you so much as glanced at him, a visible empathetic arc would stretch between you, almost like a rainbow, and link you two in the minds of your peers forever . And then there was the matter of the wrapping paper; waxed paper and later Saran wrap. If code lunches were about that intense desire for one thing in life to be Okay, or even just to appear to be Okay, when all around you and at home and inside you things were so chaotic and painful, then it mattered that it not look like Jughead had wrapped your sandwich. A code lunch suggested that someone in your family was paying attention, even if in your heart you knew that your parents were screwing up left and right. So it was a little like making your bed at lunch. Everything should be squared. Sandwiches should be wrapped with hospital corners. Right? Okay. That’s all. But now I have this material to choose from, to work with, to shape, edit, highlight, or toss. (And that’s very nice of you to suggest the latter.) This is my version of school lunches. Yours might be different and I would be interested in hearing about it. (Now don’t get me wrong. I am not suggesting you mail it to me. But I bet it reveals some interesting stuff about you and your family and the times in which you grew up.) And even though what I’ve quoted here is shitty-first-draft stuff, the boy against the fence appeared out of nowhere—I had no idea when I started writing that he was in my memory. To me, he is the most important thing that came out of this exercise. Tomorrow when I sit down to work on my novel, he will be someone who matters to me, whom I want to work with, get to know, who has something important to say or somewhere only he can take me. PolaroidsWriting a first draft is very much like watching a Polaroid develop. You can’t—and, in fact, you’re not supposed to—know exactly what the picture is going to look like until it has finished developing. First you just point at what has your attention and take the picture. In the last chapter, for instance, what had my attention were the contents of my lunch bag. But as the picture developed, I found I had a really clear image of the boy against the fence. Or maybe your Polaroid was supposed to be a picture of that boy against the fence, and you didn’t notice until the last minute that a family was standing a few feet away from him.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  Life really is so short. And finally I felt that my jealousy and I were strangely beautiful, like the men in the AIDS movie, doing the dance of the transformed self, dancing like an old long-legged bird. Part ThreeHelp Along the Way Index CardsI like to think that Henry James said his classic line, “A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost,” while looking for his glasses, and that they were on top of his head. We have so much to remember these days. So we make all these lists, filled with hope that they will remind us of all the important things to do and buy and mail, all the important calls we need to make, all the ideas we have for short stories or articles. And yet by the time you get around to everything on any one list, you’re already behind on another. Still, I believe in lists and I believe in taking notes, and I believe in index cards for doing both. I have index cards and pens all over the house—by the bed, in the bathroom, in the kitchen, by the phones, and I have them in the glove compartment of my car. I carry one with me in my back pocket when I take my dog for a walk. In fact, I carry it folded lengthwise, if you need to know, so that, God forbid, I won’t look bulky. You may want to consider doing the same. I don’t even know you, but I bet you have enough on your mind without having to worry about whether or not you look bulky. So whenever I am leaving the house without my purse—in which there are actual notepads, let alone index cards—I fold an index card lengthwise in half, stick it in my back pocket along with a pen, and head out, knowing that if I have an idea, or see something lovely or strange or for any reason worth remembering, I will be able to jot down a couple of words to remind me of it. Sometimes, if I overhear or think of an exact line of dialogue or a transition, I write it down verbatim. I stick the card back in my pocket. I might be walking along the salt marsh, or out at Phoenix Lake, or in the express line at Safeway, and suddenly I hear something wonderful that makes me want to smile or snap my fingers—as if it has just come back to me—and I take out my index card and scribble it down. I have an index card beside me right now on which I scribbled, “Pammy, Demi Moore.” Those words capture an entire movie for me, of one particular day last year, six months before Pammy died. We were outside in her garden. The sky was blue and cloudless, everything was in bloom, and she wore a little lavender cotton cap. She was doing very well that day, except that she was dying.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  And all I can say is that I have them, I took notes on them, and the act of having written something down gives me a fifty-fifty shot at having it filed away now in my memory. If I’m working on a book or an article, and I’ve taken some notes on index cards, I keep them with that material, paperclip them to a page of rough draft where that idea or image might bring things to life. Or I stack them on my desk along with the pages for the particular chapter or article I’m working on, so I can look at them. When I get stuck or lost or the jungle drums start beating in my head, proclaiming that the jig is about to be up and I don’t know what I’m doing and the well has run dry, I’ll look through my index cards. I try to see if there’s a short assignment on any of them that will get me writing again, give me a small sense of confidence, help me put down one damn word after another, which is, let’s face it, what writing finally boils down to. There are index cards on my desk that record things I thought of or saw or remembered or overheard in the last week or so. There are index cards from a couple of years ago. There is even one index card from six or seven years ago, when I was walking along the salt marsh between Sausalito and Mill Valley. Bicyclists were passing me on both sides, and I wasn’t paying much attention until suddenly a woman rode past wearing some sort of lemon perfume. And in a split second I was in one of those Proustian olfactory flashbacks, twenty-five or so years before, in the kitchen of one of my aunts, with her many children, my cousins, on a hot summer’s day. I was the eldest, at eight or so, and my aunt and uncle had just gotten divorced. She was sad and worried, and I think to soothe herself and help her wounded ego, she had done a little retail therapy: she’d gone to the store and spent several dollars on a lemonade-making contraption. Of course, it goes without saying that to make lemonade, all you need is a pitcher, a lemon-juice squeezer, ice cubes, water, lemons, and sugar. That’s all. Oh, and a long spoon. But my aunt was a little depressed, and this lemonade-making thing must have seemed like something that would be fun and would maybe hydrate her life a little, filling her desiccated spirit with nice, cool, sweet lemonade.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  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. It seems that I must take you home and rid you of it. Now, who will ride with us to Felicity Place, to catch the sport ...’ There was a ripple around the room. Maria rose at once, and reached for her walking-cane. ‘Tantivy, tantivy!’ she cried. Then: ‘Ho, Satin!’ I heard a yelp, and from beneath her chair there came - what I had not seen before, as it lay dozing behind the curtain of her skirts - a handsome little whippet, on a pig-skin leash. Dickie and Evelyn rose too, then. Diana inclined her head to Miss Bruce, and I made her a deeper bow.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  This collection was also very mixed, and very dusty. There was a good supply of shilling classics - Longfellow, Dickens, that sort of thing - and one or two cheap novels; but there were also a number of political texts, and two or three volumes of what might be called interesting verse. At least one of these - Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass - I had seen before on Diana’s bookshelves at Felicity Place. I had tried to read it once in an idle moment: I had thought it terribly dull. These shelves and their contents claimed my attention for a minute or so; it was seized after that by two pictures which hung from the rail above. The first of these was a family portrait, and as stiff, as quaint and as marvellously intriguing as other families’ portraits always are. I looked for Florence first, and found her - aged, perhaps, fifteen or so, and very fresh and plump and earnest - seated between a white-haired lady and a younger, darker girl, who had the beginnings of a barmaid’s flash good looks about her and must, I thought, be a sister. Behind them stood three boys: Ralph, minus his sailor’s whiskers and wearing a very high collar; a rather older brother who looked very much like him; and an older brother again. There was no father. The second portrait was a picture-postcard photograph: it had been placed in the edge of the large picture’s frame, but its corner curled a little, showing a loop of faded writing on the back. The subject of the portrait was a woman - a heavybrowed woman with untidy dark hair: she seemed to be sitting very squarely, and her gaze was rather grave. I thought she might be the sister from the family group, grown up; or she might be a friend of Florence’s, or a cousin, or - well, anybody. I leaned over to try to read the handwriting that showed where the card curled over; but it was hidden, and I didn’t like to pluck it free - it wasn’t that intriguing. Then I caught the bubbling of the pan of water I had set upon the stove, and hurried out to see to it. I found a little tin bowl to wash in, and a block of green kitchen soap; and then - since there was no towel, and I didn’t think it really polite to use the dish-cloth - I danced about before the range until I was dry enough to climb back into my dirty petticoats. I thought, with a little sigh, of Diana’s handsome bathroom - of that cabinet of unguents that I had liked to sample for hours at a time.

• From City of Night (1963)

  I imagined the fat body in drag as Darling Dolly Dane had described it, and I laughed. “Sure. Why not?” And Chuck says: “Man, you gotta admire those dam queens like Darlin Dolly an them.... They sure have got guts. They live the way they gotta live....” 2 The sun is shifting, shadows stretching. And the Pershing Square panorama, in preparation for the night, is exhibiting itself in all its flashy afternoon shreds. The dismal old tramps sit in wrecked heaps. New preachers have invaded the park. New hustlers. New scores. Jenny Lu is at it again. And the angelsisters are hymning in the distance about how much Jesus loves them. A man in black preaching charity is saying: “Give!—instead of selling! Giving! is an act: of Right-eousness!” Chuck said: “You notice lately in the park how many guys want you to go with them for free?” The preacher shouts: “Idleness!” Chuck: “Man, I am gettin tired jes sittin here.” “Ignorance!” Chuck: “You know, I never could stay in school without cutting. Man, I used to look out that window an then jes run out—an that old teacher, man, she even throwed a rock at me once.” “Selfishness!” Chuck: “Yeah, a lot of guys you think are scores—they wanna get you for free.” He shook his head. Now, in the increasing warmth, he rolled up his shirt sleeves, scratched his arm—lovingly—where the tattoo is, proclaiming, amid leaves and rosebuds: DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR.... “My old lady,” he explained, “she akchoolly went with me when I had this here Tattoo put on me. Ma, she says: ‘It’s kinda sweet, having somethin like “Mom” on your arm’—but I guess, she figures—well—”... He smiled brightly, remembering the longago scene with apparent fondness. “Did I ever tell you that story?” I shook my head. During the months I had been in Los Angeles, I had been with Chuck many times, sitting often on this very corner with him—but, before, he had never been this talkative. Something about the afternoon is making communication easier. And for me, in the midst of the turmoil of my own life, he seems like a kind of symbolic anchor.... Yet I constantly expected a contradiction to the easiness. But there had been none. “See, when I got this Tattoo,” he was saying, “it was back in Georgia where I was born....” “Georgia? I thought you were from Texas.” He smiled embarrassedly. “Well, see, I always tell people I am from Texas—cause I was hung up on being a Cowboy—an I akchoolly lived there, too.... See, when I was a kid, I used to go to these movies—Westerns—... Oh, no, man, it was not Texas. It was Georgia all right—...”

• From City of Night (1963)

  I smile now at the thought of his Texas and the Texas I had known: the city, not the plains of which he had dreamily conceived in Georgia, longing for Cowboy Country. The cactusstrewn desert... not the cactus which for me had grown in a feeble cluster outside that window, in that vacant lot... The Texas I knew.... Memories of the wind... the dirt... tumbleweeds... my dead dog.... That wind blowing not freely across the plains but threateningly sweeping the paved streets into that injured house... El Paso... Texas... for me, not the great-stretching, wide-plained land of the movies—but the crushing city where I had been raised in stifling love and hatred. Chuck said: “I was gonna tell you about Ma an this Tattoo.” He fixes his grayish eyes straight ahead, on nothing immediate: on the past, maybe, remembering the scene. “See, I was, oh, just a kid—an one day, Christ, when I was 15, that little town in Georgia, well, I jes got tired of it... I mean, it wasnt bugging me or nothing—I jes knew it was time to split. Like something calling you. My old man, he died long ago. There was five of us—all brothers—an Ma. She took care of us, on a kind of farm like, outside that town, see? So I tole her one day, I am gonna split that town—go somewhere else. Man, she was cool, my Ma. She did not say: ‘Dont go,’ ‘Wait’—or nothin. She jes looks at me an nods, understanding like. Then she asks me when am I leaving. Tomorrow, I tells her. An, man, she says—dig this—she says: ‘Well, we are gonna go into town, you an me.’” (I see my own mother standing before the glasscase with the angel figurines: arms outstretched, waiting to reclaim me....) “We had this old Ford,” Chuck said. “I remember it real good—an I remember her drivin it into that ole town like she was on a hotrod! Yippee!...” He adjusted his hat firmly on his head as if the wind, even remembered, were powerful enough to blow it off.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  People felt a yearning for the absolute, intuited its presence all around them, and went to great lengths to cultivate their sense of this transcendence in creative rituals. But they also felt estranged from it. Almost every culture has developed a myth of a lost paradise from which men and women were ejected at the beginning of time. It expressed an inchoate conviction that life was not meant to be so fragmented, hard, and full of pain. There must have been a time when people had enjoyed a greater share in the fullness of being and had not been subject to sorrow, disease, bereavement, loneliness, old age, and death. This nostalgia informed the cult of “sacred geography,” one of the oldest and most universal religious ideas. Certain places that stood out in some way from the norm—like the labyrinthine caverns of the Dordogne—seemed to speak of “something else.”38 The sacred place was one of the earliest and most ubiquitous symbols of the divine. It was a sacred “center” that brought heaven and earth together and where the divine potency seemed particularly effective. A popular image, found in many cultures, imagined this fructifying, sacred energy welling up like a spring from these focal places and flowing, in four sacred rivers, to the four quarters of the earth. People would settle only in sites where the sacred had once become manifest because they wanted to live as closely as possible to the wellsprings of being and become as whole and complete as they had been before they were ejected from paradise. This brings us to the second principle of premodern religion. Religious discourse was not intended to be understood literally because it was only possible to speak about a reality that transcended language in symbolic terms. The story of the lost paradise was a myth, not a factual account of a historical event. People were not expected to “believe” it in the abstract; like any mythos, it depended upon the rituals associated with the cult of a particular holy place to make what it signified a reality in the lives of participants.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  Love is on my mind. Just as surely as cold weather makes hail or snow, so a greedy mouth makes for a greedy tail. A drunken woman is not going to be able to protect her virtue, is she? Every lecher knows that. ‘Jesus, when I think about my youth, I can’t help but laugh. All that fun. All that sex. The memories cheer me even now. I was on top of the world in those days. I was hot. Of course age poisons everything. It has taken my beauty. It has robbed me of strength. Well, let them go. Farewell to both of them. Let the devil take them. Now that the flour has gone, I have got to sell the bran. That’s the sum of it. But I’m trying to keep up my spirits. Can’t you tell? ‘What was I saying about my fourth husband? Oh yes. I was furious when I imagined him in the arms of another woman. But I got my own back. My God. I made a cross for him out of the same wood. That’s all I can say. I did not prostitute myself. Certainly not. But I was so friendly to other men, so approachable, that I made him fry in his own fat. He simmered with anger and jealousy. I was his purgatory on earth. He suffered so much that his soul must have gone straight to heaven. When the shoe pinched, he cried out loudly enough. But no one, except God and my husband, knows how bitterly I tormented him. He died when I came back from my pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Now he lies buried before the main altar. I can’t say that his tomb is as sumptuous as that of a king or emperor, but it will serve. It would have been a waste of money to build anything grand. Well goodbye, old man. May God give you rest in your coffin. Sweet dreams. ‘Now I will tell you all about my fifth husband. I sincerely hope that he will not end in hell although, to tell you the truth, he was the worst behaved of all of them. God, he did beat me. I can still feel it in my ribs, and will do until my dying day. Ouch. Yet in bed he was so strong and supple that I have no complaints. He knew how to get the best out of me, especially when he grabbed hold of my fanny. I don’t care how often he beat me. He knew how to kiss and make up. I loved him better than all the others. He played hard to get. He excited me. You know that we women have strange inclinations sometimes: we long most for the things we cannot have. It is perverse, isn’t it? We will cry out and beg for the one thing forbidden to us. Deny us something, and we will desire it. Offer it to us, and we will run away.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  36 It contained all the myriad patterns, forms, and potential that made the world the way it was and guided the endless flux of change and becoming that we see all around us. It existed at a point where all the distinctions that characterize our normal modes of thought became irrelevant. In the Middle East, the region in which the Western monotheisms would develop, there was a similar notion of the ultimate. In Mesopotamia, the Akkadian word for “divinity” was ilam, a radiant power that transcended any particular deity. The gods were not the source of ilam but, like everything else, could only reflect it. The chief characteristic of this “divinity” was ellu (“holiness”), a word that had connotations of “brightness,” “purity,” and “luminosity.” The gods were called the “holy ones” because their symbolic stories, effigies, and cults evoked the radiance of ellu within their worshippers. The people of Israel called their patronal deity, the “holy one” of Israel, Elohim, a Hebrew variant on ellu that summed up everything that the divine could mean for human beings. But holiness was not confined to the gods. Anything that came into contact with divinity could become holy too: a priest, a king, or a temple—even the sacred utensils of the cult. In the Middle East, people would have found it far too constricting to limit ilam to a single god; instead, they imagined a Divine Assembly, a council of gods of many different ranks, who worked together to sustain the cosmos and expressed the multifaceted complexity of the sacred. 37 People felt a yearning for the absolute, intuited its presence all around them, and went to great lengths to cultivate their sense of this transcendence in creative rituals. But they also felt estranged from it. Almost every culture has developed a myth of a lost paradise from which men and women were ejected at the beginning of time. It expressed an inchoate conviction that life was not meant to be so fragmented, hard, and full of pain. There must have been a time when people had enjoyed a greater share in the fullness of being and had not been subject to sorrow, disease, bereavement, loneliness, old age, and death. This nostalgia informed the cult of “sacred geography,” one of the oldest and most universal religious ideas. Certain places that stood out in some way from the norm—like the labyrinthine caverns of the Dordogne—seemed to speak of “something else.” 38 The sacred place was one of the earliest and most ubiquitous symbols of the divine. It was a sacred “center” that brought heaven and earth together and where the divine potency seemed particularly effective.

• From City of Night (1963)

  And he seemed childishly pleased by the decision, as he continues: “An we’re in that bar jes drinkin up that beer, an Ma keeps sayin, This is what your Pa wouldda done—an dammit to hell I aim to do it for him an do it right!’... We split that bar, an the sun was going down—all red an crazy an everything—like it gets in the South.” He squinted at the hazy feeble Los Angeles sun—and again he seemed to be looking beyond it: to the memory perhaps of another—brighter—sun. “An then—get this—then Ma points to this house, an she says: ‘Cat-house.’ Thats what she said, an she says: ‘Thats where you are gonna go next, youngman.’ Hell, man, I’d been there before with my brother. In fack—but Ma didn know this—there was this real cute whoor there—she wasnt no young chick, exactly, but she looked real nice in bed—an man, she throwed a mean screw. She said she would not charge me nothin—cause I was bettern a truck-driver. An thats what she said, man—an that is the truth. She said, Them others, they are work; you are dayoff.” He said this not with the vanity, the bragging of the male exhibiting his masculinity, but with the pride of a child who has gotten an A in school and can prove it with his report card. “So, when I come outta that house, Ma’s waitin on me. She says: ‘Okay?’ I said: ‘Fine, Ma, fine.’...” He looks down at the Tattoo. “Oh, yeah, The Tattoo,” he remembers. “So we go get more juice. ‘Im gonna teach you right,’ she keeps tellin me. We’re wobblin aroun the town like a couple of drunk buddies—but Ma, like I say, she knowed everyone, an everyone figures we’re jes cuttin up some.” He chuckled. “Ma fall in a ditch, starts cussin up a mammy-screwin storm!—” and now he throws back his head laughing “—an she says shes gonna sue the city, she sprained her ankle or somethin—says shes gotta rest till the pain goes.... But I knowed she is jes high, that is all.” The score in front of us moves away, toward a youngman in an army shirt who has just strayed into the park. The youngman, recognizing the man as a score, let his hand dangle suggestively between his legs to attract the score more quickly.

• From City of Night (1963)

  And occasionally I will remember—during those teeming French Quarter days, like a startlingly recalled dream of long ago—things forgotten for long returning as phantom-memories—and suddenly I’ll remember the processions in El Paso when the people marched chanting to the top of the mountain where the statue of Christ looked down, pityingly, arms outstretched—but instead of devout-faced men and women chanting prayers, instead of the priests in bright robes, there will be, now, in New Orleans, soon, only days away, on Shrove Tuesday, the masked clowns, the twisting snakedancing revelers.... The seminude sweating bodies writhing along the streets. The parades.... In one moment of sharing (as on that night, sitting with Sylvia on the steps of the courtyard of her bar: with Jocko and Kathy), the hint of a miracle can occur. But even vague miracles fade, turn inside out. Momentarily, the knowledge of Sylvia’s pain, when it had become a spoken thing, had fused with our own knowledge of ourselves, and from that knowledge of guilt, in that courtyard, we had attempted mutually to vindicate each other. But a kind of closeness that joins people too suddenly can be a fleeting thing. Accumulated for years, finally released by liquor, confessions flow out like a flood-swollen river. Then, calmed, the waters seek to return to their source, to retreat; but the memory of the turmoil, of the flooding, remains, scarring the land it washed. And so it was now with Sylvia. For a whole day she had stayed away from The Rocking Times. When she returned, it with again the Sylvia I had first known: sitting at the bar, drinking Seven-Up. Waiting. But now, although she spoke to me much as before, I could sense that she preferred to avoid me. As with Pete, those many faces away, when his discovered knowledge of himself had threatened me and we had chosen to pass like strangers on the street, the face which Sylvia turned to me now was the face of someone who, clearly, in the deep night, wishes passionately—because of that fear of vulnerability in a world in which you have to pretend at toughness—that he could erase from another’s mind the shared remembrances of what has passed between them. But, once, for a moment, we had been Close, and perhaps in that remembered closeness, the real miracle might occur, waiting in a chamber of the mind which could open now more readily, with others. Thursday. The Parade of the Krewe of the Knights of Momus—the mocking spirit expelled from Olympus—will invade New Orleans tonight, four days before Mardi Gras inflames the city at midnight. Floats will sweep the dirty streets trailing gauze like ghost-wings; silverleafed reflecting the choked lights along Canal Street under the winter stars....

• From City of Night (1963)

  Lulled into an emotional trance by the liberating victory of having at last stolen, I felt myself in a constant state of highness—and I no longer sought either the joints of maryjane or the pills: senses on pinpoint as if I were drunk without liquor. And what I was high on was the furious unsurfeited search. Now the subterfuge that I did it only for money—even though, as early as New York (especially when the act was executed in public places), I had not strictly adhered to it—began to disappear. It was now a matter of numbers. Often—satisfied merely to know that I could have scored, and turning down the person who asked me—I returned alone to, now, another rented room on Hope Street, in another hotel this time; and in that room, I lie in bed aware of myself... sexually aware. Often, too, the longing to return to El Paso would grasp me without warning. I would imagine my Mother standing before the glasscase in the living-room. Longingly, I remember the mountain I had climbed as a boy: the statue of Christ under that most beautiful sky in the world.... The memory of my father.... I would touch the ring he had given me. And then I would see El Paso racked by the savage wind. In a dark moviehouse in Hollywood, a thin youngman picks

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Some Western Christians read the story as a factual account of the Original Sin that condemned the human race to everlasting perdition. But this is a peculiarly Western Christian interpretation and was introduced controversially by Saint Augustine of Hippo only in the early fifth century. The Eden story has never been understood in this way in either the Jewish or the Orthodox Christian traditions. However, we all tend to see these ancient tales through the filter of subsequent history and project current beliefs onto texts that originally meant something quite different. Today, because the modern West is a society of logos, some people read the Bible literally, assuming that its intention is to give us the kind of accurate information that we expect from any other supposedly historical text and that this is the way these stories have always been understood. In fact, as we shall see in subsequent chapters, until well into the modern period, Jews and Christians both insisted that it was neither possible nor desirable to read the Bible in this way, that it gives us no single, orthodox message and demands constant reinterpretation.2 There is also a widespread assumption that the Bible is supposed to provide us with role models and give us precise moral teaching, but this was not the intention of the biblical authors. The Eden story is certainly not a morality tale; like any paradise myth, it is an imaginary account of the infancy of the human race. In Eden, Adam and Eve are still in the womb; they have to grow up, and the snake is there to guide them through the perplexing rite of passage to maturity. To know pain and to be conscious of desire and mortality are inescapable components of human experience, but they are also symptoms of that sense of estrangement from the fullness of being that inspires the nostalgia for paradise lost. We can see Adam, Eve, and the serpent as representing different facets of our humanity.3 In the snake is the rebelliousness and incessant compulsion to question everything that is crucial to human progress; in Eve we see our hunger for knowledge, our desire to experiment, and our longing for a life free of inhibition. Adam, a rather passive figure, displays our reluctance to take responsibility for our actions. The story shows that good and evil are inextricably intertwined in human life. Our prodigious knowledge can at one and the same time be a source of benefit and the cause of immense harm. The rabbis of the Talmudic age understood this perfectly. They did not see the “fall” of Adam as a catastrophe, because the “evil inclination” (yeytzer ha’ra) was an essential part of human life, and the aggression, competitive edge, and ambition that it generates are bound up with some of our greatest achievements.4