Nostalgia

Passages

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

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• From The Decameron (1353)

  Now it so happened that not long afterwards, the Catalan docked in Alexandria with a cargo which included some peregrine falcons that he was taking to the Sultan. These he duly delivered, after which he was occasionally invited to dine at the royal table, and the Sultan, on observing the ways of Sicurano, who was still in attendance upon him, was greatly impressed with the youth and asked the Catalan if he would allow him to keep him. Although he was loath to let him go, the Catalan gave his consent, and it was not very long before Sicurano’s able performance of his duties had earned him the same degree of favour and affection from the Sultan that he had enjoyed with his previous master. Now, at a certain season of the year, it was the custom to hold a trade-fair within the Sultan’s domain at Acre, where merchants, both Christian and Saracen, used to congregate in large numbers. And in order to protect the merchants and their merchandise, the Sultan always used to send, in addition to his other officials, one of his court dignitaries with a contingent of guardsmen. And so it was that when the time for the fair drew near, the Sultan thought that he would send Sicurano to discharge this function, as he already had an excellent knowledge of the language; and this he did. Sicurano duly arrived in Acre, therefore, as captain in charge of the special guard whose duties were to protect the merchants and their merchandise. And as he went round on tours of inspection, discharging his functions with diligence and skill, he came across a number of merchants from Sicily, Pisa, Genoa, Venice and other parts of Italy, with whom he readily made friends out of a nostalgic feeling for the country of his birth. Now, it so happened that on one of these occasions, having dismounted at the stall of some Venetian merchants, in the midst of various other valuable objects he caught sight of a purse and an ornamental belt, which he promptly recognized as his own former belongings. Concealing his astonishment, he politely asked who owned them and whether they were for sale. One of the merchants attending the fair was Ambrogiuolo of Piacenza, who had arrived there on a Venetian ship with a large quantity of goods, and on hearing that the captain of the guard was asking who owned the articles in question, he stepped forward, grinning all over his face. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘these things belong to me, and they are not for sale. But if you like them, I will gladly make you a present of them.’ When Sicurano saw him laughing, he suspected that the fellow had somehow seen through his disguise, but keeping a straight face, he asked: ‘Why do you laugh? Is it because you see me, a soldier, inquiring about these female commodities?’

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Despite its studied rhetorical structure and its possible literary antecedents, such as Dante’s contemptuous description of his native Florence in canto XV of Inferno, the passage could well reflect the author’s private thoughts and feelings in the years immediately following his return to Tuscany. Living in the house of his widowed father, in a city far more deeply engrossed in commerce and high finance than the pursuit of culture and scholarship, a city torn by internal disputes and at war with the neighbouring state of Lucca, he must indeed have looked back with nostalgia to the refined, tranquil and orderly aristocratic milieu in which he had spent the thirteen years of his adolescence and early manhood. His discontent with life in Florence may be glimpsed, also, in the closing paragraph of the first of Boccaccio’s ‘Florentine’ works, Comedía delle ninfe fiorentine, popularly known as the Ameto from the name of its main character. It probably dates from 1341–2, and in the last paragraph the author dedicates the book to a friend of long standing, Niccolò di Bartolo del Buono, asking him to accept ‘this rose, born amid the thorns of my adversity, which the beauty of Florence plucked by force from the unyielding brambles as I lay in the depths of despondency’.3 The Comedía delle ninfe fiorentine is a prose narrative interspersed with a number of poems, and in the last of these the author complains about ‘the dark, silent, melancholy house’ which harbours him against his will. What saddens him most of all, he continues, is ‘the coarse and horrible sight of a miserly old man, cold and churlish’ – perhaps a reference to his widowed father, but more probably a metaphor for the prospect of senility in a general sense. If a reference to his father was what he really intended, he was being unkind. Boccaccio senior could hardly have been as wizened and lifeless as he was painted if, some two years later, he was to pass to a second marriage with Bice de’ Bostichi, who was to present him with a son, Iacopo.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  But Stephen went slowly downstairs to her study where Puddle was sitting in front of the fire, and she thought that Puddle sat there as though tired; her hands were quite idle, and after a moment Stephen noticed that she was dozing. Very quietly Stephen opened her book, unwilling to rouse the little grey woman who looked so small in the huge leather chair, and whose head kept guiltily nodding. But the book seemed scarcely worth troubling to read, so that presently Stephen laid it aside and sat staring into the flickering logs that hummed and burnt blue because it was frosty. On the Malvern Hills there would probably be snow; deep snow might be capping the Worcestershire Beacon. The air up at British Camp would be sweet with the smell of winter and open spaces—little lights would be glinting far down in the valley. At Morton the lakes would be still and frozen, so Peter the swan would be feeling friendly—in winter he had always fed from her hand—he must be old now, the swan called Peter. Coup! C-o-u-p! and Peter waddling towards her. He, who was all gliding grace on the water, would come awkwardly waddling towards her hand for the chunk of dry bread that she held in her fingers. Jean with his Adèle along in the kitchen—a nice-looking boy he was, Stephen had seen him—they were young, and both were exceedingly happy, for their parents approved, so some day they would marry. Then children would come, too many, no doubt, for Jean’s slender purse, and yet in this life one must pay for one’s pleasures—they would pay with their children, and this appeared perfectly fair to Stephen. She thought that it seemed a long time ago since she herself had been a small child, romping about on the floor with her father, bothering Williams down at the stables, dressing up as young Nelson and posing for Collins who had sometimes been cross to young Nelson. She was nearly thirty, and what had she done? Written one good novel and one very bad one, with few mediocre short stories thrown in. Oh, well, she was going to start writing again quite soon—she had an idea for a novel. But she sighed, and Puddle woke up with a start. ‘Is that you, my dear? Have I been asleep?’ ‘Only for a very few minutes, Puddle.’ Puddle glanced at the new gold watch on her wrist; it had been a Christmas present from Stephen. ‘It’s past ten o’clock—I think I’ll turn in.’ ‘Do. Why not? I hope Adèle’s filled your hot water bottle; she’s rather light-headed over her Jean.’ ‘Never mind, I can fill it myself,’ smiled Puddle.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  His wife came bustling in from the kitchen: ‘Sit down, Miss Stephen,’ and she dusted a chair. Stephen sat down and glanced at the Bible where it lay, still open, on the table. ‘Yes,’ said Williams dourly, as though she had spoken, ‘I’m reduced to readin’ about ’eavenly ’orses. A nice endin’ that for a man like me, what’s been in the service of Sir Philip Gordon, what’s ’ad ’is legs across the best ’unters as ever was seen in this county or any! And I don’t believe in them lion-headed beasts breathin’ fire and brimstone, it’s all agin nature. Whoever it was wrote them Revelations, can’t never have been inside of a stable. I don’t believe in no ’eavenly ’orses neither—there won’t be no ’orses in ’eaven; and a good thing too, judgin’ by the description.’ ‘I’m surprised at you, Arth-thur, bein’ so disrespectful to The Book!’ his wife reproached him gravely. ‘Well, it ain’t no encyclopaedee to the stable, and that’s a sure thing,’ grinned Williams. Stephen looked from one to the other. They were old, very old, fast approaching completion. Quite soon their circle would be complete, and then Williams would be able to tackle Saint John on the points of those heavenly horses. Mrs. Williams glanced apologetically at her: ‘Excuse ’im, Miss Stephen, ’e’s gettin’ rather childish. ’E won’t read no pretty parts of The Book; all ’e’ll read is them parts about chariots and such like. All what’s to do with ’orses ’e reads; and then ’e’s so unbelievin’—it’s aw-ful!’ But she looked at her mate with the eyes of a mother, very gentle and tolerant eyes. And Stephen, seeing those two together, could picture them as they must once have been, in the halcyon days of their youthful vigour. For she thought that she glimpsed through the dust of the years, a faint flicker of the girl who had lingered in the lanes when the young man Williams and she had been courting. And looking at Williams as he stood before her twitching and bowed, she thought that she glimpsed a faint flicker of the youth, very stalwart and comely, who had bent his head downwards and sideways as he walked and whispered and kissed in the lanes. And because they were old yet undivided, her heart ached; not for them but rather for Stephen. Her youth seemed as dross when compared to their honourable age; because they were undivided. She said: ‘Make him sit down, I don’t want him to stand.’ And she got up and pushed her own chair towards him.

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  By then the Lafferty parents had sold their farm and bought a house in the old part of downtown Provo; Dan’s father ran his practice out of a basement office in this home. In 1981, shortly after Dan started working for Watson Sr., the LDS Church sent both of the elder Laffertys abroad on a two-year mission, at which point Dan and his younger brother Mark (who had graduated the Los Angeles College of Chiropractic six months after Dan), agreed to take over the practice in their father’s absence. Dan and Mark had always enjoyed each other’s company. “As children,” says Dan, “we were inseparable.” Every morning and evening of their childhood they sat together across a milk pail to milk the family cow. They spent their summer vacations practically joined at the hip, “playing in the barns, jumping in the hay, throwing the football, playing in our tree hut,” he recalls. “It’s funny to remember how hard it was to stop playing even long enough to get a drink or take a pee. Nothing tasted so good as cold water from the faucet that filled the watering trough, and nothing felt so good as taking a pee when the pressure got so bad we had to stop playing because you couldn’t hold it any longer.” When their younger brothers—Tim, Watson Jr., and Allen—were old enough, the smaller boys eagerly joined in Dan and Mark’s escapades. Then, says Dan, “we’d all line up along the fence, oldest to youngest, and have a group pee. The little guys loved to do what Mark and I did, especially lining up to pee on a fence.” When Dan and Mark started working together in their father’s office, the special closeness they had shared in their youth was rekindled. During breaks between patients they engaged in heartfelt discussions about everything that was most important to them—and increasingly what seemed most important concerned religious doctrine and its power to remedy the insidious evils inflicted by the government on its citizens. Regarding the timing of these heart-to-heart talks, Dan reports, “I began to observe a fascinating phenomenon.” Dan and Mark were usually so busy seeing patients that often several days would pass between their religious-political discourses. But on those days when they would unexpectedly have gaps in the schedule in which to talk at length, says Dan, “rather mysteriously, my younger brothers would show up, unannounced. And we would have some very, very valuable time discussing issues.” These impromptu get-togethers happened often enough, says Dan, “that it seemed like it had to be more than just a coincidence.” Five of the six Lafferty brothers—Dan, Mark, Watson, Tim, and Allen—were usually present for these ad hoc conferences; the only brother who failed to attend was Ron, the eldest of the Lafferty offspring, who was six years older than Dan, and had always acted less like a sibling than a father figure to his brothers.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  The community expanded to nearly one hundred members over the next five years, in large part because the twelve married couples brought the number of children from five in January 1949 to thirty-nine. With money donated from the sale of personal property and family homes, Catherine Clarke bought a cluster of seven houses off Putnam Avenue, a few blocks from Harvard Square, into which the families moved. Twelve couples, each looking forward to the joys and challenges of child-rearing and, at the same time, dedicated to ensuring that, however many children God chose to bless them with, each child would be raised with a rigid adherence to traditional Roman Catholic doctrine. That was their life’s work. My home was the top-floor apartment of a three-family house, which Father named Saint Francis Xavier’s House. The Malufs and the Ewaskios—the families of the two married professors who, with my father, had been fired from Boston College—moved into the second and first floors. Ours was a spacious apartment, with large bay windows that overlooked the street below. It suited us well, and before long my parents had five children. PART 2 LEAVING THE WORLD BEHIND 6 A Family of the Heart 1951–1952 M y earliest memories are filled with the sounds of laughter. Though I was only three years old, I knew each of the more than sixty adults at the Center by name. We were family. Three times a day we gathered for meals. We prayed together in the morning at Mass and in the evening at Benediction. The men and women of the Center became an array of “uncles and aunts,” with someone ready at any time of the day to play games with me, read to me, or take me for a walk. My favorite “aunt” was Betty Sullivan, a soft-spoken woman with gentle brown eyes and shoulder-length dark hair much like my mother’s. When my parents attended the frequent evening lectures at the Center, she would come to our apartment and babysit. Sunday mornings were made extra special when she’d take me to the banks of the Charles River where I’d pick daffodils or buttercups. Most mornings after breakfast, I’d put my hand in hers, and we’d make the ten-minute trip along the streets of Cambridge to the Center. I knew the route by heart. As we walked, I’d skip around Betty, grabbing first her right hand and then her left as I circled her, while she seemed to glide along the sidewalk like a guardian angel before delivering me safely into the hubbub at the Center. The Center was a four-story gray building at the junction of Bow and Arrow Streets, fronted with floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows that faced both St. Paul’s Church and Harvard’s renowned Adams House. The ground floor consisted of one long rectangular room, its stucco walls painted a dull white and its concrete floor covered in an array of Persian rugs.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  The cover of my baby album is white with specks of glitter throughout. “It’s a girl!” is emblazoned across the cover. On the first page of this album are my parents’ names, my date of birth, my height and weight, hair and eye color. There are two black imprints of my baby feet with the words “Girl Gay” written above them. I was born at 7:48 in the morning, which is why, I am certain, I am not a morning person. There are blank lines for “exciting memories in baby’s life,” and all of those lines have been filled with my first tiny accomplishments. Apparently I read the alphabet at two and a half years old and could tell time at three. My mother proudly wrote, “Reads almost everything at five years old.” Those are her exact words, written in her neat penmanship, though family lore has me reading the newspaper with my dad about a year and a half before that. For the first five years of my life, my mother recorded my height and weight. I had a big head that was triangular, something that can happen with the firstborn child. My mother says she spent hours smoothing my newborn head into a rounder shape. There was a record of my birth in the Omaha World-Herald, printed on October 28, 1974, thirteen days after my birthday, and the clipped section of the newspaper is stored in this album alongside my original birth certificate and the little card they put on my bassinet in the hospital. My mother was twenty-five and my father was twenty-seven, so young, but, given the era, not as young as many people were when they started families. My name is spelled correctly on my birth certificate, with one n, and the birth certificate is pink. A nuanced cultural understanding of gender did not exist then—girls were pink and boys were blue and that was that. In the very first picture of my mother and me together, she is holding me and her jet-black hair is cascading down her back in a thick ponytail. She looks impossibly young and beautiful. I am three days old. This is actually not the first picture of us together. There is a picture of my mom, hugely pregnant with me, wearing a sassy blue minidress and a pair of chunky heels. Her hair is wild and hanging loose down her back. She is leaning against a car, giving a look to the photographer, my father, the kind of intimate look that makes me want to turn away to afford them some privacy. She put this picture in the album even though she is one of the most private people I know. She wanted me to see this gorgeous image, to know she and my father have always loved each other. These oldest pictures have been in the album so long that they are stuck to the pages. To try and remove the pictures would ruin them.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  I know, precisely, and yet I do not know. I know, but I think what I really want is to understand the why of the distance between then and now. The why is complicated and slippery. I want to be able to hold the why in my hands, to dissect it or tear it apart or burn it and read the ashes even though I am afraid of what I will do with what I see there. I don’t know if such understanding is possible, but when I am alone, I sit and slowly page through these albums obsessively. I want to see what is there and what is missing and what happened even if the why still eludes me. There is a picture of me. I am five. I have big eyes and a scrawny neck. I am staring at a plastic typewriter while I lie on a couch, on my stomach, ankles crossed, probably daydreaming. I always daydreamed. Even then, I was a writer. From an early age, I would draw little villages on napkins and write stories about the people who lived in those villages. I loved the escape of writing those stories, of imagining lives that were different from my own. I had a ferocious imagination. I was a daydreamer and I resented being pulled out of my daydreams to deal with the business of living. In my stories, I could write myself the friends I did not have. I could make so many things possible that I did not dare imagine for myself. I could be brave. I could be smart. I could be funny. I could be everything I ever wanted. When I wrote, it was so easy to be happy. There is a picture of me. I am seven; I am happy, wearing overalls. I wore overalls a lot as a kid. I liked them for lots of reasons, but mostly I liked them because they had many pockets where I could hide things and because they were complicated and had lots of buttons and things requiring fastening. They made me feel safe, cozy. In probably one out of every three or four pictures from that period, I am wearing overalls. That’s strange, but I was strange. In this particular picture, I am with my brother Joel and he is karate kicking me as I try to avoid his little foot. He was and is very energetic. We are three years apart. We are having fun. We are still very close. We were cute kids. It kills me to see that kind of naked joy in myself. I would give almost anything to be that free again. When I was eight, my brother Michael Jr. was born, and then there were three of us in all the pictures, often huddled together, or holding hands as we stared into the camera.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  As much as I wrote, I lost myself in books even more. I read everything I could get my hands on. My favorite books were the Little House on the Prairie books. I loved the idea that Laura Ingalls, an ordinary girl from the plains, could live an ordinary extraordinary life in a time so different from mine. I loved all the details in the books—Pa bringing home delectable oranges, making candy in the snow with maple syrup, the bond shared by the Ingalls sisters, Laura being called half-pint. As the Ingalls girls grew up, I loved Laura’s rivalry with Nellie Oleson and her courtship with Almanzo Wilder, who would eventually become her husband. I was breathless when I read about the first years of their marriage as homesteaders, enduring the trials of farming and raising their daughter, Rose. I wanted that kind of steady, true love for myself, and I wanted a relationship where I could be independent but loved and looked after at the same time. When I moved on from Little House on the Prairie, I read everything by Judy Blume. I mostly learned about sex from her novel Forever . . . , and for many years, I assumed that all men called their dicks “Ralph.” I read books about adventurous girls mining for gold in California and surviving the trials and tribulations of the wagon trail. I became intensely obsessed with the loving rivalry of Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield in the idyllic California town of Sweet Valley. I read Clan of the Cave Bear and learned that sex could be far more interesting than the youthful fumblings of Katherine and Michael in Forever . . . had indicated. I read and read and read. My imagination expanded infinitely. There are countless pictures of me wearing skirts and dresses, pictures where I am a girly girl with long, done-up hair, jewelry, doing the whole pretty-princess thing. I long thought I was a tomboy because I was the only girl in my family. Sometimes we try to convince ourselves of things that are not true, reframing the past to better explain the present. When I look at these pictures, it is quite clear that while I enjoyed roughhousing and playing in dirt with my brothers and such, I wasn’t entirely a tomboy, not really.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  Earle laughed again. “Oh, you’re right, baby sister. I spend all my spare time making notes on things people have done that they don’t want no one to talk about, and I make sure I talk about just those things.” He hefted his bag on one hip and me on the other. “Tell me, Bone, has your mama told you yet how your aunt Carr come to live so far away in Baltimore City and come home so rarely we barely recognize her when she does?” “Oh, Earle!” Mama put one hand over her mouth and grabbed the pecans with the other. “Don’t talk bad about Carr. Come on in and I’ll get out my Karo syrup and pie pans.” Earle swung me up high so that I straddled his shoulders, my legs hanging down on either side of his neck. “Yes, ma’am. I got a taste for pecan pie the way you make it when you’re mad.” He tickled my bare foot till I grabbed his ears to make him stop. “When your mama’s pissed at me, Bone, she chops the nuts up fine the way I like them. Otherwise she don’t bother, and if the nuts an’t chopped small they don’t sweeten up right for my taste.” At the screen door he paused, and I pulled his ears again. “But what about Aunt Carr? An’t you gonna tell me how she moved to Baltimore?” He turned his head to look up at me and gave his famous slow grin. “You know your mama don’t want me to tell you that story.” I kicked my feet against his chest. “But an’t you gonna tell me anyway?” Earle laughed and swung me down. He pushed the screen door with his hip and took a quick look inside to see that Mama had gone on to the kitchen. “Well.” He lit a cigarette, striking the match one-handed. “Your aunt Carr was a sensitive girl, tender on the subject of how pretty your mama and Alma were when she wasn’t much to look at herself. Carr wanted to be beautiful so much it made her mean. She used to talk so awful about Raylene it was a shame, insisting Raylene had to learn to use makeup and fix her hair, start working on getting herself a man. But I always thought she just went on at Raylene so she could boast about how hard she worked at looking good. Raylene and Alma and your mama used to just laugh at her about it, make her so mad. I an’t saying Carr didn’t love her sisters, but sometimes you could tell she didn’t much like them. And oh! She did have a thing for the young Mr. Wade. The girl just plain wanted him, and maybe she could see that he wasn’t giving a minute’s notice to her when Alma was around. It wore on her bad.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  “Then one Thanksgiving Wade joked where everyone could hear that Alma was the younger, sweeter version of Carr—the blossom next to the windfall, I think he said. Carr’s face was a study right then. You could see every thought running across it, none of them pretty. And by Christmas, I swear that girl had snapped up old Baltimore Benny like he was new bait in a cold spring. Had her first baby by the next fall, and got Benny to move back up with his people right after that. It took Wade and Alma another five years to marry themselves, though Alma’s twins waited barely long enough for the preacher to stop talking before they pushed their way out of her belly.” Earle rolled his cigarette between his thumb and forefinger. “Seems like after that we were all grown up and everything was different. It’s the way of things. One day you’re all family together, fighting and hugging from one moment to the next, and then it’s all gone. You’re off making your own family, scared of what’s coming next, and Lord, things have a way of running faster and faster all the time.” He looked off across the yard as if he were seeing a lot more than his oil-green Chevy parked on the street. “Well, where are you?” Mama called to us from the kitchen. “I an’t gonna make no pies all by myself when you two can help.” I ran inside while Earle followed slowly behind, dropping his lanky form into a kitchen chair turned around so he could rest his chin on the back of it. “You just don’t want me telling stories where you can’t hear, little sister.” “Lies, you mean.” Mama passed me the sifter and a bowl of flour, then poured out a mound of pecans between her and Earle. She took her big butcher knife and started rocking it back and forth across the nuts, chopping them fine. “You know, Bone, Earle’s hair was a dull brown when he was a boy and started school. It just got darker and blacker every year.” She looked over at her brother with a crooked smile. “What you think, Earle, was it school or sin that made your hair so black?” Earle palmed a mouthful of pecans, tugged on the lock that hung down over his forehead, and sighed a long mournful moan. “Oh, school, little sister. That’s why I had to quit, you know. I had to stop the process before it went too far. If I’d gone on, my hair would have turned so black it would have started to absorb all the sunlight in Greenville County. Crops would have failed and children gone hungry just because of my selfish need to learn algebra and geography. I had to quit and take that job building the new runway out at the air base. It was the only thing to do to save us from starvation and the cold cold night.”

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  “Oh, Bone!” she laughed. “Maybe you should plan on marrying yourself a blond just to be safe. Huh?” [image file=image_rsrc2PS.jpg] Granny wouldn’t talk much about my real daddy except to curse his name, but she told me just about everything else. She would lean back in her chair and start reeling out story and memory, making no distinction between what she knew to be true and what she had only heard told. The tales she told me in her rough, drawling whisper were lilting songs, ballads of family, love, and disappointment. Everything seemed to come back to grief and blood, and everybody seemed legendary. “My granddaddy, your great-great-granddaddy, he was a Cherokee, and he didn’t much like us, all his towheaded grandchildren. Some said he had another family down to Eustis anyway, a proper Indian wife who gave him black-haired babies with blue eyes. Ha! Blue eyes an’t that rare among the Cherokee around here. Me, I always thought it a shame we never turned up with them like his other babies. Of course, he was a black-eyed bastard himself, and maybe he never really made those other babies like they say. What was certain was my grandma never stepped out on him. Woman was just obsessed with that man, obsessed to the point of madness. Used to cry like a dog in the night when he was gone. He didn’t stay round that much either, but every time he come home she’d make another baby, another red-blond child with muddy brown eyes that he’d treat like a puppydog or a kitten. Man never spanked a child in his life, never hit Grandma. You’d think he would have, he didn’t seem to care all that much. Quiet man, too. Wouldn’t fight, wouldn’t barely talk. Not a Boatwright, that’s for sure. “But we loved him, you know, almost as much as Grandma. Would have killed to win his attention even one more minute than we got, and near died to be any way more like him, though we were as different from him as children can be. None of us quiet, all of us fighters. None of us got those blue eyes, and no one but you got that blue-black hair. Lord, you were a strange thing! You were like a fat red-faced doll with all that black black hair—a baby doll with a full head of hair. Just as quiet and sweet-natured as he used to be. You didn’t even cry till you took croup at four months. I’ve always thought he’d have liked you, Granddaddy would. You even got a little of the shine of him. Those dark eyes and that hair when you was born, black as midnight. I was there to see.”

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  “What magnificent orders would travel from this family to London,” said Edward, “in such an event! What a happy day for booksellers, music-sellers, and print-shops! You, Miss Dashwood, would give a general commission for every new print of merit to be sent you—and as for Marianne, I know her greatness of soul, there would not be music enough in London to content her. And books!—Thomson, Cowper, Scott—she would buy them all over and over again: she would buy up every copy, I believe, to prevent their falling into unworthy hands; and she would have every book that tells her how to admire an old twisted tree. Should not you, Marianne? Forgive me, if I am very saucy. But I was willing to show you that I had not forgot our old disputes.” “I love to be reminded of the past, Edward—whether it be melancholy or gay, I love to recall it—and you will never offend me by talking of former times. You are very right in supposing how my money would be spent—some of it, at least—my loose cash would certainly be employed in improving my collection of music and books.” “And the bulk of your fortune would be laid out in annuities on the authors or their heirs.” “No, Edward, I should have something else to do with it.” “Perhaps, then, you would bestow it as a reward on that person who wrote the ablest defence of your favourite maxim, that no one can ever be in love more than once in their life—your opinion on that point is unchanged, I presume?” “Undoubtedly. At my time of life opinions are tolerably fixed. It is not likely that I should now see or hear any thing to change them.” “Marianne is as steadfast as ever, you see,” said Elinor, “she is not at all altered.” “She is only grown a little more grave than she was.” “Nay, Edward,” said Marianne, “_you_ need not reproach me. You are not very gay yourself.” “Why should you think so!” replied he, with a sigh. “But gaiety never was a part of _my_ character.” “Nor do I think it a part of Marianne’s,” said Elinor; “I should hardly call her a lively girl—she is very earnest, very eager in all she does—sometimes talks a great deal and always with animation—but she is not often really merry.” “I believe you are right,” he replied, “and yet I have always set her down as a lively girl.” “I have frequently detected myself in such kind of mistakes,” said Elinor, “in a total misapprehension of character in some point or other: fancying people so much more gay or grave, or ingenious or stupid than they really are, and I can hardly tell why or in what the deception originated. Sometimes one is guided by what they say of themselves, and very frequently by what other people say of them, without giving oneself time to deliberate and judge.”

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  “No,” replied Elinor, “her opinions are all romantic.” “Or rather, as I believe, she considers them impossible to exist.” “I believe she does. But how she contrives it without reflecting on the character of her own father, who had himself two wives, I know not. A few years however will settle her opinions on the reasonable basis of common sense and observation; and then they may be more easy to define and to justify than they now are, by any body but herself.” “This will probably be the case,” he replied; “and yet there is something so amiable in the prejudices of a young mind, that one is sorry to see them give way to the reception of more general opinions.” “I cannot agree with you there,” said Elinor. “There are inconveniences attending such feelings as Marianne’s, which all the charms of enthusiasm and ignorance of the world cannot atone for. Her systems have all the unfortunate tendency of setting propriety at nought; and a better acquaintance with the world is what I look forward to as her greatest possible advantage.” After a short pause he resumed the conversation by saying,— “Does your sister make no distinction in her objections against a second attachment? or is it equally criminal in every body? Are those who have been disappointed in their first choice, whether from the inconstancy of its object, or the perverseness of circumstances, to be equally indifferent during the rest of their lives?” “Upon my word, I am not acquainted with the minutiae of her principles. I only know that I never yet heard her admit any instance of a second attachment’s being pardonable.” “This,” said he, “cannot hold; but a change, a total change of sentiments—No, no, do not desire it; for when the romantic refinements of a young mind are obliged to give way, how frequently are they succeeded by such opinions as are but too common, and too dangerous! I speak from experience. I once knew a lady who in temper and mind greatly resembled your sister, who thought and judged like her, but who from an enforced change—from a series of unfortunate circumstances—” Here he stopt suddenly; appeared to think that he had said too much, and by his countenance gave rise to conjectures, which might not otherwise have entered Elinor’s head. The lady would probably have passed without suspicion, had he not convinced Miss Dashwood that what concerned her ought not to escape his lips. As it was, it required but a slight effort of fancy to connect his emotion with the tender recollection of past regard. Elinor attempted no more. But Marianne, in her place, would not have done so little. The whole story would have been speedily formed under her active imagination; and every thing established in the most melancholy order of disastrous love. CHAPTER XII.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  She even walked like Fats, with a swing-bopping step. Ginger talked, and I listened. I soon discovered that if you keep your mouth shut, people are apt to believe you know everything, and they begin to feel freer and freer to tell you anything, anxious to show that they know something, too. The old Ford swooped elegantly into the curb at the corner of Atlantic and Main, just the other side of the railroad tracks. “End of the line, girls.” CeCe, Ginger’s brother, pulled loose the rope that held the front passenger door in place. Ginger and I clambered out into the autumn afternoon sun, bracing but not yet chill. Up and down Atlantic Avenue, schoolchildren were painting garish and ghostly murals in brilliant tempera and soap paint onto the windows and doors of the shops that had agreed to participate in the Halloween pageant and parade. Tomorrow was Halloween. The parade would wind through most of the downtown area, Ginger explained, and include most of the town’s children. “One big treat. The stores figure it’ll save on tricks. They do it like that every year. Keeps the windows from being scratched and marked up. Watercolor’s easier to wash off than house-paint. They don’t do it in the city, do they?” We walked into Gerber’s Department Store looking for stockings for Ginger, because Cora insisted Ginger wear nylons to church on Sunday. “I’ve never seen Halloween celebrated like that before.” “Well,” Ginger drawled, fingering the nylons on display. “That’s small-town stuff. There’s a lot you haven’t seen goes on here different from the big city. Like fo’instance, these stockings ain’t shit. Let’s go see at Grants’.” We crossed the avenue and walked back up the other side of Main Street. From the record shop, snatches of Rosemary Clooney’s voice singing “ Come on a my house, my house a come on ,” mixed with the Saturday afternoon traffic. A tow-headed boy on a bike rolled past us, sucking a bright green pickle. The sharp smell of knife-clean dill and garlic pulled a rip-cord in my head, dropping me into the middle of Rivington Street, between Orchard and Delancey. Bright Sunday morning on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York’s eager and determined bargain-hunters searching through the sidewalk bins for good buys and old friends. On the corner of Orchard Street, the Pickle Man presided over wooden vats of assorted sizes and shades of green and succulent submarines, each hue denoting a different stage or flavor of picklement.

• From The City of God

  359 Lecture 17 Transcript—Augustine’s Scriptural History (Books 15–17) 1910, human character changed,” wrote the great modernist Virginia Woolf in 1924. And for her, the change in human nature was akin to exile from the Garden of Eden. These modernists saw religion as a set of antiquated institutions and passions steeped in reactionary, resentful nostalgia for an earlier, wholly-imagined integrity of feeling, and thought, and action, and character, and cosmos. And yet, these modernist writers were not simply dismissive of religion. In fact, they were obsessed by the question of how to reestablish fruitful contact with our new knowledge in a way that transmuted that antiquity into something inhabitable today. And they imagined that if there was a way to do that, it would be universally applicable—that, since they assumed there was only one path of modernization, there would only be one way to be religious in modernity. Today we doubt that modernity is a necessarily universalizing, or even unidirectional, process. And this is part of what makes us potentially— most of us, anyway—postmodern. Postmodernity happens, it is argued, when you realize that the West’s experience of modernization is not a universal and natural path of development, but just how these particular cultures have changed over the past few centuries so that others could modernize in very different ways. Today, our challenge is not the challenge of belief or unbelief, as the modernists used to perhaps believe, but the challenge of pluralism—a challenge of inhabiting a world filled with many kinds of belief, as well as many kinds of unbelief. Modernity has not let us escape this problem, nor is our modernity the only formulation of it. Other ages confronted analogous problems, and their accomplishments might have something useful to teach us today. Such is the case with Augustine. Like the modernists of the early 20 th century, he too underwent the wrenching transition from the end of one age to the beginning of another. All his writing is gripped by the question of how to render useful a heritage now grown radically problematic—how to repot, as it were, a tradition whose original soil

• From The City of God

  462 Books That Matter: The City of God „Augustine knows well the Beatitude, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” The saints in paradise will see God in the spirit, so they see God even if their eyes are shut. Yet the seeing is not by means of the flesh, though it is seeing in the flesh. And they will see without interruption or intermediation, seeing God continually and truly. „This vision is God’s own peace, understood fully only by God, of which the blessed will partake. This kind of seeing will be continuous in some way with vision as we experience it now, though it will be immeasurably more powerful and revealing; the eyes will discern things of an immaterial nature. „When the blessed see created things, they will see not just them, but God in them. They will see God as “all in all,” as manifest in things of this world. The objects of creation reveal God as integral to what they truly are, and God is using them to exhibit God’s glory in a particular way. It is seeing creation itself, but now we see creation as having a point and a purpose, as created matter speaking of its Creator. The Four Stages of Freedom „In the heavenly city the blessing will be not simply of vision but of agency, and this free agency is very different from what we know as freedom today. For Augustine, the fullest picture of good human agency is characterized by humans’ finding that to sin is not possible. „Augustine thinks the history of humanity can be divided into four stages of human freedom. ›Before the Fall, it was possible for humans to sin. ›After the Fall and before the grace of Christ, it is not possible for humans not to sin.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  Half-submerged beneath the floating bits of garlic and peppercorns and twigs of dill, schools of pickles drifted like spiced fish waiting belly up for a bite. Nearby, sawhorse tables extended onto the sidewalk under a striped awning, holding flats of dried apricots, dark orange and mysteriously translucent. Beside them on the tables, long square wooden boxes half-open, waxed paper pulled back over the long slabs of halvah, ground sesame-paste candy. There were boxes of vanilla, smooth chocolate, and the crazy-quilt mixture of the two—my favorite, marble . Over all, in the sharpening autumn air, the smells from Ratner’s Dairy Restaurant drifting around the corner and over the rooftops, cheese blintzes and freshly baked onion rolls. They mingled with the heavier smells of the delicatessen next door, where all-beef garlic sausages and stuffed derma nestled alongside of the kasha knishes in the window-warmer. To the noses on the busy street, religious and dietary separations did not matter, and Sunday morning shopping on Rivington Street was an orchestra of olfactory delights . I wondered where the boy had gotten a half-dill pickle in Stamford, Connecticut. “Do they sell pickles in Grants’, Ginger?” “What a great idea!” Ginger grinned as she took my arm. “You like pickles, too? Big sour juicy ones, and the little—hey, watch it!” Ginger yanked back on my arm as I glanced up the avenue absently and stepped down into the street. “Speedy Gonzales, you get tickets for jay-walking around here, and New Yorkers get most of them. You don’t have anything better to do with your money?” She grinned again as the light changed. “How’d you hear about the job at Keystone, anyway?” “At the West Main Community Center.” “Good ole Crispus Attucks.” “What’s that?” We turned the corner onto Main Street and headed for Grants’. “The center, stupid. It was just renamed in honor of a Negro, so we shouldn’t mind that they don’t want us using the center downtown.” “Who’s it named for?” “You mean you don’t know who he is?” Ginger screwed her face up, unbelieving. She cocked her head and wrinkled her brow at me. “I haven’t been around here that long, you know,” I countered, defensively. “Well I’ll be dipped. Slick kitty from the city! What kind of a school was that you-all went to?” Her round, incredulous eyes almost disappearing into the folds of her wrinkled-up face. “I thought everybody knew about him . The first cat to die in the Revolutionary War, in Concord, Massachusetts. A Black man, name of Crispus Attucks. The shot heard ’round the world. Everybody knows that. They renamed our center after him.” Ginger squeezed my arm again as we entered the store. “And they got you the job at Keystone. I’m glad they did something useful, after all.” Grants’ didn’t sell pickles except with sandwiches.

• From House of Holes: A Book of Raunch (2011)

  She sat on a dark-red bar stool and addressed the bartender. “Can you make a sherry cobbler?” she asked. He nodded, sure. “I’ll take one, too,” Cardell said impulsively. He turned back to Jackie. “What’s a sherry cobbler?” “It’s my life’s work,” said Jackie, and moved an eyebrow provocatively. She told Cardell where she taught, and they talked about a big video store near there that had closed recently. “Rented a lot of movies there, back in the day,” said Cardell, closing his eyes in nostalgic reminiscence. “Before everything streamed.” The drinks came, with straws poking out. Cardell took three enormous sips and nodded, blinking and smacking his lips. The drink was incredibly sweet and strong. And good. “So that’s a sherry cobbler,” he said. “Not particularly subtle—but then, who needs subtle?” Jackie sucked hers down greedily. “Damn delicious. I never tire of it. Would you like me to tell you the history of the sherry cobbler?” “Tell it in the minutest detail,” Cardell said. But Jackie had an odd look. “Wait a sec,” she said. She began breathing strangely and put her hand on Cardell’s arm. “I need your help with something. Stand behind me.” Cardell stood behind where she sat on the bar stool. She leaned forward, so that her head was almost on her arms, and pushed her bottom back toward him so that she was almost off the stool. “What’s happening?” Cardell asked. “Put your hand under my dress.” “Here?” “Yeah, just pretend you’re whispering something to me. I’m trying to lay an egg.” The end of the bar where they were was dark and nobody else was sitting nearby, so it was possible to do as she asked. “Now what?” “I’m not sure.” Jackie sat for a moment, leaning forward. Then she straightened and brushed the hair out of her eyes. “Nope, not quite yet.” Cardell sat back down and finished his drink. “Ah, Nelly!” he said. “The great breakthrough,” Jackie was saying, “came in 1842 when Charles Dickens came to the U.S. on his speaking tour. Somebody served him up a big, ice-cold sherry cobbler. It was the first drink made with crushed ice, you know.” “No, I didn’t,” Cardell said. “Oh, yes. And the first drink people drank through a straw.” “Doubly revolutionary,” said Cardell. “Did Charles Dickens like it?” “Loved it, and he had his character Martin Chuzzlewit drink one.” “Ah, old Chuzzlewit,” Cardell said, in a wuffly English accent. “And where do you come down on the question of the size of Dickens’s dick? Big? Little? Doesn’t matter?” “We just don’t know,” said Jackie, with a look of mild ex-asperation. “It’s one of the great mysteries.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  Every half-educated or educated modern who comes to the period in which Augustine lives still lives with the unthinking binary categories he nourished. The “pagan” category has triumphed over its sectarian origins and is now commonly used by interpreters and scholars of every stripe to accept the imposition on the late-antique world of the black/white divide that Christians sought to create. Eighteenth-century sympathizers with un-Christian cultists did not realize how much of the combat they were giving away in accepting the name and preferring the style of “pagan” for their heroes in the period. To be sure, few if any real “pagan” heroes stood out in Augustine’s time. Most of the modern melodramas of the decline and fall of “paganism” suffer from the fundamental failing of taking Christian parody and polemic too seriously. The poignancy and loss of old ways in Augustine’s time was rarely felt so deeply by votaries of the old religions as their modern sympathizers would have us believe.361 Christianity succeeded by the way it outlasted the Roman empire and defined itself against its culture of origin. It persuaded those who came after to see some linear transformation, even progress, between old and new, with Christianity granted presumptive ownership of the new. We say glibly of Augustine that he is both Roman and Christian, ancient and medieval, and in so doing make claims that could only be true in retrospect, and only if we accept a set of theological categories that were very much controverted in Augustine’s own time. Once again, if we could imagine Augustine without the future we know he had, he would engage a broader but less intense debate about his merits. Without legatees and legacies, real and imagined, he undoubtedly would be one of the most fascinating and broadly studied of ancient men. But we would think of him as resembling in the first instance not so much Aquinas or Heidegger as Cicero or Pascal. Indeed, he and Cicero would be found to be brothers in many ways: failed family men and political upstart machinators whose prestige and creations succeeded beyond their lifetimes even while they themselves died amid the ruins of their earthly hopes; heirs of Platonism consciously rewriting their master for their own times, and living at a moment when new political orders they little imagined would invoke them as founding patrons.