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 Austerlitz (2001)

  journey, where just before turning into Liverpool Street Station the train must wind its way over several sets of points through a narrow defile, and where the brick walls rising above both sides of the track with their round arches, columns, and niches, blackened with soot and diesel oil, put me in mind once again that morning of an underground columbarium. It was around three in the afternoon by the time I reached Harley Street and one of its mauve brick buildings, almost all of them occupied by dermatologists, urologists, gynecologists, neurologists, psychiatrists, ear, nose, and throat specialists, and eye surgeons, and was standing by the window in the soft lamplight of Zdenék Gregor’s slightly overheated waiting room. From the gray sky that lowered over the city outside a few isolated snowflakes were floating down, and disappeared into the dark chasms of the yards behind the buildings. I thought of the onset of winter in the mountains, the complete absence of sound, and my childhood wish for everything to be snowed over, the whole village and the valley all the way to the mountain peaks, and how I used to imagine what it would be like when we thawed out again and emerged from the ice in spring. And as I stood in the waiting room remembering the snow of the Alps, the whitened panes of the bedroom window, the curved drifts around the porch, the softly capped insulators of the telegraph poles, and the trough of the well which was sometimes frozen over for months, the opening lines of one of my favorite poems came into my mind.... And so I long for snow to sweep across the low heights of London .... I imagined that out there in the gathering dusk I could see the districts of the city of London crisscrossed by innumerable streets and railway lines, crowding ever more closely together as they marched east and north, one reef of buildings above the next and then the next, and so on, far beyond Holloway and Highbury, and I saw the snow falling on this huge outcropping of stone slowly, steadily, until everything was covered up and buried.... London a lichen mapped on mild clays and its rough circle without purpose ... It was a circle of this kind with an indistinct outline that Zdenék Gregor drew on a piece of paper to illustrate the extent of the gray area in my right eye when he had examined it. Usually, he said, this was only a temporary disability, in which a bubble suffused by clear liquid formed on the macula, rather like a blister under wallpaper. There was considerable uncertainty, said Zdenék Gregor, about the causes of the disorder, described by the literature on the subject as central serous chorioretinopathy. All that was really known was that it occurred almost exclusively in middle-aged men who spent too much time reading and writing. After the consultation I must have a procedure called a fluorescing angiography carried out to determine the affected area of the retina more precisely—it would mean taking a series of photographs of my eyes, or

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  dark cul-de-sacs with rolltop cupboards, lecterns, writing desks, office chairs, and other items of furniture stacked up at the end of them, as if someone had been obliged to hold out there in a state of siege. He had even heard, said Austerlitz, of people who, over the years, had managed to start up a small business in one or other of the empty rooms and remote corridors of that great wairen: a tobacconist’s, a bookie’s, a bar, and it was rumored, Austerlitz added, that a man called Achterbos had once turned a gentlemen’s lavatory down in the basement into a public convenience for, among others, passersby in the street, installing himself at the entrance with a small table and a plate to take the money, and that later, when he engaged an assistant who was handy with a comb and a pair of scissors, it was a barber’s shop for a while. I heard several such apocryphal stories from Austerlitz, anecdotes in curious contrast to his usual rigorous objectivity, not only that day but on our later encounters, for instance one quiet November afternoon when we spent some time sitting in a café with a billiards room in Terneuzen—lI still remember the proprietress, a woman with thick-lensed spectacles who was knitting a grass-green sock, the glowing nuggets of coke in the hearth, the damp sawdust on the floor, the bitter smell of chicory—and looked out through the panoramic window, which was framed by the tentacles of an ancient rubber plant, at the vast expanse of the misty gray mouth of the Schelde. Then, not long before Christmas, I saw Austerlitz coming towards me on the promenade at Zeebrugge when evening was falling and there was not another living soul in sight. It turned out that we had both booked on the same ferry, so we slowly walked back to the harbor together, with the emptiness of the North Sea on our right, and the tall fagades of the apartment blocks set among the dunes, with the bluish light of television screens flickering behind their windows, curiously unsteady and ghostly. It was night by the time the ferry sailed. We stood together on the stern deck. The white wake vanished into the darkness, and I remember that we once thought we saw a few snowflakes swirling in the lamplight. Only on this night crossing of the Channel, in fact, did I discover from a chance remark dropped by Austerlitz that he was a lecturer at a London institute of art history. As it was almost impossible to talk to him about anything personal, and as neither of us knew where the other came from, we had always spoken in French since our first conversation in Antwerp, I with lamentable awkwardness, but Austerlitz with such natural perfection that for a long time I thought he had been brought up in France. When we switched to English, in which I was better versed, I was strangely touched to notice in him an insecurity which had been entirely concealed from me before, expressing itself in a slight speech impediment and occasional fits of stammering, during which he clutched the worn spectacle case he always held in his left hand so

• From Comrade Loves of the Samurai (1972)

  The owner of the shop was an old samurai, who had abandoned his career as a samurai when he was Still young. He lived on the money he had obtained by the sale of his former garments and his precious family heirlooms. He had only one intimate friend, who was of the same age as himself; and they very often played chess together. His only other companion was a little dog. He had no other visitors, except his few rare customers. Once, at the end of a hot summer day, he removed his clothes, which were soaked with sweat, and took a bath in his garden. His friend wept at the sight of his worn old body, and tenderly caressed the poor bent back. With his voice full of tears he said, as he washed his friend's wrinkled and bony shoulders: 'A certain great Chinese poet said in one of his poems: "A fine young man proudly sang the beauty of his body, admiring himself in a mirror. But that was yesterday. To-day, alas! he is no more than a poor old man worn out with wrinkles, and his head is covered with grey hair." That is exactly our own Story. We have sung together hand in hand without a care when we were young. But now it is only a distant memory and a dream.'Then the two old men joined hands and wept tears of regret for their past, while the hot water in the little tub grew cold. These two men were samurais who had been born in the Province of Tjikuzen. The younger's name was Mondo Tamashima, and he had been celebrated for the beauty of his face. Many people took him for a young Princess. The elder was called Hayemon Toyoda, and was a skilful marksman. He fell in love with Mondo, who returned his love sincerely. Mondo was sixteen years old and Hayemon nineteen when their love began. They were Strongly devoted to each other, and vowed an affection deeper than the sea.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  1 When I was three and Bailey four, we had arrived in the musty little town, wearing tags on our wrists which instructed—“To Whom It May Concern”— that we were Marguerite and Bailey Johnson Jr., from Long Beach, California, en route to Stamps, Arkansas, c/o Mrs. Annie Henderson. Our parents had decided to put an end to their calamitous marriage, and Father shipped us home to his mother. A porter had been charged with our welfare—he got off the train the next day in Arizona-and our tickets were pinned to my brother's inside coat pocket. I don't remember much of the trip, but after we reached the segregated southern part of the journey, things must have looked up. Negro passengers, who always traveled with loaded lunch boxes, felt sorry for “the poor little motherless darlings” and plied us with cold fried chicken and potato salad. Years later I discovered that the United States had been crossed thousands of times by frightened Black children traveling alone to their newly affluent parents in Northern cities, or back to grandmothers in Southern towns when the urban North reneged on its economic promises. The town reacted to us as its inhabitants had reacted to all things new before our coming. It regarded us a while without curiosity but with caution, and after we were seen to be harmless (and children) it closed in around us, as a real mother embraces a stranger's child. Warmly, but not too familiarly. We lived with our grandmother and uncle in the rear of the Store (it was always spoken of with a capital s), which she had owned some twenty-five years. Early in the century, Momma (we soon stopped calling her Grandmother) sold lunches to the sawmen in the lumberyard (east Stamps) and the seedmen at the cotton gin (west Stamps). Her crisp meat pies and cool lemonade, when joined to her miraculous ability to be in two places at the same time, assured her business success. From being a mobile lunch counter, she set up a stand between the two points of fiscal interest and supplied the workers' needs for a few years. Then she had the Store built in the heart of the Negro area. Over the years it became the lay center of activities in town. On Saturdays, barbers sat their customers in the shade on the porch of the Store, and troubadours on their ceaseless crawlings through the South leaned across its benches and sang their sad songs of The Brazos while they played juice harps and cigar-box guitars. The formal name of the Store was the Wm. Johnson General Merchandise Store. Customers could find food staples, a good variety of colored thread, mash for hogs, corn for chickens, coal oil for lamps, light bulbs for the wealthy, shoestrings, hair dressing, balloons, and flower seeds. Anything not visible had only to be ordered.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  As for the fish section, where perch, pike, plaice, sole, and eels lay heaped on black slate slabs with fresh water constantly running over them, Pereira described it as a whole underworld in itself, said Austerlitz, and if it hadn’t been too late he, Austerlitz, would go round the place again with me. He added that he would particularly like to show me the temple, with its omamental gold-painted picture of a three-story ark floating beneath a rainbow, and the dove just returning to it carrying the olive branch in her beak. Oddly enough, said Austerlitz, as he stood in front of this attractive motif with Pereira that afternoon he had been thinking of our encounters in Belgium, so long ago now, and telling himself he must find someone to whom he could relate his own story, a story which he had learned only in the last few years and for which he needed the kind of listener I had once been in Antwerp, Liége, and Zeebrugge.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  China dogs—they had nice china dogs at Langley’s—that made you think of someone; oh, yes, of course, Collins—Collins and a cottage with red china dogs. But you tried not to think about Collins! There was such a queer light slanting over the hills, a kind of gold glory, and it made you feel sorry—why should a gold glory make you feel sorry when it shone that way on the hills? Rice pudding, almost as bad as tapioca—not quite though, because it was not so slimy—tapioca evaded your efforts to chew it, it felt horrid, like biting down on your own gum. The lanes smelt of wetness, a wonderful smell! Yet when Nanny washed things they only smelt soapy—but then, of course, God washed the world without soap; being God, perhaps He didn’t need any—you needed a lot, especially for hands—did God wash His hands without soap? Mother, talking about calves and babies, and looking like the Virgin Mary in church, the one in the stained-glass window with Jesus, which reminded you of Church Street, not a bad place after all; Church Street was really rather exciting—what fun it must be for men to have hats that they could take off, instead of just smiling—a bowler must be much more fun than a Leghorn—you couldn’t take that off to Mother— The brougham would roll smoothly along the white road, between stout leafy hedges starred with dog-roses; blackbirds and thrushes would be singing loudly, so loudly that Stephen could hear their voices above the quick clip, clip, of the cobs and the muffled sounds of the carriage. Then from under her brows she must glance across at Anna, who she knew loved the songs of blackbirds and thrushes; but Anna’s face would be hidden in shadow, while her hands lay placidly folded. And now the horses, nearing their stables, would redouble their efforts as they swung through the gates, the tall, iron gates of the parklands of Morton, faithful gates that had always meant home. Old trees would fly past, then the paddocks with their cattle—Worcestershire cattle with uncanny white faces; then the two quiet lakes where the swans reared their cygnets; then the lawns, and at last the wide curve in the drive, near the house, that would lead to the massive entrance. The child was too young to know why the beauty of Morton would bring a lump to her throat when seen thus in the gold haze of late afternoon, with its thoughts of evening upon it. She would want to cry out in a kind of protest that was very near tears: ‘Stop it—stop it, you’re hurting!’

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  At times Jamie gave way to deep depression, hating the beautiful city of her exile. Homesick unto death she would suddenly feel for the dour little Highland village of Beedles. More even than for its dull bricks and mortar would she long for its dull and respectable spirit, for the sense of security common to Sabbaths, for the kirk with its dull and respectable people. She would think with a tenderness bred by forced absence of the greengrocer’s shop that stood on the corner, where they sold, side by side with the cabbages and onions, little neatly tied bunches of Scottish heather, little earthenware jars of opaque heather honey. She would think of the vast, stretching, windy moorlands; of the smell of the soil after rain in summer; of the piper with his weather-stained, agile fingers, of the wail of his sorrowful, outlandish music; of Barbara as she had been in the days when they strolled side by side down the narrow high street. And then she would sit with her head in her hands, hating the sound and the smell of Paris, hating the sceptical eyes of the concierge, hating the bare and unhomely studio. Tears would well up from heaven alone knew what abyss of half-understood desolation, and would go splashing down upon her tweed skirt, or trickling back along her red wrists until they had wetted her frayed flannel wristbands. Coming home with their evening meal in a bag, this was how Barbara must sometimes find her. 2Jamie was not always so full of desolation; there were days when she seemed to be in excellent spirits, and on one such occasion she rang Stephen up, asking her to bring Mary round after dinner. Every one was coming, Wanda and Pat, Brockett, and even Valérie Seymour; for she, Jamie, had persuaded a couple of negroes who were studying at the Conservatoire to come in and sing for them that evening—they had promised to sing Negro Spirituals, old slavery songs of the Southern plantations. They were very nice negroes, their name was Jones—Lincoln and Henry Jones, they were brothers. Lincoln and Jamie had become great friends; he was very interested in her opera. And Wanda would bring her mandolin—but the evening would be spoilt without Mary and Stephen. Mary promptly put on her hat; she must go and order them in some supper. As she and Stephen would be there to share it, Jamie’s sensitive pride would be appeased. She would send them a very great deal of food so that they could go on eating and eating. Stephen nodded: ‘Yes, send them in tons of supper!’ 3At ten o’clock they arrived at the studio; at ten thirty Wanda came in with Brockett, then Blanc together with Valérie Seymour, then Pat wearing serviceable goloshes over her house shoes because it was raining, then three or four fellow students of Jamie’s, and finally the two negro brothers.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  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. But old Mrs. Williams shook her white head slowly: ‘No, Miss Stephen, ’e wouldn’t sit down in your presence. Beggin’ your pardon, it would ’urt Arth-thur’s feelin’s to be made to sit down; it would make ’im feel as ’is days of service was really over.’ ‘I don’t need to sit down,’ declared Williams. So Stephen wished them both a good night, promising to come again very soon; and Williams hobbled out to the path which was now quite golden from border to border, for the door of the cottage was standing wide open and the glow from the lamp streamed over the path. Once more she found herself walking on lamplight, while Williams, bareheaded, stood and watched her departure. Then her feet were caught up and entangled in shadows again, as she made her way under the trees.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  17 Weekdays revolved on a sameness wheel. They turned into themselves so steadily and inevitably that each seemed to be the original of yesterday's rough draft. Saturdays, however, always broke the mold and dared to be different. Farmers trekked into town with their children and wives streaming around them. Their board-stiff khaki pants and shirts revealed the painstaking care of a dutiful daughter or wife. They often stopped at the Store to get change for bills so they could give out jangling coins to their children, who shook with their eagerness to get to town. The young kids openly resented their parents' dawdling in the Store and Uncle Willie would call them in and spread among them bits of sweet peanut patties that had been broken in shipping. They gobbled down the candies and were out again, kicking up the powdery dust in the road and worrying if there was going to be time to get to town after all. Bailey played mumbledypeg with the older boys around the chinaberry tree, and Momma and Uncle Willie listened to the farmers' latest news of the country. I thought of myself as hanging in the Store, a mote imprisoned on a shaft of sunlight. Pushed and pulled by the slightest shift of air, but never falling free into the tempting darkness. In the warm months, morning began with a quick wash in unheated well water. The suds were dashed on a plot of ground beside the kitchen door. It was called the bait garden (Bailey raised worms). After prayers, breakfast in summer was usually dry cereal and fresh milk Then to our chores (which on Saturday included weekday jobs)—scrubbing the floors, raking the yards, polishing our shoes for Sunday (Uncle Willie's had to be shined with a biscuit) and attending to the customers who came breathlessly, also in their Saturday hurry. Looking through the years, I marvel that Saturday was my favorite day in the week. What pleasures could have been squeezed between the fan folds of unending tasks? Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives. After our retreat from St. Louis, Momma gave us a weekly allowance. Since she seldom dealt with money, other than to take it in and to tithe to the church, I supposed that the weekly ten cents was to tell us that even she realized that a change had come over us, and that our new unfamiliarity caused her to treat us with a strangeness. I usually gave my money to Bailey, who went to the movies nearly every Saturday. He brought back Street and Smith cowboy books for me. One Saturday Bailey was late coming back from the Ryeal-toh. Momma had begun heating water for the Saturday-night baths, and all the evening chores were done. Uncle Willie sat in the twilight on the front porch mumbling or maybe singing, and smoking a ready-made. It was quite late.

• From Comrade Loves of the Samurai (1972)

  The idea of homosexuality is traditionally much more acceptable to Orientals than to Westerners. One reason for this may be the lesser physical differentiation of the sexes in the Mongoloid race (Japanese women and men have relatively sparse body hair, while women's breasts and buttocks are small compared to those of average Caucasian women.) Also the East viewed sexual love detached from Western-style notions of sin. Provided social proprieties were observed, there was no association of sin with sex. Women were excluded from important arts (including Kabuki and Noh acting and the tea ceremony) because they were of little social importance. In the circumstances it was fitting that men should seek men for their most intimate life. Ihara Saikaku's youthful writings were unsuccessful, but when he published his novel The Armorous Life of Yonosuke, the gateway to fame and prosperity opened to him. Among his many popular bawdy best sellers is Five Women Who Loved Love (Charles E. Tuttle). The Songs of the Geisha is quite unassociated with the stories of Ihara Saikaku. It is a collection of geisha folk songs composed to be sung to the accompaniment of the shamisen. Ninety of these songs were retranslated by E. Powys Mathers from Gaston Morphy's anthology Le Livre des Geisha . The remainder are from Chansons des Geishas by Steinilber Oberlin and Hidetake Iwamura. All have that charmingly nostalgic quality which fitted well the time and the circumstances for which they were composed. Geisha entered the entertainment trade in old Japan under sad circumstances, most often being sold to procurers by impoverished parents for training in the ways of pleasure houses (for the whole story see De Becker's The Nightless City (Charles E. Tuttle). For lonely girls who were courtesans and geisha the only hope was to find a lover to purchase their freedom, but until this happened —which was rare—they were obliged to spend many years in erotic slavery. When youthful bloom had faded and their time of service had expired, they were often cast aside undesired. So these songs, freely composed and intimately personal, expressed the feelings of the geisha toward their sympathetic listeners. Unlike classic songs, they reach to the heart of the common people. Love, frustration, and the futility of hope are their main themes. Here is an example from "Who Loves": A body that loves Is fragile and uncertain, A floating boat. The fires in the fishing boat at night Burn red, my heart burns red. Wooden stakes hold up the nets Against the tide of Uji. The tide is against me. These song-poems, mere thumbnail sketches of life, belong to a very ancient oral tradition in Japan. The best known are popularly quoted and sung, but for a true rendering they must be heard from a beautiful geisha with a shamisen, and in a teahouse. The effect is unique. After long training in singing, dancing, and playing instruments, the geisha became herself a living work of art.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  But old Mrs. Williams shook her white head slowly: ‘No, Miss Stephen, ’e wouldn’t sit down in your presence. Beggin’ your pardon, it would ’urt Arth-thur’s feelin’s to be made to sit down; it would make ’im feel as ’is days of service was really over.’ ‘I don’t need to sit down,’ declared Williams. So Stephen wished them both a good night, promising to come again very soon; and Williams hobbled out to the path which was now quite golden from border to border, for the door of the cottage was standing wide open and the glow from the lamp streamed over the path. Once more she found herself walking on lamplight, while Williams, bareheaded, stood and watched her departure. Then her feet were caught up and entangled in shadows again, as she made her way under the trees. But presently came a familiar fragrance—logs burning on the wide, friendly hearths of Morton. Logs burning—quite soon the lakes would be frozen—‘and the ice looks like slabs of gold in the sunset, when you and I come and stand here in the winter . . . and as we walk back we can smell the log fires long before we can see them, and we love that good smell because it means home, and our home is Morton . . . because it means home and our home is Morton. . . .’ Oh, intolerable fragrance of log fires burning! CHAPTER 24 1 R alph said very little about the ring. What could he say? A present given to his wife by the daughter of a neighbour—an unusually costly present of course—still, after all, what could he say? He took refuge in sulky silence. But Stephen would see him staring at the pearl, which Angela wore on her right-hand third finger, and his weak little eyes would look redder than usual, perhaps with anger—one could never quite tell from his eyes whether he was tearful or angry. And because of those eyes with their constant menace, Stephen must play her conciliatory role; and this she must do in spite of his rudeness, for now he was openly rude and hostile. And he bullied. It was almost as though he took pleasure in bullying his wife when Stephen was present; her presence seemed to arouse in the man everything that was ill-bred, petty and cruel. He would make thinly-veiled allusions to the past, glancing sideways at Stephen the while he did so; and one day when she flushed to the roots of her hair with rage to see Angela humble and fearful, he laughed loudly: ‘I’m just a plain tradesman, you know; if you don’t like my ways, then you’d better not come here.’ Catching Angela’s eye, Stephen tried to laugh too. A soul-sickening business.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  2 Raftery stepped quietly into his horse-box and Jim with great deftness secured the halter, then he touched his cap and hurried away to his third-class compartment, for Stephen herself would travel with Raftery on this last journey back to the fields of Morton. Sitting down on the seat reserved for a groom she opened the little wooden window into the box, whereupon Raftery’s muzzle came up and his face looked out of the window. She fondled the soft, grey plush of his muzzle. Presently she took a carrot from her pocket, but the carrot was rather hard now for his teeth, so she bit off small pieces and these she gave him in the palm of her hand; then she watched him eat them uncomfortably, slowly, because he was old, and this seemed so strange, for old age and Raftery went very ill together. Her mind slipped back and back over the years until it recaptured the coming of Raftery—grey-coated and slender, and his eyes as soft as an Irish morning, and his courage as bright as an Irish sunrise, and his heart as young as the wild, eternally young heart of Ireland. She remembered what they had said to each other. Raftery had said: ‘I will carry you bravely, I will, serve you all the days of my life.’ She had answered: ‘I will care for you night and day, Raftery—all the days of your life.’ She remembered their first run with hounds together—she a youngster of twelve, he a youngster of five. Great deeds they had done on that day together, at least they had seemed like great deeds to them—she had had a kind of fire in her heart as she galloped astride of Raftery. She remembered her father, his protective back, so broad, so kind, so patiently protective; and towards the end it had stooped a little as though out of kindness it carried a burden. Now she knew whose burden that back had been bearing so that it stooped a little. He had been very proud of the fine Irish horse, very proud of his small and courageous rider: ‘Steady, Stephen!’ but his eyes had been bright like Raftery’s. ‘Steady on, Stephen, we’re coming to a stiff one!’ but once they were over he had turned round and smiled, as he had done in the days when the impudent Collins had stretched his inadequate legs to their utmost to keep up with the pace of the hunters. Long ago, it all seemed a long time ago. A long road it seemed, leading where? She wondered.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  Together, all of the changes I’ve experienced since my transition—in my body feelings, in my interactions with other people, and in my growing life history as a woman—have led to me becoming a somewhat different person than I was before. Granted, my personality, habits, opinions, sense of humor, etc., are mostly still the same, but my life itself has taken on a different shape. While I can think back to before my transition and imagine how I looked and acted, I find that my memories of how it felt to be in my body—to be physically male—are becoming increasingly vague with time. It’s not dissimilar to how I feel when I think back to high school—recalling all of the things that I thought, said, and did, yet feeling almost as if I were reminiscing about another person. I now look back on my years as an adult male, remembering how I acted and interacted with others, but having some difficulty relating to the person I was back then. My life has very much been reshaped by the experiences of being and feeling physically female and having other people react to me as such. People often squabble over what defines a person as a woman or a man—whether it should be based on their chromosomes, assigned sex, genitals, or other factors—but such reductionist views deny our indisputably holistic gendered realities. For all of us, gender is first and foremost an individual experience, an amalgamation of our own unique combinations of gender inclinations, social interactions, body feelings, and lived experiences. While our experiential gender is often shaped or influenced by our perceived gender (the gender others assume us to be), one does not necessarily follow from the other. For example, I had lived and was treated as a man for many years, yet I always felt rather ambivalent about belonging to that class. Sometimes when my female friends would go off on a tirade about men in general, I would join in with them, not because I hated men or enjoyed making generalizations about people, but as a way of expressing the fact that I did not feel like a man. That identity never made sense to me given my constant struggles with gender dissonance, the persistent body feelings I experienced that informed me that there was something not quite right with my being physically male, and my personal history of consciously exploring and expressing my femaleness and femininity both in my imagination and in public. I gravitated toward genderqueer identities for most of the years that I was male-bodied—at different points, viewing myself as a boy who wanted to be a girl, a crossdresser, and bigendered—because they resonated with the myriad of gendered experiences that I had had up to that point. They captured the fact that, at the time, I really did feel like I was straddling both maleness and femaleness in some way.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  “You really are so beautiful,” he says. “I’m so happy Jill gave me your number. She said you were dying to meet me, but I feel now like it should’ve been the reverse.” I can’t help but laugh to myself, remembering how Dr. B had been so persistent, telling me he was so excited to meet me and could I please allow the precious passing along of my phone number? She diligently worked both ends to make this set-up happen. Within minutes, the platter still largely untouched, he leans toward me and kisses me, continuing to murmur about how beautiful I am and how happy he is to be with me. A noise at the door startles us and we pull away from each other. A moment later, his daughter is tiptoeing through the room apologetically, saying she forgot something, and then she is back out the door again and he returns to his spot next to me. I pull back, expressing concern that she will come in again, so he takes me to his bedroom and closes the door behind us. His bed is king-size on a large mahogany frame, covered in a worn patchwork quilt. Framed photos of his kids line the dresser, along with a few candles that he lights, saying, “This is the best thing about living right next to a Dollar Store, they have absolutely everything.” I think longingly of #6 with his fastidiously chosen bedding and expensive, delicately scented candles culled from artisanal markets. We undress, facing each other, and he lays me back against the bed and asks if I am OK with his going down on me. I nod my assent and after a few minutes he grabs a condom from his nightstand and we both quickly come. When we are still and lying next to each other, I say, “I want to ask you a question, something I’ve been pondering lately.” “Sure,” he says, “go ahead.” “Why do men love oral sex so much? I don’t mean receiving it, I mean giving it. Every man I’ve been with finds it a huge turn-on, and many love it or seem to need it more than intercourse. Why is that? What is it about it that you find so alluring?” I ask. “Isn’t it obvious?” he says. “No. Don’t get me wrong, I really love having sex. I like being the recipient of oral sex and like giving it, but it’s not the main attraction for me. I always wonder why men love to be that up close and personal with a woman’s pussy,” I say. “Well, first of all, it’s not every pussy. They’re not all the same. Some aren’t appealing at all. You just happen to have a really nice one,” he says and a short, loud laugh escapes my lips. “Why? What about it?” I ask. “The way it smells. The smell is very important. The way it feels. Yours is wet and soft and inviting.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Mary’s will see the book into which these lectures have grown as a kind of contribution in the other direction, bringing reflections that were occasioned by my work in the wider world into the bright light and searching scrutiny of the academy. There is, of course, much more to do, and I hope to return to the four gospels in a much fuller academic context before long. But this book may perhaps provide a start, and a signpost. N. T. Wright St. Mary’s College St. Andrews September 2011 PART ONE The Empty Cloak 1 The Missing Middle THE PROBLEM I WISH TO ADDRESS in this book can be introduced with a personal story from nearly fifty years ago. I was in high school, trying with some friends to run a small Christian Studies group. We decided one term that we would do a series of studies about Jesus, each beginning with “Why?” The topics included such questions as: Why was Jesus born? Why did Jesus live? Why did Jesus die? Why did Jesus rise again? And why will he return? (I don’t think we had one on why Jesus ascended, though we should have.) Anyway, for some reason I was assigned the task of preparing and leading the second of these: Why did Jesus live? I soon realized, even as a raw teenager, that I had drawn the short straw. After all, if you were given Jesus’s birth, you could talk about the incarnation, about God becoming man. We all had memories of Christmas sermons, and we knew how important it was that Jesus wasn’t just an ordinary human being: he was God in person. There was even the whole question of the virgin birth. No shortage of material there. The same was true too for the person who was to speak about Jesus’s death. Even at that tender age we knew not only that it was important to say “he died for our sins,” but to push a little bit farther and ask how that happened, how it made sense. For myself, that is, so to speak, where I came in: my earliest memory of personal faith was when, as a very small boy, I was overwhelmed, reduced to tears, by the thought that Jesus died for me. What the cross says about the love of God has always been central and vital for me. I don’t think we schoolboys quite grasped the range of what is called “atonement theology.” But we knew there were some important questions to look at and some important and central beliefs to grasp hold of. So too with the resurrection. And, indeed, the second coming. Again, I’m not sure we went very deep or even necessarily explored the most helpful biblical passages. But these were thrilling topics. There was plenty to talk about, plenty to chew over, plenty to make us not only think hard, but also celebrate the excitement of believing in Jesus and of trying to live as a Christian.

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  Two thousand years ago, Octavian, the not-yet Augustus, said, “Aphrodisias is the one city from all of Asia I have selected to be my own,” and the citizens carved that accolade on the archive wall of their theater. Since the Greek goddess Aphrodite was the Roman goddess Venus, from whom the Julian line was allegedly descended, the city was most fortunately named at that precise historical moment. Millennia later, in Aphrodisias: City of Venus Aphrodite, the frontispiece poem by L. G. Harvey says, when all paper words are turned to ash there will remain one scarred hillside beautiful enough to last forever. Kenan Erim, of New York University, the city’s Turkish-born excavator and that book’s author, spent his professional life there and is now buried most appropriately beside the reconstructed gate to Aphrodite’s temple. He said that “of all the Graeco-Roman sites of Anatolia, Aphrodisias is the most hauntingly beautiful” (1). Agreed. The hamlet of Geyre once sat atop the ancient site, but was removed and rebuilt in its nearby location after an earthquake in the 1960s. That opened the site for archaeology, but the old village square still underlies the new entrance plaza ringed by restrooms (very elegant), a restaurant (very limited), and a museum (very beautiful). You get there around 11:30 A.M. and have the site almost totally to yourself. The morning tour buses heading west from Hierapolis and the hot-spring pools of Pamukkale are just leaving, and those reversing that itinerary will not arrive until much later. You sit high up in the once thirty-thousand-seat theater, eat a quiet picnic lunch, admire the stands of stately poplars amid the marbled ruins , and look east to where the seven-thousand-foot tip of Baba Dag emerges periodically from scudding cloud cover. At the foot of that mountain are the marble quarries that gave the city ready material for sculpture or inscription and made its products famous far beyond its own borders. The Dandalaz tributary, fed from the snows of that eastern mountain range, circled the city’s south side and took sculptures northwestward to the ancient Meander, the modern Büyük Menderes, which carried them westward to the coast and the world. Overview What text do you read to see most clearly Paul’s life, and what site do you visit to see most clearly Paul’s world—even, or especially, if Paul himself neither wrote that text nor visited that site? In this chapter two chosen sites, the city of Aphrodisias, now in southwestern Turkey, and the island of Delos, now in mid-Aegean Greece , frame two contradictory aspects of the chosen text, Luke’s Acts of the Apostles, now a prelude to Paul’s letters in the New Testament.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  The child was too young to know why the beauty of Morton would bring a lump to her throat when seen thus in the gold haze of late afternoon, with its thoughts of evening upon it. She would want to cry out in a kind of protest that was very near tears: ‘Stop it—stop it, you’re hurting!’ But instead she would blink hard and shut her lips tightly, unhappy yet happy. It was a queer feeling; it was too big for Stephen, who was still rather little when it came to affairs of the spirit. For the spirit of Morton would be part of her then, and would always remain somewhere deep down within her, aloof and untouched by the years that must follow, by the stress and the ugliness of life. In those after-years certain scents would evoke it—the scent of damp rushes growing by water; the kind, slightly milky odour of cattle; the smell of dried roseleaves and orris-root and violets, that together with a vague suggestion of beeswax always hung about Anna’s rooms. Then that part of Stephen that she still shared with Morton would know what it was to feel terribly lonely, like a soul that wakes up to find itself wandering, unwanted, between the spheres. 4Anna and Stephen would take off their coats, and go to the study in search of Sir Philip who would usually be there waiting. ‘Hallo, Stephen!’ he would say in his pleasant, deep voice, but his eyes would be resting on Anna. Stephen’s eyes invariably followed her father’s, so that she too would stand looking at Anna, and sometimes she must catch her breath in surprise at the fullness of that calm beauty. She never got used to her mother’s beauty, it always surprised her each time she saw it; it was one of those queerly unbearable things, like the fragrance of meadowsweet under the hedges. Anna might say: ‘What’s the matter, Stephen? For goodness’ sake darling, do stop staring!’ And Stephen would feel hot with shame and confusion because Anna had caught her staring. Sir Philip usually came to her rescue: ‘Stephen, here’s that new picture-book about hunting’; or, ‘I know of a really nice print of young Nelson; if you’re good I’ll order it for you to-morrow.’

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  With this image, a host of others came. I had forgotten, in the rage of my growing up, how proud my father had been of me when I was little. Apparently, I had had a voice and my father had liked to show me off before the members of the church. I had forgotten what he had looked like when he was pleased but now I remembered that he had always been grinning with pleasure when my solos ended. I even remembered certain expressions on his face when he teased my mother—had he loved her? I would never know. And when had it all begun to change? For now it seemed that he had not always been cruel. I remembered being taken for a haircut and scraping my knee on the footrest of the barber’s chair and I remembered my father’s face as he soothed my crying and applied the stinging iodine. Then I remembered our fights, fights which had been of the worst possible kind because my technique had been silence. I remembered the one time in all our life together when we had really spoken to each other. It was on a Sunday and it must have been shortly before I left home. We were walking, just the two of us, in our usual silence, to or from church. I was in high school and had been doing a lot of writing and I was, at about this time, the editor of the high school magazine. But I had also been a Young Minister and had been preaching from the pulpit. Lately, I had been taking fewer engagements and preached as rarely as possible. It was said in the church, quite truthfully, that I was “cooling off.” My father asked me abruptly, “You’d rather write than preach, wouldn’t you?” I was astonished at his question—because it was a real question. I answered, “Yes.” That was all we said. It was awful to remember that that was all we had ever said. The casket now was opened and the mourners were being led up the aisle to look for the last time on the deceased. The assumption was that the family was too overcome with grief to be allowed to make this journey alone and I watched while my aunt was led to the casket and, muffled in black, and shaking, led back to her seat.

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  Notes of a Native Son Notes of a Native Son Notes of a Native Son FOR PAULA MARIA AND GEBRIL Notes of a Native Son Contents Introduction by Edward P. Jones Acknowledgments Preface to the 1984 Edition Autobiographical Notes PART ONE Everybody’s Protest Novel Many Thousands Gone Carmen Jones: The Dark Is Light Enough PART TWO The Harlem Ghetto Journey to Atlanta Notes of a Native Son PART THREE Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets Brown A Question of Identity Equal in Paris Stranger in the Village Notes of a Native Son Introduction I did not know James Baldwin the essayist before my first year of college. I knew only the James Baldwin of novels and short stories and plays, a trusted man who gave me, with his Harlem and his Harlem people, the kind of world I knew so well from growing up in my Washington, D.C. They were all one family, the people in Harlem and the people in Washington, Baldwin told me in that way of all grand and eloquent writers who speak the eternal and universal by telling us, word by hard-won word, of the minutiae of the everyday: The church ladies who put heart and soul into every church service as if to let their god know how worthy they are to step through the door into his heaven. The dust of poor folks’ apartments that forever hangs in the air as though to remind the people of their station in life. The streets of a city where the buildings Negroes live in never stand straight up but lean in mourning every which way. So I knew this Baldwin and, in that strange way of members of the same family, he knew me. When I went off to college in late August 1968, I took few books, anticipating the adequacy of the library that awaited me at Holy Cross College. I packed only two books of nonfiction, both bought in a used bookstore not long after I was accepted to college. Both had never been read. The first was a ponderous 1950s tome on writing logical and well-reasoned essays. I was never to read it in my time at Holy Cross, perhaps because it was so inaccessible.

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

  In another seminary decades later, I encountered the difference between Catholic and Protestant perceptions of Paul firsthand. While I was a visiting professor of New Testament in a theological consortium that included three Catholic seminaries, a number of Catholic students attended my courses. As I was lecturing about Paul’s understanding of justification by grace, I noticed that several of the Catholic students looked puzzled, and then one asked, “What’s all this about ‘justification by grace’? Why is this important?” I realized that the phrase was largely foreign to them. Their puzzlement did not reflect theological naiveté, but the different significance of Paul for Protestants and Catholics. Crossan: I, on the other hand, grew up blissfully unaware of those battling interpretations of Paul or even of the fierce Reformation controversies about him. As a Catholic, I knew him first as the latter half of a June 29 feast day dedicated to Sts. Peter and Paul, and my memory says that in the Ireland of the late 1930s and early 1940s that was a Holy Day of Obligation—like a Sunday. Then, in 1945, in a classical boarding school in Ireland, I ran into “Romulus et Remus” and realized that the twin heroes of pagan Rome had been displaced by “Petrus et Paulus,” the twin heroes of Christian Rome—the double R ceding smoothly to the double P —with both individuals always in that given order. Next, in 1959, when I first stood in St. Peter’s Square in Rome and looked at the statues of St. Peter (on the basilica’s primary, or gospel, side) and St. Paul (on its secondary, or epistle, side), I realized that their unity was as apostles martyred together in Rome. Paul was not there as an author or a theologian, but as a martyr. But, of course, while Peter held his keys, Paul did not hold his epistles. I knew, by then, that there was already tension between Peter and Paul within the New Testament itself. Paul accused Peter “to his face” of “hypocrisy”—twice (Gal. 2:11–13). And, later, an author writing in Peter’s name noted that “our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given him…in all his letters. There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures” (2 Pet. 3:15–16). So those twin Roman statues in front of St. Peter’s represented a visual reconciliation of a process that went back to the fourth century, when Peter and Paul were emphasized together as the martyred founders of the new Christian Rome (match that, Constantinople!). Finally, then, I conclude with an iconic image of that foundational reconciliation from the later fourth century. It is a bronze hanging lamp from the villa of the aristocratic Valerii on the Celian Hill in Rome, now preserved in the National Archaeological Museum in Florence. The lamp is shaped like a boat. Peter is seated in the stern at the tiller.