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

  To Ünal’s surprise you drift away from the churches and move farther up the hill along a plaza once named after Tiberius and toward a temple once dedicated to Augustus. It is hard to imagine the ancient temple from its present remains, and it looks much worse than in excavation photographs from Ramsay in 1912–14 and Robinson in 1924. Only worn courses of gray limestone blocks survive in the front, and crags from the badly eroded bedrock foundation remain in the back. But still very striking is the cavernous imprint of the plaza’s massive apse that had been shaped by cutting away an enormous volume of earth and rock from the hillside. The fluted columns, decorated blocks, colored marbles, and terra-cotta tiles that once composed the temple’s two-storied portico backdrop have long since been stripped away, but the overall site remains very impressive. And, of course, it was built on the highest point in the city. Later you take a little yellow Fiat taxi about half a mile down to Ünal’s museum in Yalvaç, but that short ride covers two thousand years in a few minutes. You leave the quiet of those ancient ruins above the bustling modern town. You leave the site of the ancient sanctuary of the mother goddess Men and later temple of Augustus’s imperial divinity. You careen through a roundabout surrounded by European cube-shaped multistoried and multicolored apartments. You turn hard past a state-of-the-art football stadium with deep green grass and turquoise plastic seats. You turn yet again and then you hit the main road clogged with pedestrians there for the market. Yours is the only car, and your driver eases gently through the crowd without using his horn. Women veiled in traditional garb display linen bolts and cotton weavings; stands are filled with pots, pans, and pistachio nuts; and farmers lead horse-drawn carriages filled with onions and garlic down the street. And fruit, fruit everywhere. Then and now, Antioch and Yalvaç are both towns on a well-watered and fertile steppe ringed closely to east and distantly to west by mountains, then and now cereals and fruits abound, and then as now the River Anthius streams down from the Sultan Daglari massif to the serenity of mountain-ringed Lake Egirdir. Geography is continuity. Inside the cream-colored museum the displays are sleek, elegant, and well lit. Outside, Ünal strides along the north side of the walled garden surrounding the museum. On your right you pass dozens of small Latin fragments of the Acts of the Divine Augustus set in cement within metal frames attached to the side wall of the museum. You continue on past two much larger fragments of the Greek Acts of the Divine Augustus sitting on the cemented ground. The Latin texts come from Pisidian Antioch, the Greek ones from Apollonia, now Uluborlu, nearby to the southwest but on the other side of Lake Egirdir. “Terrible conservation. We must redo it properly,” comments Ünal.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  151THEY are passing, posthaste, posthaste, the gliding years—to use a soul-rending Horatian inflection. The years are passing, my dear, and presently nobody will know what you and I know. Our child is growing; the roses of Paestum, of misty Paestum, are gone; mechanically minded idiots are tinkering and tampering with forces of nature that mild mathematicians, to their own secret surprise, appear to have foreshadowed; so perhaps it is time we examined ancient snapshots, cave drawings of trains and planes, strata of toys in the lumbered closet. We shall go still further back, to a morning in May 1934, and plot with respect to this fixed point the graph of a section of Berlin. There I was walking home, at 5 A.M., from the maternity hospital near Bayerischer Platz, to which I had taken you a couple of hours earlier. Spring flowers adorned the portraits of Hindenburg and Hitler in the window of a shop that sold frames and colored photographs. Leftist groups of sparrows were holding loud morning sessions in lilacs and limes. A limpid dawn had completely unsheathed one side of the empty street. On the other side, the houses still looked blue with cold, and various long shadows were gradually being telescoped, in the matter-of-fact manner young day has when taking over from night in a well-groomed, well-watered city, where the tang of tarred pavements underlies the sappy smells of shade trees; but to me the optical part of the business seemed quite new, like some unusual way of laying the table, because I had never seen that particular street at daybreak before, although, on the other hand, I had often passed there, childless, on sunny evenings. In the purity and vacuity of the less familiar hour, the shadows were on the wrong side of the street, investing it with a sense of not inelegant inversion, as when one sees reflected in the mirror of a barbershop the window toward which the melancholy barber, while stropping his razor, turns his gaze (as they all do at such times), and, framed in that reflected window, a stretch of sidewalk shunting a procession of unconcerned pedestrians in the wrong direction, into an abstract world that all at once stops being droll and loosens a torrent of terror.

• From Chasing Beauty

  The Stewart side of the family dominates Belle’s genealogical chart, and her Scottish forebears were her particular interest. Entries go back as far as Allan Stewart Laird of Appin, who died in 1448. Under the entry listing James Stewart, born in 1660 and descended from Alexander Laird of Invernahlye, Belle includes the detail that he was “one of 10 sons who all attended church with their father in kilted plaids and arms.” Fascinated by a hoped-for link between her branch of the Stewart family and Mary, Queen of Scots, she collected images of the doomed queen as well as relics—a fragment of Belgian needle-and-bobbin lace and a very small scrap of floral silk damask purported to be from one of Mary’s dresses. A lifetime membership in the Stewart Society in Edinburgh was “hereby certified for Mrs. I. Stewart Gardner” in 1921. Missing on the chart is a key piece of information—Belle’s birth date. The official date, April 14, 1840, is stated in Morris Carter’s 1925 biography and appears on the plaque marking her grave at Mount Auburn Cemetery, but there are discrepancies. Evidence in other records points to 1839 as her birth year. *** THE STEWART SISTERS HAD PRIVATE TUTORS EARLY ON, AS DID MANY daughters in wealthy families, and something of their education can be gleaned from their earliest books, such as the popular Line upon Line and Peep of the Day, both published by John S. Taylor and Company. The daily devotionals for children connected correct behavior with religious belief. At five, Belle carefully inscribed the inside cover of each book with “I. Stewart, Nov. 4, 1845.” Another volume on Belle’s shelves, Thoughts on Self-Culture, encouraged restraint and discipline.

• From Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)

  From such impressions as these alone can anyone else decide whether it is worth going back and making a more historically concerned and concerted visit/invasion. Is there something there to research and learn from? Clearly I think there is. (Further investigation may well come up with a bunch of things not to do, if you want to establish such useful institutions.) But it is from those early impressions of what was visible along the coastline that others are most likely to decide whether or not they want to return and explore further. The temporal coastline of the Forty-second Street/Eighth Avenue area is still changing in its material visibility weekly, monthly. The Venus Theater that figures in these pages is now the Daniella Pizzeria. The Eros I is now one of two Playwright Restaurants. (The Circus Theater over on Broadway has become another.) On the other side of the small parking lot, the Capri is now a restaurant called Starstruck. The (old) Cats on Eighth Avenue gave way to a discount electronics store by 1992. Less than a year back, Ernie’s boss sold off the Full Moon Saloon and the new owners gutted and remodeled it, discovering in the process a storeroom whose door had been sealed over—and in which there was nothing of interest. With its internal space bigger by that storeroom, now it’s a bar called the Collins. Once again the Savoy is no longer gay; today it’s a straight jazz bar, doing fairly well. Pretty much intact, the Savoy’s funkier clientele moved to the new Cats, on Forty-eighth Street, where they settled in for about a year. Only a few weeks ago, however, that establishment closed.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Someday, he'd have his own chef de cuisine and would leave the scrounging, the hustling, the lying, the bloodletting, and the bulk of the cooking, to him. That was the way it was. That was the way it would always be. He didn't mind toiling in obscurity. That wasn't the hard part. He didn't need his name on the damn menu. When he and Rob had started out at Red House, a thirty-five-seat storefront with no liquor license on the Lower East Side, it had been just the two of them and a dishwasher. Rob had worked saute, Paul was at the grill. When things got jammed, the dishwasher would step in and help plate the veggies. The kitchen had been cramped, swelteringly hot, and caked with ancient dirt. Roaches had streamed through every crack in the grease-browned walls and the floor behind the ranges, and the dishwasher hadn't been cleaned in thirty years. But Paul had never felt so pure. Merry Motherfucking Christmas, thought Paul, squeezing his temples between thumb and forefinger. Poor bastards, he thought. Poor me. Poor Rob, even. Rob, who only wanted to be loved. Paul didn't—just couldn't—hold Rob's rather meteoric rise against him. Okay, maybe he wasn't the greatest chef in the world. But he was a good cook. And to Paul, that was what mattered. As silly and as sad as all Rob's social climbing, star-fucking, and ass-crawling might be: the TV Boot Camp where Rob had assiduously studied the fine art of simultaneously cooking and being telegenically charming, the dermabrasion to remove the evidence of an adolescent bout with acne, the ever-changing hair styles, one day straight, one day spiky, and suspiciously fuller these days at the crown (Jesus! Was he getting plugs?), the voice coach, the elocution lessons, the personal trainer, the constant sucking up to those miserable fucking shakedown artists at the Institute for Fine Food. Where were they now? Paul winced, thinking of all the whoring they'd done together, all the times Rob had put on his smile and floated and sucked up to Mortimer Hitchcock, the egotistical reviewer-slash-professional extortionist who published the ubiquitous Hitchcock Guide to Restaurants. More free food. More command performances at ridiculous charity events designed to do nothing more charitable than pump more gaseous air into Hitchcock's already bloated ego. An eight-cylinder hoodlum in the guise of an erudite diner, his face absolutely wriggling with corruption—he could probably teach the Genovese crime family something about coercion. Taste of Tribeca. Taste of Times Square. Taste of Gramercy Park. The ludicrous and thankfully short-lived "Res-taurantgoer's Manifesto," an attempt by the loathsome author publisher to elevate his status to more Jeffersonian heights. And Food Week! More bite-size portions of free food, more freebies. Chefs all around the city had to dumb down their menus, discount chicken or salmon for a bunch of cheap, useless shut-ins in cat-hair-covered skirts and basketball sneakers who'd just as soon be sucking down the early-bird special. What was that line in Taxi Driver?

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  This monumental Temple became increasingly an unchallenged symbol of Judaic faith and identity, and though its successor was finally destroyed by a Roman army in the early years of Christian emergence a thousand years later, it remains a potent presence in the imaginations of Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. It may have been in Solomon’s time, the tenth century BCE, that the combination of monarchy and Temple priesthood spawned a bureaucracy of record-keepers. In turn they began producing what are probably the first large-scale fragments of text to remain in the Hebrew Bible: works of history chronicling and celebrating the monarchy, including a suitably edifying presentation of the rather awkward transition from Saul’s to David’s dynasty. Overladen with much long-term adaptations and preoccupations, these form the backbone of the books of Samuel, Kings and the later reworkings of them which Christian Bibles label the two books of Chronicles.[23] Solomon’s realm quickly split after his death into two kingdoms, southern Judah and northern Israel; their political union had probably never been robust despite their common worship of the God of Abraham. That political disaster led to constant nostalgia for the remembered and now much-exaggerated glories of David and Solomon, through two or three centuries of dual monarchical rule which the Hebrew Bible portrays as repeatedly falling short of earlier standards, not least in faithfulness to God and his laws. Because of this, alongside complex narrative history the Hebrew Bible enshrines a remarkable genre of literature rarely surviving from other ancient cultures: passionate denunciations of the society around the divinely inspired speaker, who is known as a prophet. Centuries later, Christians ransacked the texts inherited from these prophetic performances for clues about the coming of Jesus and the radical change of direction for the Judaic tradition that it represented. Judaism has remained more conscious of the reality that prophets spoke primarily to their own times, pitilessly clarifying current crises and how these represented judgements of God on the backsliding of his chosen people.[24]

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  She’s flossed, brushed her teeth and gargled with mouthwash. Ever the dentist’s wife. She checks out the room, looks out the window. Anything to avoid sitting down facing him. He can tell she’s uncomfortable and says, “I’m sure the others will be here any minute.” He smiles at her, looking into her eyes. But she quickly looks away. “Do you come to Elizabeth often?” she asks. “Almost never. It’s changed, and not for the better.” “I heard Janet closed.” “In ’62, when the state eliminated orphanages. End of an era. It’s been condemned since the seventies. Kids break in at night to party. Makes me sad.” He offers her a glass of wine. “Just water,” she says. “I read your piece on Longy,” he says, handing her the water glass. She laughs. “I was a senior at college. Sold it to the Las Vegas Sun. A heady experience. They hired me based on that story.” “I like your theory that he never would have hanged himself, that it was a gangland slaying disguised as suicide.” “I still believe that.” “Jack sent other stories, too. The one about the fire at the MGM Grand.” “I don’t really specialize in disaster, but when there’s a disaster, like my uncle Henry, I’m there.” That was the disaster that led Andy into forensic dentistry, but she doesn’t tell that to Mason. “Vegas must be a good place for stories,” Mason says. “If you like weird stories, it’s great.” “Well, I’m proud of you.” Again, he looks into her eyes. Again, she looks away. Gulps down the whole glass of water. She’s saved by a knock on the door. Gaby and her family, and a few minutes later, the boys from Janet. And Phil Stein. “Oh my god,” she says. “You’re Phil Stein, aren’t you?” “I am.” “I loved your mother.” “And she loved you. Never stopped talking about you, even after you moved away.” “Is she…” It’s awkward, asking if a parent is still living. He shakes his head. “She died years ago. Complications of diabetes and a stroke.” “I’m sorry. She was so kind to me.” “She was a good person. I’m still trying to convince my sister of that.” “Mother-daughter relationships can be difficult,” Miri says. “Tell me about it. I gave Mom a dog for her sixtieth birthday. My sister almost killed me. The dog reminded Mom of Fred. Remember Fred?” “We have a dog named Fred,” Miri tells him, “and another called Goldie.” “Goldie . My mother would have loved knowing that.” They both laugh. “Do you have a family?” she asks. “Divorced,” he says. “Like half our generation.” “Sorry.” “But I have two kids. You?” “Still married,” she tells him. Then adds, “Happily.” “One of the lucky ones.” She nods. “I was at your stepbrother’s funeral. Steve Osner.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  34Ifind myself studying, in a copy of The New York Review of Books, a Magnum photograph of Sophia Loren taken during a Christian Dior fashion show in Paris in 1968. In this photograph Sophia Loren is sitting on a gilt chair, wearing a silk turban and smoking a cigarette, achingly polished, forever soignée as she watches “the bride,” the traditional end of the show. It occurs to me that this Magnum photograph would have been taken not long after Sophia Loren herself had been “the bride,” in fact twice the bride, married in France to Carlo Ponti for the second time after the annulment of their original Mexican marriage, the marriage for which he had been charged with bigamy and threatened with excommunication in Italy. A “scandal” of the time. It has become hard to remember how reliably “scandal” once came our way. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, a scandal. Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini, a scandal. Sophia Loren and Carlo Ponti, a scandal. I continue studying the photograph. I imagine the object of this particular scandal leaving Dior and going to lunch in the courtyard of the Plaza Athénée. I imagine her sitting with Carlo Ponti in the courtyard, eating an éclair with a fork, the vines that line the courtyard blowing slightly, ivy, lierre, sunlight glowing pink through the red canvas canopies over the windows. I imagine the sound of the little birds that flock in the lierre, a twittering, a constant presence and an occasional—when, say, a metal shutter is opened, or when, say, Sophia Loren rises from her table to cross the courtyard—swelling of birdsong. I imagine her leaving the Plaza Athénée, photographers flashing around her as she slides into a waiting car on the Avenue Montaigne. The cigarette, the silk turban. It strikes me that she looks in this photograph not unlike the women in the photographs Nick took at Quintana’s christening.

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  That father, Patrick (Patricius), had “curial” rank—he was a decurion, a town councilor with tax-collecting duties, and not a Christian. Augustine calls him meager in his land holdings (tenuis, T 2.5), but that was the typical stance of his class. As the historian of the empire A. H. M. Jones writes: “We never hear of a contented decurion.” They were bound down to their land and their duties, and so were their heirs—Augustine escaped only by selling his inheritance when he became a bishop (L 126.7). Patrick’s vineyards were worked by slaves, and Augustine had a slave attendant (pedagogue) who took him to school (T 1.30). Augustine tells us practically nothing about himself before the age of eleven or twelve when he went to live with his pedagogue in a neighboring town with a secondary school. But we can find traces in his later writing of the bright-eyed and observant boy he must have been. The principal art form of Roman Africa was mosaic work—he mentions the rich mosaics owned by his own patron in Thagaste, Romanian. He would later think of order in the universe on the model of his hometown’s mosaics: If a person were to look at an intricate pavement so narrowly as to see only the single tesserae, he would say the artist, lacking a sense of composition, had set the little pieces at haphazard, since he could not take in at once the whole pattern, inlaid to form a single image of beauty (O 1.2). Even in his seventies, Augustine would still be thinking of divine order in terms of mosaics: “Order disposes all things, regular and irregular, in the places they fit” (CG 19.13). Augustine hated school and played truant to see games—the bear-baiting shows put on by Romanian, or the fighting cocks to be seen in a splendid mosaic found near Carthage. Though Augustine was later very critical of games in the arena, some blood-sports of his youth kept their hold on him. Even while he was preparing for baptism he could write: We saw gamecocks sharpening toward a scrap. We had to watch, for what horizon do eyes of love not scan, hoping for a hint of reason’s beautiful scheme, which checks and impels all things (whether they realize it or not), a scheme that makes its observer quick to respond whenever it beckons? It can flash its signals out of anything, in anything. In, for instance, these cocks: the thrust of their heads toward battle, their lifted crests, their darting attacks, skilled parries; pure animal action without mind, yet how apt, every move; for a higher mind works through them, ordering all things. At the last, the victor’s right: the exultant crowing, a body taut with pride of power. And the rites of defeat—limp wings, carriage and croak gone awry; all strangely fitting and, by their consonance with nature’s set way, beautiful. (O 1.25)

• From American Swing (2008)

  I THINK THE ONLY DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LARRY AND MANY MEN IN OUR SOCIETY AND CULTURE IS THAT LARRY DIDN'T HESITATE TO TALK ABOUT IT AND TELL THE TRUTH ABOUT IT, HOW HE ACTUALLY FELT. I WONDER HOW MANY MEN HIDE HOW THEY REALLY FEEL ABOUT SEX. OR HOW MANY MEN WOULD HAVE THE COURAGE TO SAY "I WANT TO DO THEM ALL"? EVERY TIME I DRIVE BY THE CLUB, EVEN TO THIS DAY, I STILL FEEL THE MAGIC. LOOK AT IT, THE LIGHTS ARE STILL HERE. OH, THERE'S DISCO LIGHTS OVER THERE. THE SPRINKLER SYSTEM WAS HERE. THERE'S OUR FAN, STILL UP THERE TO THIS DAY. WHATEVER FRANKIE BUILT, IT'S STILL THERE. SO... AMAZING. Dodson: ONE THING ABOUT GETTING OLDER IS THAT YOU DON'T WANT TO LOOK BACK AND SAY "WOW, REALLY I'M SORRY I DIDN'T DO THAT. I REALLY AM SORRY I MISSED THAT. I REALLY AM SORRY I DIDN'T TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THAT." I'M AN OLD LADY WITH NO REGRETS, BECAUSE I'LL TELL YOU: THOSE-- THAT PERIOD WAS VERY SPECIAL. IT WAS THE SAME ROUTINE EVERY NIGHT BUT DIFFERENT BODIES. DIFFERENT SIZES. TALL, SHORT-- IT WAS, YOU KNOW, A SIGHT TO SEE... EVERY NIGHT. - ( camera clicks ) - Breitbart: SOMEHOW WHENEVER ANYBODY DISCUSSES PLATO'S RETREAT, THEY DO IT WITH A SMILE ON THEIR FACE. IF ANYBODY WAS THERE, THEY'RE HAPPY. IF ANYBODY WASN'T THERE, THEY'RE ONLY SORRY THAT THEY DIDN'T GET AN OPPORTUNITY TO GO THERE AND SEE IT. ( camera clicks ) Karen: IT WAS VERY EXCITING TO A LOT OF PEOPLE. AND WHEN WE FINALLY CAUGHT UP WITH IT, WE WERE AMUSED BY IT AS WELL. I'M-- I'M REALLY GLAD I WENT. I'M GLAD TO HAVE THE EXPERIENCE OF HAVING GONE. JUST AS I'M GLAD THAT I GOT TO THE TOP OF THE WORLD TRADE CENTER ONCE. EVEN TO TODAY PEOPLE SAY THINGS TO ME: "I KNEW YOUR FATHER. I REMEMBER YOUR FATHER." OKAY, SOME PEOPLE, THEY HAVE NO MEMORIES. THEY HAD A BORING NORMAL... LET'S SAY EVERYDAY-STRAIGHT KIND OF LIFE. I'VE LED A DIFFERENT KIND OF LIFE. I'VE HAD THAT LIFE AND MY LIFE CHANGED... BY GOING TO PLATO'S... BY GETTING INTO OPEN SEX. THESE ARE THINGS THAT YOU NEVER THOUGHT YOU WOULD EVER DO IN LIFE. YOU DIDN'T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT. SO A LOT OF PEOPLE, THEY DON'T HAVE THOSE MEMORIES. I HAVE THOSE MEMORIES. I CAN SEE THE FACES IN FRONT OF ME NOW. Nina: IT WAS GOOD FOR ME. IT WAS GOOD FOR ME. IT WAS GREAT FOR ME. IS LARRY STILL AROUND, BY THE WAY? - ARE YOU GUYS TALKING TO LARRY? - Man: HE PASSED AWAY IN '99. - HE PASSED AWAY? - YEAH. - HE WAS ONLY ABOUT 50. - 62. WOW.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  I would have been the first dead heavyweight champion of the world.” I felt like that as a teenager. I feel a little more fragile now. I still think people are invincible, but I’d rather not find out for sure. Can you please explain the significance of the last few sentences? The quote of Edison’s last words? It is an invocation of hope in the life of the world to come. When writing the first draft of the book, which scene/s were you most excited about writing? Which did you write first? I wrote this book over so many years, and there were so many dozens of drafts, that it’s hard to remember the process. I wrote the scene in the gym where they find out about Alaska very early on, probably in 2001. I also wrote a couple of the later scenes where the Colonel and Pudge are playing video games that year, and the scene where Pudge meets the Colonel survived in more or less its original form. I think Barn Night was also written in 2001, which was probably the most fun I had writing Alaska . But almost everything I wrote that first year ended up getting deleted or dramatically changed. Such is writing. Was there any section in particular that you had to rewrite way more than other sections? Why? The funeral. I wrote the funeral probably fifteen or twenty times, and I would send it to Julie, and she’d be like, “Yeah, you have to write the funeral again.” It was infuriating. Then one day my roommates and I had a huge fight. I don’t even remember what it was about, but I think it involved a vacuum cleaner. I really love my friend Shannon, and in many years of living together we almost never fought, and I couldn’t stop screaming and crying about this vacuum cleaner, and so I went downstairs sobbing and furious and wrote the funeral scene in about ten minutes. Do you have a favorite line in Looking for Alaska ? Yes, it’s the one I didn’t write. When Sarah Urist and I were on our first date, I said something about the future, and she said, “Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia.” Later, after receiving permission from Sarah, I gave that line to Alaska. I still think all the time about how imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia, and also how strange and wonderful it is that my first date with Sarah led to another, and another, and now we’ve been married for almost fifteen years.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  "Some years ago I saw in England, in Kew Gardens, for the first time, araucarias, and I walked along the beds looking at these strange plants, with their rigid bark and compact, short, scaly leaves, of a sombre green, whose abrupt, rough, bristling form cut in upon the fine softly-lighted turf of the fresh grass-plat. If I now inquire what this, experience has left in me, I find, first, the sensible representation of an araucaria; in fact, I have been able to describe almost exactly the form and color of the plant. But there is a difference between this representation and the former sensations, of which it is the present echo. The internal semblance, from which I have just made my description, is vague, and my past sensations were precise. For, assuredly, each of the araucarias I saw then excited in me a distinct visual sensation; there are no two absolutely similar plants in nature; I observed perhaps twenty or thirty araucarias; without a doubt each one of them differed from the others in size, in girth, by the more or less obtuse angles of its branches, by the more or less abrupt jutting out of its scales, by the style of its texture; consequently, my twenty or thirty visual sensations were different. But no one of these sensations has completely survived in its echo; the twenty or thirty revivals have blunted one another; thus upset and agglutinated by their resemblance they are confounded together, and my present representation is their residue only. This is the product, or rather the fragment, which is deposited in us, when eve have gone through a series of similar facts or individuals, Of our numerous experiences there remain on the following day four or five more or less distinct recollections, which, obliterated themselves, leaves behind in us a simple colorless, vague representation, into which enter as components various reviving sensations, in an utterly feeble, incomplete, and abortive state.—But this representation is not the general and abstract idea. It is but its accompaniment, and, if I may say so, the ore from which it is extracted. For the representation, though badly, sketched, is a sketch, the sensible sketch of a distinct individual. But my abstract idea corresponds to the whole class; it differs, then from the representation of in individual.—Moreover, my abstract idea is perfectly clear and determinate; now that I possess it, I never fall to recognize an araucaria among the various plants which may be shown me; it differs then from the coil used and floating representation I have of some particular araucaria."[56]

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Santos Dumont was a magical word which suggested a beautiful flowing mustache, a sombrero, spurs, something airy, delicate, humorous, quixotic. Sometimes it brought up the aroma of coffee beans and of straw mats, or, because it was so thoroughly outlandish and quixotic, it would entail a digression concerning the life of the Hottentots. For there were among us, older boys who were beginning to read and who would entertain us by the hour with fantastic tales which they had gleaned from books such as Ayesha or Ouida’s Under Two Flags . The real flavor of knowledge is most definitely associated in my mind with the vacant lot at the corner of the new neighborhood where I was transplanted at about the age of ten. Here, when the fall days came on and we stood about the bonfire roasting chippies and raw potatoes in the little cans which we carried, there ensued a new type of discussion which differed from the old discussions I had known in that the origins were always bookish. Some one had just read a book of adventure, or a book of science, and forthwith the whole street became animated by the introduction of a hitherto unknown subject. It might be that one of these boys had just discovered that there was such a thing as the Japanese current and he would try to explain to us how the Japanese current came into existence and what the purpose of it was. This was the only way we learned things—against the fence, as it were, while roasting chippies and raw potatoes. These bits of knowledge sunk deep—so deep, in fact, that later, confronted with a more accurate knowledge it was often difficult to dislodge the older knowledge. In this way it was explained to us one day by an older boy that the Egyptians had known about the circulation of the blood, something which seemed so natural to us that it was hard later to swallow the story of the discovery of the circulation of the blood by an Englishman named Harvey. Nor does it seem strange to me now that in those days most of our conversation was about remote places, such as China, Peru, Egypt, Africa, Iceland, Greenland.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  Medusa: Tibetan-born Inhuman and cousin of Johnny Storm’s paramour, Crystal, the Elemental. Medusa: her tresses had a life of their own. Once a sworn enemy of the Fantastic Four, a member of the anti-F.F., the Frightful Four. The mood in the Baxter Building was grim. Besides the Richards’s marital problems, Crystal had recently chosen to marry Quicksilver instead of Johnny Storm. Sue was worried about Franklin’s trances; Reed was worried about Sue; Johnny was worried about Crystal; Ben Grimm was worried about himself. It was a good period for readers of the F.F. And Paul Hood was a compulsive reader of comics. Still, the magazine would never equal its first eighty issues, when its creators, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, were at the helm. But it was pretty cool. Twelve years ago, exactly, in 1961, the first issue, with its chronicle of the battle with Mole Man, had appeared. Paul’s sister, Wendy, was almost the same age as the book. Fourteen years ago his family had arrived at its tetragonal shape. In fact, if you thought about it, it was possible that his sister, Wendy, was born during the creative gestation that led to the Fantastic Four. Where had Stan Lee been in those two years? The Hoods trailed after the implications of these characters as if Stan himself pulled their strings. At a newsstand in Stamford, at the train station, Paul was perusing the squeaky spin rack in the rear, near the pornography, where the comics were nestled. Number 141 beckoned to him. It boasted, unsurprisingly, the end of the Fantastic Four. On the cover, a deeply perturbed Sue held in her arms her irradiated son: “Little Franklin is glowing like an ATOMIC BOMB!” Sure, Paul had tried D.C. Comics. He had read Batman and Justice League of America, and he had followed some of the other Marvel titles, too: Spider-Man, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, The Avengers, and X-Men, and especially those titles that were F.F. spin-offs, The Silver Surfer and The Sub-Mariner. He had tried them all. He had ranged far and wide. But he kept coming back to the F.F. Batman was cool: his skills were not supernatural. He was just smart and rich. Superman was a moral force. The Hulk had hubris. Silver Surfer was definitely created by a mind on psychedelics. Thor was the comic you read if you wanted to work for one of those touring Renaissance festivals, if you wanted to wear a shirt that was called a blouse. So why the Fantastic Four? First of all, Paul couldn’t shake the uncanny coincidence that his father had the same first name as Benjamin Grimm, the Thing. When he was younger, he actually thought of his father as the Thing: chunky, homely, self-pitying. When Paul was a kid, his dad raged around the house like a pachyderm taking down underbrush.

• From Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)

  What did Hoke think about the suppression of the sex movies and peep shows, and about the rezoning? “In one way it’s good—but not in another. I thought they should just make them not display or advertise on the outside. Then they could have kept all that going, and it wouldn’t have bothered anybody. I mean, you’re never gonna really get rid of it. It’ll just pop up somewhere else—in Brooklyn or Queens, if they don’t let it go on in the city here.” What about the relation of sex and drugs? “If you make them go together, sure, they’ll walk along with one another, hand in hand. Just like sex and violence. But that’s because you force them into the same places. They say they’re going to put all the sex stuff on the river, but the girls who used to be walkin’ around over there, half naked with their tits fallin’ out, they’re gone. You know—” here Hoke leaned a meaty forearm on the bar (I took a quiet breath)—“I remember back in the seventies, before Dinkins was mayor, before Koch even, when Abe Beame was just starting to run for office. He was down on Forty-second Street, giving a speech on the corner. I can see him now, pointing up at Show World. ‘If you elect me, I promise you before my term of office is through, this place will be gone from the city!’ That’s just what he said! “Well, Beame is gone. Koch is gone. Dinkins is gone. And Giuliani is going to be gone soon. (I voted for him when he came in. But I sure wouldn’t vote for him now.) And Show World’s still there.” Hoke chuckled. Did Hoke have any objections to my using his real name? “Well, maybe you should change—Naw, go on. Why not? Nobody’s looking for me. I don’t got no record or anything.” I said thanks for the talk. We shook hands, and I walked out onto Eighth Avenue. I’ve mentioned that the man I’ve lived with happily now for getting on to six years also frequented the Capri. Did I mention, however, that he’s also Irish and German; and also from Brooklyn; and also has big hands (though not quite so big as Hoke’s), and also bites his nails? (No harelip, however. Sigh.) Anyway, I’m just happy that, in the course of our talk, even sixteen years later, Hoke didn’t think to ask me to go with him to Afghanistan. . . .

• From White Oleander (1999)

  At the station, we bought poppies, and took a taxi out of town. The car stopped at the edge of an enormous field. It was cold, the brown grass bent down in the wind. White stones dotted the plain and I remembered how empty it was, and the wind passed right through my thin coat. Where is it? I asked. Ici , the man said, stroking his blond mustache. White plaster in his hair. I stared at the short rippling grass, but I couldn’t picture the soldiers there dying, the roar of cannons, it was so quiet, so very empty, and the poppy in my hand throbbed red like a heart. They took pictures of each other against the yellow-gray sky. The woman gave me a chocolate in a gold wrapper on the way home. I could still taste that chocolate, feel the poppy red in my hand. And the man. Etienne. The light came down from a skylight into his studio, glass honeycombed with chicken wire. It was always cold there. The floor was gray concrete. There was an old gray couch bolstered with newspapers, and everything was covered with white dust from the plaster he used making his statues, plaster covering wire and rags. I played with a wooden sculptor’s doll there, posing it while my mother posed. So much white. Her body, and the plaster, and the dust, we were white as bakers. The old space heater he placed near her stool didn’t do much but buzz and throw out the smell of burned hair. He played French rock ’n’ roll. I could still feel how cold it was. He had a skeleton hanging from a hook that I could make dance. She sent me down to the store for a bottle of milk. Une bouteille du lait , I rehearsed as I walked. I didn’t want to go but she made me. The milk came in a bottle with a bright foil lid. I got lost on the way back. I wandered in circles, too frightened to cry, holding the milk in the gathering dusk. Finally I was too tired to walk, and sat down on the steps of an apartment house by the rows of buttons, darkened except where the fingers touched, there it was bright. A glass door with a curved handle. Smell of French cigarettes, car exhaust. Flannel trouserlegs went by, nylons and high heels, woolen coats. I was hungry but I was afraid to open the milk, afraid she would be angry. Suddenly I saw the blank windows of my dream. Où est ta maman? the nylons asked, the trouserlegs asked. Elle revient , I said, but I didn’t believe it. My mother jumped out of a taxi in her Afghan coat with the embroidery and the curly wool trim. She screamed at me, grabbed me. The bottle slipped from my hands. The way the milk looked on the sidewalk. Shiny white, with sharp pieces of glass.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  I like living in the city where so many of my favorite films take place, where nearly every street corner reminds me of some piece of lurid personal or criminal history. "Crazy Joe Gallo was shot here . . . Big Paul Castellano got whacked there . . . Used to score there . . . That place used to be a speakeasy . . . My old methadone clinic . . . That used to be an after-hours club . . ."It may not be the most beautiful city. It's not the nicest city (though it is, sadly, getting nicer). And it's certainly not the easiest city to live in. One minute you're on top of the world, and the next—like when you wish to light up a smoke at a bar and can't—you're wallowing in misery and self-pity, unable to decide between murder and suicide. But it is exactly those famously manic highs and lows that make New York, and Manhattan in particular, like nowhere else. I mean, you can talk London or Paris or Barcelona all you like, but we're open all night: I can pick up the phone around midnight and get just about anything I want delivered to my apartment: Chinese food, Lebanese, sushi, pizza, a video, a bag of seedless hydro, a human head. I think I know what I'm talking about here. I've been other places. I travel a lot—about eight months out of the year. And while I love London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Melbourne, Hanoi, Salvador, Saint Petersburg, Tokyo, and Saint Sebastian like old friends, I miss my city when I'm away too long. As much as I enjoy getting lost, disappearing into another place, another culture, another cuisine, there are places and flavors, sounds, smells, and sights I begin to yearn for after three or four weeks eating fish heads and rice. When people from other cities, planning a trip to New York (or the city, as we locals are apt to call it), ask me where they should eat, where they should go, where they should drink during their stay, they are often surprised at my answers. Sure, we have some of the best high-end restaurants in the world here, but that's not what I miss when I'm wiping fermented bean paste off my chin, or trading shots of bear-bile-infused rice whiskey in Asia. When visiting Manhattan one should go for things that we do really well and the rest of the world doesn't. Example? Deli. We have it; you don't. Even Los Angeles, with no shortage of Jews, can't get it right. For whatever mysterious reasons, no city on the planet can make deli like New York deli and the first thing I start to miss when away from home too long is breakfast at Barney Greengrass, The Sturgeon King, on Amsterdam Avenue and Eighty-sixth Street.

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  Illness, dirtEvery confined space in which the body has felt a fulfilment inversely proportional to the available space, where it has felt all the more pleasure for being constrained, awakens in us a nostalgia for the foetal state. And we never benefit from it so much as when, safe in that secret haven, organic life reassumes its rights (whatever they may be) and we can abandon ourselves to something not unlike the beginning of a regression. If you think about it, it was not for reasons of hygiene that WCs became places in which we isolate ourselves, closets in fact. Modesty is the pretext given, but the occult explanation for this modesty is neither a fear for our dignity or a wish not to embarrass others, but the freedom to experience the pleasures of defecation without any restraint, to inhale our own embalming stench or even to examine our stools meticulously, taking a lead from Salvador Dali who left descriptions rich with comparisons and images. I am not about to tell a series of scatological stories, I just want to remember here some banal situations in which my different bodily functions found themselves in conflict. And as I have never come across any declared enthusiasts for my farts or my faeces, and I myself have had no more inclination to savour those of others, these confrontations turned out to be dubious struggles between pleasure and displeasure, enjoyment and pain.

• From Wild (2012)

  “Oh, baby,” he whispered, his mouth so soft against the roughest part of me. “You don’t have to worry about a thing.” It was fun. It was more than fun. It was like a festival in that tent. We fell asleep at six and woke two hours later, exhausted, but awake, our bodies too out of whack to sleep any more. “It’s my day off,” said Jonathan, sitting up. “You wanna go to the beach?” I consented without knowing where exactly the beach might be. It was my day off too, my last one. Tomorrow I’d be back on the trail, headed for Crater Lake. We dressed and drove on a long arcing road that took us a couple of hours through the forest and up over the coastal mountains. We drank coffee and ate scones and listened to music as we drove, sticking to the same narrow conversation we’d had the night before: music, it seemed, was the one thing we had to discuss. By the time we pulled into the coastal town of Brookings, I half regretted agreeing to come and not only because my interest in Jonathan was waning, but because we’d been driving three hours. It seemed odd to be so far from the PCT, as if I were betraying it in a way. The magnificence of the beach muted that feeling. As I walked along the ocean beside Jonathan, I realized that I’d been at this very beach before, with Paul. We’d camped in the nearby state park campground when we’d been on our long post-NYC road trip—the one on which we’d gone to the Grand Canyon and Vegas, Big Sur and San Francisco, and that had ultimately taken us to Portland. We’d stopped to camp at this beach along the way. We’d made a fire, cooked dinner, and played cards at a picnic table, then crawled into the back of my truck to make love on the futon that was there. I could feel the memory of it like a cloak on my skin. Who I’d been when I’d been here with Paul and what I’d thought would happen and what did and who I was now and how everything had changed. Jonathan didn’t ask what I was thinking about, though I’d gone quiet. We only walked silently together, passing few people, though it was a Sunday afternoon, walking and walking until there was no one but us. “How about here?” Jonathan asked when we came to a spot that was backed by a cove of dark boulders. I watched as he laid out a blanket, set the bag of lunch things he’d bought at Safeway on top of it, and sat down.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  When we did meet what deeply impressed me was the look of innocence he wore—the same expression as the day of the rock fight. When I spoke to him about the fight I was still more amazed to discover that he had forgotten that it was we who had killed the boy; he remembered the boy’s death but he spoke of it as though neither he nor I had any part in it. When I mentioned Weesie’s name he had difficulty in placing her. Don’t you remember the cellar next door . . . Joey Kesselbaum? At this a faint smile passed over his face. He thought it extraordinary that I should remember such things. He was already married, a father, and working in a factory making fancy pipe cases. He considered it extraordinary to remember events that had happened so far back in the past. On leaving him that evening I felt terribly despondent. It was as though he had attempted to eradicate a precious part of my life, and himself with it. He seemed more attached to the tropical fish which he was collecting than to the wonderful past. As for me I recollect everything, everything that happened that summer, and particularly the day of the rock fight. There are times, in fact, when the taste of that big slice of sour rye which his mother handed me that afternoon is stronger in my mouth than the food I am actually tasting. And the sight of Weesie’s little bud almost stronger than the actual feel of what is in my hand. The way the boy lay there after we downed him, far far more impressive than the history of the World War. The whole long summer, in fact, seems like an idyll out of the Arthurian legends. I often wonder what it was about this particular summer which makes it so vivid in my memory. I have only to close my eyes a moment in order to relive each day. The death of the boy certainly caused me no anguish—it was forgotten before a week had elapsed. The sight of Weesie standing in the gloom of the cellar with her dress lifted up, that too passed easily away. Strangely enough, the thick slice of rye bread which his mother handed me each day seems to possess more potency than any other image of that period. I wonder about it . . . wonder deeply. Perhaps it is that whenever she handed me the slice of bread it was with a tenderness and a sympathy that I had never known before. She was a very homely woman, my Aunt Caroline. Her face was marked by the pox, but it was a kind, winsome face which no disfigurement could mar. She was enormously stout and she had a very soft, a very caressing voice. When she addressed me she seemed to give me even more attention, more consideration, than her own son.