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 White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  the game warden and ranging about with his extra-long (illegal) Twombly gun that he used to hunt geese. The Turlocks of Michener’s historical reinvention were all cunning—savage survivalists . 9 As sweeping narratives and small-screen histories accompanied the nation’s bicentennial celebrations of 1976, it should come as no surprise, then, that the founders themselves provided a dynastic saga worthy of a miniseries. The Adams Chronicles traced the path of a crusty New England farmer, John Adams, to the presidency, and carried forward with his descendants, three generations’ worth. The Chronicles led up to the accomplished Henry Adams, a strong-minded historian whose life crossed into the twentieth century. In his introduction to the PBS treatment’s companion book, Professor Daniel Boorstin, the newly appointed Librarian of Congress, recast John Adams as an oxymoron: a “self-made aristocrat.” His well-known “vanity,” his “independence from public opinion” morphs into an “Adams tradition,” redefining class arrogance as an admirable family trait. There were no Turlocks in these Chronicles, so the rabble-rouser Samuel Adams stood in for the “slippery” side of the family. “Plain” John Adams was contrasted with his social climber of a cousin, who insisted on being chauffeured in a fancy carriage when he attended the Continental Congress. 10 • • • Amid the reconstruction of classes taking place in the 1970s, the political status of twentieth-century ethnics endured a series of changes, beginning with President Nixon’s attempts to appeal to a different breed of “forgotten Americans” than those embraced by FDR’s New Deal. Those whom Nixon wished to connect with were the “White Lower Middle Class” identified by Pete Hamill in a 1969 New York magazine article. They were the alienated “rabble,” and Nixon promised to embrace the “Silent Majority” as the backbone of America—hardworking and true. Michael Novak, in The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics (1972), took the argument one step further, claiming that ethnic Americans were better Americans, because they understood the traditional values of loyalty, love of the flag, and hard work, and they did not expect government to provide unfair special assistance (as they imagined blacks were doing). 11 The welfare system was one of the issues dividing Americans at this time. Some Nixon supporters acknowledged that there were hardworking people

• 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 History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The last two chapters which were probably added by a younger contemporary, and marked as such in the MS., treat of knowledge, faith and spiritual life with reference to the tree of knowledge and the tree of life in paradise. Faith opens the paradise of a higher knowledge of the mysteries of the supernatural world. The Epistle to Diognetus forms the transition from the purely practical literature of the Apostolic Fathers to the reflective theology of the Apologists. It still glows with the ardor of the first love. It is strongly Pauline.1317 It breathes the spirit of freedom and higher knowledge grounded in faith. The Old Testament is Ignored, but without any sign of Gnostic contempt. 5. Authorship and Time of composition. The author calls himself "a disciple of the Apostles,"1318 but this term occurs in the appendix, and may be taken in a wider sense. In the MS. the letter is ascribed to Justin Martyr, but its style is more elegant, vigorous and terse than that of Justin and the thoughts are more original and vigorous.1319 It belongs, however, in all probability, to the same age, that is, to the middle of the second century, rather earlier than later. Christianity appears in it as something still new and unknown to the aristocratic society, as a stranger in the world, everywhere exposed to calumny and persecution of Jews and Gentiles. All this suits the reign of Antoninus Pius and of Marcus Aurelius. If Diognetus was the teacher of the latter as already suggested, we would have an indication of Rome, as the probable place of composition. Some assign the Epistle to an earlier date under Trajan or Hadrian,1320 others to the reign of Marcus Aurelius,1321 others to the close of the second century or still later.1322 The speculations about the author begin with Apollos in the first, and end with Stephens in the sixteenth century. He will probably remain unknown.1323 § 171. Sixtus of Rome. Enchiridion SIXTI philosophi Pythagorici, first ed. by Symphor. Champerius, Lugd. 1507 (under the title: Sixtii Xysti Anulus); again at Wittenberg with the Carmina aurea of Pythagoras, 1514; by Beatus Rhenanus, Bas. 1516; in the "Maxima Bibliotheca Vet. Patrum." Lugd. 1677, Tom. III. 335–339 (under the title Xysti vel Sexti Pythagorici philosophi ethnici Sententicae, interprete Rufino Presbytero Aquilejensi); by U. G. Siber, Lips. 1725 (under the name of Sixtus II. instead of Sixtus I.); and by Gildemeister (Gr., Lat. and Syr.),Bonn 1873. A Syriac Version in P. Lagardii Analecta Syriaca, Lips. and Lond. 1858 (p. 1–31, only the Syriac text, derived from seven MSS. of the Brit. Museum, the oldest before A.D. 553, but mutilated). The book is discussed in the "Max. Bibl." l. c.; by Fontaninus: Historia liter. Aquilejensis (Rom. 1742); by Fabricius, in the Bibliotheca Graeca, Tom. I. 870 sqq. (ed. Harles, 1790); by Ewald: Geschichte des Volkes Israel, vol. VII. (Göttingen, 1859), p. 321–326; and by Tobler in Annulus Rufini, Sent. Sext. (Tübingen 1878).

• From White Oleander (1999)

  “I remember, it was a sunny day, and we ate sandwiches of raw hamburger and onions, standing up at a corner café, and my mother sang this cowboy song: ‘Whoopee ti yi yo, git along little dogies.’” It was the only memory I had of Amsterdam being sunny. Claire laughed, a sound like bells, drew her knees up to her chin and wrapped her arms around them, gazing at me in a way I could have bottled and stored like a great wine. “We sat in the sun overlooking the canal, and she said, ‘Look, Astrid, watch this.’ And she waved at the people passing by on a glass sightseeing boat. And all the passengers waved back. They thought we were Dutch, see, welcoming them to our city. That was my best day.” The sun and the herring gulls and all those people waving, thinking we were from there, that we belonged. At the other end of the couch, Claire sighed, unfolding her legs, smiling nostalgically. She didn’t see who I had been then, a thin, lonely child, warmed by the mistaken thought that I belonged. She saw only the childish fun. “You’ve been everywhere, haven’t you.” I had, but it hadn’t done me much good. THE DAY Ron was expected home from Nova Scotia, Claire threw out all the take-out packages, cleaned the kitchen, and did three loads of laundry. The house was fragrant with cooking, and Emmylou Harris sang something about bandits in Mexico. Claire had rubber gloves on, she was pulling meat off a chicken that was still hot, wearing a red-and-white-checked apron and lipstick. “I’m making paella, what do you think of that?” It made me anxious. I liked the way it was, we’d settled into a routine, and now it was being thrown off by the part I didn’t yet know, the part that could change everything for me. Already I resented her husband, and I hadn’t even met him. But I vacuumed the living room, helped her make their bed with fresh sheets printed with falling roses, red and white. “Red and white are the marriage colors,” Claire explained. She opened the French doors to the garden, blooming vibrantly in the April sun. Her hands lingered and smoothed the white quilt. I knew she wanted to be in this bed with him, making love with him. I secretly hoped he would miss his plane, get into an accident on the way to the airport. I was unnerved by her tremulous anticipation. She reminded me of a certain kind of rose she grew in the garden, called Pristine. It was white with a trace of pink around the outside, and when you picked it, the petals all fell off. I didn’t know why he had to come back now. I was having such a good time. I’d never been such a source of interest. I certainly didn’t want to share this with some husband, some Ed on the couch.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  She gave the dial a spin, she let it land wherever it would, afternoons when she avoided extracurriculars—field hockey or Bible study or Super-8 Cinematography or the Quilting Club—mornings when her parents weren’t up or had left early for church, evenings when, again, she was by herself. She loved Electric Company and Sesame Street though she was too old for them, loved the hyperbole of puppets and the restless, kinetic pacing of these programs. The shape of advertisements ruled the world. Advertisements and comic books and teen fanzines. As she watched television, she gave herself back to her childhood, to some part of herself that had never passed beyond that demographic category. But she also loved reruns: The Flying Nun, Petticoat Junction, Green Acres , and Family Affair . She loved Gene Rayburn and Monty Hall. She respected enforcers of justice, such as Cannon, Kojak, and Toma—Tony Musante, so cute—and elegies to place, like Streets of San Francisco and Hawaii Five-O; she loved variety programs, Sonny and Cher and Flip Wilson and Andy Williams and Ray Stevens , who had parlayed his hit “Everything Is Beautiful” into a summer replacement program that year; but she lived for the Saturday night horror films—Chiller Theater and Creature Features . The Chiller theme’s graphic was especially satisfying, a six-fingered hand emerging from some rank Paleolithic ooze. This was a gigantic hand—it dwarfed, just behind it, a tree plucked clean as a piece of driftwood, so that you could get a sense of the scale—a hand the size of a Mack truck. The fingers waved around a little bit, as though signaling to you not to abandon the show during the commercial. Meanwhile, a deep and ominous voice, a voice kind of like the one that announced the radio spots for local drag- and stock-car racing, intoned the word chiller . Long, low, and slow, this guy declaimed it, like it was a wind-borne message of evil sweeping across a steppe. Mostly she watched television alone, since the days were gone when Paul snuggled with her through the horror flicks. She was alone that Friday night in the drafty library along the Silvermine River. She had a Duraflame log in the fireplace and a blanket wrapped around her, but the cold was relentless anyway. Snow fell, cascading, out in the driveway. Gales circled the house like the sound effects of low-budget movies. On the box, during the breaks, WPIX heralded tomorrow evening’s dramatic television presentation—first ever—of the Shroud of Turin. Through these announcements Wendy had grown accustomed to this textile, to the faint traces of a likeness there, and in the midst of this dreamy evening of martyrdom and B-films, the scary weather outside seemed to be appropriate, like Old Testament vengeance. She had played hooky during Sunday School and confirmation classes. Unitarian services: her mother had left the church of her birth and was on this Unitarian kick, though she still tried to keep Wendy interested in Episcopalianism. All the neighbors went.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Looking always backward, we became mired in nostalgia. We both liked old movies, which Mrs. Gayle allowed us to watch all night when I slept over, and whose fatuous obsession with aristocracy fed our own. We preferred old cars to new ones. We used antique slang. Arthur played the piano pretty well, and when we were alone in his house we sang old songs together, our voices quavering with loss: I wandered today to the hill, Maggie, To watch the scene below . . . The creek and the old rusty mill, Maggie, Where we sat in the long long ago One night he kissed me, or I kissed him, or we kissed each other. It surprised us both. After that, whenever we felt particularly close we turned on each other. Arthur was an easy target. His voice cracked. He bathed twice a day but always gave off an ammoniac hormonal smell, the smell of growth and anxiety. He played no sports and was still a Second Class Scout, a truly pitiful rank for someone his age. As long as I didn’t call him a sissy I could cut him to pieces. I was a sitting duck myself, and Arthur had a map of my nerves. With feline insouciance he could produce a word that would knock me breathless and send me stumbling blind from the house. Sometimes he set Pepper on me. Pepper would yap at my heels all the way down the street while Arthur stood at his door and urged him on, knowing that I liked the little mutt too much to defend myself. We had these blowups often. We’d stay clear of each other for a few days, then Arthur would call up and invite me over as if nothing had happened, and I would go. THE GATHERING OF the Tribes was held in a high school just outside Seattle. My event was the swimming meet. I carried an overnight bag with my swimming trunks and towel, and a change of clothes for Arthur and me so our uniforms wouldn’t give us away when we left: Glenvale later that day and began hitching our way north. During the Gathering I kept my distance from Arthur. I didn’t want to be associated with him, and not only because of what we were planning. His uniform was baggy and unadorned, his manner supercilious. He stood at the edges of the events and made sarcastic remarks. He didn’t look like a serious Scout. I did. I held Star rank. I had a new uniform and plenty of things to wear on it. Patrol leader’s insignia. The Order of the Arrow. A sash with several merit badges. To look at my merit badges you would have thought I could be dropped anywhere, in any season, just as I was, and in no time improvise a shelter and kindle a fire and snare an animal for dinner. You would have thought I could navigate by the stars. Name trees.

• From The Fixed Stars (0)

  [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Brandon’s father, June’s grandfather, taught her this endearing thing: walking down the street, in the car, or anywhere, he’d reach for her wrist and squeeze it gently, three times. I. Love. You. Now we all do it, Ash included. Three squeezes: I love you. I read a profile in the New Yorker of the novelist Elizabeth Strout. After her daughter left for college, Strout moved out of the house she’d shared with her then-husband. “I know that one piece was a desire to really just focus on her writing,” her ex would tell the New Yorker. “A desire to not have to be responsible for anybody else.” He and Strout eventually divorced. “They like each other so much—that made it confusing,” said their adult daughter. “My takeaway is that love itself is not enough.”60 33The ghosts are sneaky. Making coffee one morning that fall, not long after Ash moved in, I heard a new but oddly familiar sound: chick-a-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee, it went. It was the song of a black-capped chickadee perched on the lichen-coated branches of the plum tree outside. I’d read the syllables of the chickadees’ song years earlier in The Taste of Country Cooking, by Edna Lewis, a book Brandon and I loved so much that, when we were newly married, I’d read passages to him out loud. But I’d never heard the real song, or not that I noticed, until that morning. I’m haunted, I told Ash. In the winter, Ash took a work trip to Portland, and I drove down to join them. Walking to the restaurant where we planned to meet, I passed a hotel where Brandon, June, and I had once stayed. Now I was the ghost in the scene, lurking on the sidewalk outside, beneath rooms where my life used to be. June had been four months old when we’d stayed here, and I was newly emerged from postpartum depression. As she slept in her Pack ’n Play, a noise machine humming beside her, Brandon and I had sex for the first time since her birth. I knew it would be good for us, and it was. It only hurt for an instant as we started, and I even came. It was fun. I went to use the bathroom afterward, and in the low blue light from the window, I looked at my reflection. Remember this feeling, I told myself. Sex not only felt physically good, but it made me feel close to him. I was proud of us, proud of the act itself. In showing up with Brandon this way, after such a hard time, I’d done something not only beneficial for us but also prudent, advisable, like maxing out my Roth IRA contributions for the calendar year.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  Modern poverty, strangely enough, began when man for the first time in history began to escape from poverty. The American Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the French Revolution in 1789 were the birth of modern democracy. But about the same time another revolution set in beside which these great events were puny. In 1769 James Watt harnessed the expansive power of steam for human use. Hitherto man had used only the localized power of falling water and the fitful power of blowing wind. The only ready force had been the vital energy of man and beast. Now at last the weary hum of the hand-spindle and the pounding of the hand-loom could cease. Nature bent her willing neck to the yoke, and the economic production of our race took a leap forward—as when a car has been pushed forward by hand on the level, and now grips the cable and rushes up a steep incline. If some angel with prophetic foresight had witnessed that epoch, would he not have winged his way back to heaven to tell God that human suffering was drawing to its end? Instead of that a long-drawn wail of misery followed wherever the power-machine came. It swept the bread from men’s tables and the pride from their hearts. Hitherto each master of a handicraft, with his family and a few apprentices and journeymen about him, had plied his trade in his home, owner of his simple tools and master of his profits. His workmen ate at his table, married his daughters, and hoped to become masters themselves when their time of education was over. He worked for customers whom he knew, and honest work was good policy. He supplied a definite demand. The rules of his guild and the laws of his city barred out alien or reckless competition which would undermine his trade. So men lived simply and rudely. They had no hope of millions to lure them, nor the fear of poverty to haunt them. They lacked many of the luxuries accessible even to the poor to-day, but they had a large degree of security, independence, and hope. And man liveth not by cake alone. Then arrived the power-machine, and the old economic world tottered and fell like San Francisco in 1906. The machine was too expensive to be set up in the old home workshops and owned by every master. If the guilds had been wise enough to purchase and operate machinery in common, they might have effected a coöperative organization of industry in which all could have shared the increased profits of machine production. As it was, the wealthy and enterprising and ruthless seized the new opening, turned out a rapid flow of products, and of necessity underbid the others in marketing their goods.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  “So this’ll be different, right?” She couldn’t remember much of that trip, beyond the other members of the French Club and the boy she’d hoped to kiss, who instead wound up getting caught in bed with Susanna Marx. She remembered smoking pot and eating nothing but croissants. Sending Nico postcards that wouldn’t reach him till she was home. Waiting in lines at the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower, feeling she should have a more profound reaction. She’d only taken French to rebel against her mother, who believed she ought to know Spanish. Fiona asked if he’d been there himself, and then she said, “I guess if you were a pilot—” She’d forgotten because she didn’t believe him. He said, “Second best city in the world.” “What’s the first?” “Chicago,” he said, as if it were obvious. “No Cubs in Paris. You staying Left Bank or Right?” “Oh. Between them, I guess? My friend has a place on Île Saint-Louis.” She liked how it made the trip sound glamorous rather than desperate. The man whistled. “Nice friend.” Maybe she shouldn’t have said it, shouldn’t have made herself sound moneyed and scammable. But because it felt so lovely and warm inside this version of the story, she went on. “He’s actually—have you heard of the photographer Richard Campo?” “Yeah, of course.” He looked at her, waited for the rest. “What, that’s your friend?” She nodded. “We go way back.” “Holy ,” the man said. “You serious? I’m a big art freak. I get him mixed up with Richard Avedon. But Campo did those deathbed shots?” “He’s the one. Grittier than Avedon.” “I didn’t know he was still alive. Wow. Wow.” “I won’t tell him you said that.” Really, she had no idea what shape Richard was in. He was still working at eighty, and when he passed through Chicago a few years ago for his show at the MCA, he was stooped but energetic, gushing about the twenty-nine-year-old French publicist who was apparently the love of his life. They waited a long time to approach the gate. He asked if she planned to hit the museums with Richard Campo, and Fiona told him she was really there to visit her daughter. It was true, in the most optimistic sense. “And her daughter too,” she said. “My granddaughter.” He laughed and then realized she was serious. “You don’t look—” “Thanks,” she said. To her relief, the seatbelt light dinged off. No time for the guy to ask questions she didn’t have answers to. (What arrondissement? How old is the grandkid? What’s her name?) She waited for room to stand. “Your wallet couldn’t be in your suitcase, could it?” She gestured at the overhead bins. “Checked my bag at O’Hare.” She believed him more now, but not enough to offer money. She said, “I’ll share my cab, if that would help.” He grinned, and his teeth were nice. Square and white.

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  I didn’t tell him about how she walked around naked and just peed right in from of me and stuff. I didn’t want him to get the wrong impression. Kuch described how his girlfriend, Laurie, handled his Hodaka in dirt and pointed out the cleanness of the welds on his Yamaha, the new spoked alloy wheels and the new rear disc brake he and his dad had put on that afternoon. He traced a dirt track in the air for me and drew in the ruts and showed me the line he’d ride to stomp ass the next weekend in the race at Post Falls. We wiped our greasy fingers on the grass and stared up at the stars. We lay back against the Thompson Park benches and talked about how fast our first two years of high school had gone and about how weird it felt to be beginning the last one in less than a month. I was already getting nostalgic thinking about all the great times being over so soon. And it’s a lot worse now that I’ll be graduating in a few weeks. Tanneran once told us that college is where you make your lifetime friends. He said college is where you begin your intellectual growing and that you just grow away from your high school friends. I hope that doesn’t turn out to be true. I never want to lose the friendship of Kuch or Otto. I guess it can’t turn out to be true if I don’t let it. “Ya know what I’m gonna do instead of goin’ to college?” Kuch asked, popping another beer. “Win the Spanish Grand Prix?” I replied. “Besides that.” “What, then?” “I’m gonna go on a vision quest,” he said. I didn’t say anything for a minute or two. I’d read about vision quests in several books, but I learned the real detailed stuff about them from a book called Seven Arrows by a Northern Cheyenne named Hyemeyohsts Storm. The circumstances under which I read that book consisted of Kuch yelling and screaming, “Read this sonofabitching book, man. It is un-fucking-believable!” It has nice pictures, but outside of the part where the Indian kid fucks his mother, I didn’t bend the edges of too many pages. I originally turned Kuch on to the subject of the American Indian early in our sophomore year. I got into it by way of Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man . From Berger I went to Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee , to Black Elk Speaks , and then to everything I could get my hands on. I liked learning about the Indians, but Kuch freaked out. He rampaged through Indian fiction, history, anthropology, and also through the Wickiup Tavern in Springdale on the border of the Spokane Indian Reservation. For a while it looked like I’d created a monster. “Why a vision quest?” I asked. “I’d like to see if I can’t find my place in the circle,” Kuch replied.

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  Where fat lazy Lake Roosevelt had lain in a bed of sand, the Columbia River cut through rock. Northward lay the mudflat that had once been farmland. An olive-drab Dodge Power Wagon was skidding driftwood logs through the mud to dry ground. Its driver and Carla and I were the only folks around. We walked down the rocky trail, across the dry sandy beach, through wet sand, and finally through mud before we reached the boulders that gleamed through the driftwood and trash. It looked like a whole lakeful of litter had lodged where the channel narrowed. The heat drew a dead smell from the mud. Carla walked back to the clean sand to lie in the sun while I worked my way across the rocks and logs to a broad ledge parallel to the falls but higher in elevation and about thirty yards away. White plastic bleach jugs floated in the shallow pools and hung like snowberries in the driftwood jams. I sat on the wet rock, drew my arms around my knees, and gazed south. Thin and blue, the river rolled through a black band of mud bordered by white sand. Where the white sand ended, green pines rose and blurred in the distance to dark high-mountain blue. On the east ran the Huckleberry Mountains and on the west the Kettle River Range. Some of the land between the mountain ranges south to the great bend in the river still belongs to the Spokane and Colville Indian tribes. I felt insulated by the roar of water all around me. I couldn’t hear the cars on the highway, and when I closed my eyes I couldn’t see the trash. I was thinking of something Seattle, Chief of the Duwamish Indians, had said about his people and their land on Puget Sound: When the last red man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the white man, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe. . . . They will throng with the returning hosts that once filled and still love this beautiful land. I was thinking of those invisible dead and of my own as I pulled the cassette recorder from my wrestling bag and set it on the rock ledge. A shower of mist blew off the falls and with it fell a great coolness. I watched the tiny points of moisture brighten the black surface of the machine for a second before I pressed “record.” When I got back to the clean part of the beach I found Carla sunning with her shirt off. She opened one eye as she heard my footsteps squinch across the sand. I was slightly crazed by the river I guess, or I wouldn’t have had the nerve to do what I did then. I stood above her and let myself topple from the ankles like a tree. She yelped, but I caught myself before I touched her.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  I have been with my own father only three times, each visit happening in my childhood, each visit happening in cold weather. He was a basketball coach, and I do not know why he left my mother. I only know he was tall and handsome and smelled like beer; his collar smelled like beer, his hands like beer, and his coarse, unshaven face smelled like beer. I do not drink much beer myself, but the depth of the scent has never left me. My friend Tony the Beat Poet will be drinking a beer at Horse Brass Pub and the smell will send me to a pleasant place that exists only in recollections of childhood.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  I could see the two of us in the round mirror on the wall, our long hair down, our blue eyes. Norsewomen. When I saw us like this, I could almost remember fishing in cold deep seas, the smell of cod, the charcoal of our fires, our felt boots and our strange alphabet, runes like sticks, a language like the ploughing of fields. Beauty was my mother’s law, her religion. You could do anything you wanted, as long as you were beautiful, as long as you did things beautifully. If you weren’t, you just didn’t exist. She had drummed it into my head since I was small. Although I had noticed by now that reality didn’t always conform to my mother’s ideas.

• From Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them (2006)

  Now he is back in jail on another charge, and the camera showed this big man gracefully doing tai chi exercises in the prison garden. The last man told the story of how he used to commit brutal acts in order to ingratiate himself with the bosses for whom he worked as a low-level debt collector. At forty, he got married and fell in love with his wife, had two kids, and redirected his life; he raised a quarter million to buy his way out of the mob, and now was a born-again preacher. The detail he kept returning to was the worst thing he used to do: he’d chain a guy, some deadbeat, to the back bumper of his car and drag him along the street. The storyteller repeated this detail several times, amazed by his previous self, by the other life he used to lead, and with that edge of longing that always goes right along with nostalgia. And it was this detail—the man, the chain, the bumper—that made me believe every word of this guy’s story of sin and repentance. READING back through this chapter, I’m appalled by the details. A one-legged skier, a gangrenous cat bite, a game of dueling stories, a cut-out magazine photo beside the bed of a giant insect, a bloody potato on the kitchen floor, a wise guy driving down the road with a deadbeat tied to his bumper. But why should I be surprised? It’s not just God in the details, but the times in which we live. Details aren’t only the building blocks with which a story is put together, they’re also clues to something deeper, keys not merely to our subconscious but to our historical moment. There is one more detail, one final detail, that I feel I should add. Several months after the Esalen workshop ended, and a few weeks before my friend told me the story of the dueling stories, he had gotten a letter from the woman, the one-legged skier. She wrote that for New Year’s Eve she had gone out into the desert and thrown back her head and just screamed and screamed, and she wanted to tell him that, and to say that she felt much better.

• From Educated (2018)

  As a child I scarcely knew my aunts, uncles or cousins on my mother’s side. We rarely visited them—I didn’t even know where most of them lived—and it was even rarer for them to visit the mountain. The exception was my aunt Angie, my mother’s youngest sister, who lived in town and insisted on seeing my mother. What I know about the engagement has come to me in bits and pieces, mostly from the stories Mother told. I know she had the ring before Dad served a mission—which was expected of all faithful Mormon men—and spent two years proselytizing in Florida. Lynn took advantage of this absence to introduce his sister to every marriageable man he could find this side of the Rockies, but none could make her forget the stern farm boy who ruled over his own mountain. Gene returned from Florida and they were married. LaRue sewed the wedding dress. —I’VE ONLY SEEN A single photograph from the wedding. It’s of my parents posing in front of a gossamer curtain of pale ivory. Mother is wearing a traditional dress of beaded silk and venetian lace, with a neckline that sits above her collarbone. An embroidered veil covers her head. My father wears a cream suit with wide black lapels. They are both intoxicated with happiness, Mother with a relaxed smile, Dad with a grin so large it pokes out from under the corners of his mustache. It is difficult for me to believe that the untroubled young man in that photograph is my father. Fearful and anxious, he comes into focus for me as a weary middle-aged man stockpiling food and ammunition. I don’t know when the man in that photograph became the man I know as my father. Perhaps there was no single moment. Dad married when he was twenty-one, had his first son, my brother Tony, at twenty-two. When he was twenty-four, Dad asked Mother if they could hire an herbalist to midwife my brother Shawn. She agreed. Was that the first hint, or was it just Gene being Gene, eccentric and unconventional, trying to shock his disapproving in-laws? After all, when Tyler was born twenty months later, the birth took place in a hospital. When Dad was twenty-seven, Luke was born, at home, delivered by a midwife. Dad decided not to file for a birth certificate, a decision he repeated with Audrey, Richard and me. A few years later, around the time he turned thirty, Dad pulled my brothers out of school. I don’t remember it, because it was before I was born, but I wonder if perhaps that was a turning point. In the four years that followed, Dad got rid of the telephone and chose not to renew his license to drive. He stopped registering and insuring the family car. Then he began to hoard food. This last part sounds like my father, but it is not the father my older brothers remember.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  SECTION IIIn the LossesCHAPTER 4Escalating CommitmentToward the end of the 1930s, Harold Staw’s parents were among the millions of Americans who moved their families from the East Coast to Southern California, the latest frontier for chasing the American Dream. Shirley Posner’s family had made a similar move to Los Angeles, where she met Harold. They fell in love, married in 1940, and had two kids of their own while Harold worked in a defense plant in Los Angeles during World War II. After the war, Harold and Shirley settled in San Bernardino, along the eastern end of an area known as the Inland Empire, sixty miles from Los Angeles. The war years had been good for LA, a center for defense production. As that prosperity spread, much of the Inland Empire transitioned from farms and citrus groves to residential areas. Harold’s stepfather and mother operated a grocery store, and Harold and Shirley followed suit, purchasing a neighborhood store. They turned a small profit but after several years Harold could see the writing on the wall. Large supermarket chains were taking over and it would eventually be impossible for a mom-and-pop operation to compete. Harold needed to find a more promising business. By 1952, he noticed a unique opportunity in Fontana, ten miles to the west of San Bernardino, along the route of a new freeway that was supposed to one day reach all the way to Los Angeles. Fontana was a booming factory town. Kaiser Steel had opened a huge factory during World War II and it became even busier once the United States entered the Korean War. Harold thought all those workers—mostly new arrivals to the area who were now earning a good wage—represented a market he could sell appliances to. Because the factory’s workers all belonged to the steelworkers union, his store would sell exclusively to members of the union, like a PX on a military base. At the start, he had little beyond his idea. With the small amount of money the Staws got from selling the grocery store, Harold could only afford to lease a tiny property that had previously housed chickens. But with the help of Shirley and their two young children, he enthusiastically swept the space clear of chicken feathers and opened the Union Store. He didn’t have money for much inventory—the entire operation was, literally, bare bones—but he used the limitations of the space and his budget to offer discounted prices. Customers could look at several floor models. If they saw a refrigerator or a stove they liked, he ordered it for them from the manufacturer. Harold’s idea turned out to be a visionary first step in building a successful retail chain. The converted chicken coop did so well that Harold expanded to a larger property in Upland, another twelve miles west on the freeway as construction continued. The Upland store had more space, more inventory, and now featured housewares in addition to appliances.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  Another nice thing about the hood was that it’s super cheap. You can get by on next to nothing. There’s a meal you can get in the hood called a kota. It’s a quarter loaf of bread. You scrape out the bread, then you fill it with fried potatoes, a slice of baloney, and some pickled mango relish called achar. That costs a couple of rand. The more money you have, the more upgrades you can buy. If you have a bit more money you can throw in a hot dog. If you have a bit more than that, you can throw in a proper sausage, like a bratwurst, or maybe a fried egg. The biggest one, with all the upgrades, is enough to feed three people. For us, the ultimate upgrade was to throw on a slice of cheese. Cheese was always the thing because it was so expensive. Forget the gold standard—the hood operated on the cheese standard. Cheese on anything was money. If you got a burger, that was cool, but if you got a cheeseburger, that meant you had more money than a guy who just got a hamburger. Cheese on a sandwich, cheese in your fridge, that meant you were living the good life. In any township in South Africa, if you had a bit of money, people would say, “Oh, you’re a cheese boy.” In essence: You’re not really hood because your family has enough money to buy cheese. In Alex, because Bongani and his crew lived in East Bank, they were considered cheese boys. Ironically, because they lived on the first street just over the river, they were looked down on as the scruff of East Bank and the kids in the nicer houses higher up in East Bank were the cheesier cheese boys. Bongani and his crew would never admit to being cheese boys. They would insist, “We’re not cheese. We’re hood.” But then the real hood guys would say, “Eh, you’re not hood. You’re cheese.” “We’re not cheese,” Bongani’s guys would say, pointing further up East Bank. “They’re cheese.” It was all a bunch of ridiculous posturing about who was hood and who was cheese. Bongani was the leader of his crew, the guy who got everyone together and got things moving. Then there was Mzi, Bongani’s henchman. Small guy, just wanted to tag along, be in the mix. Bheki was the drinks man, always finding us booze and always coming up with an excuse to drink. Then there was Kakoatse. We called him G. Mr. Nice Guy. All G was interested in was women. If women were in the mix, he was in the game. Then, finally, there was Hitler, the life of the party. Hitler just wanted to dance.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The resolution to exchange the splendors of the world for monastic seclusion was not uncommon among the rulers and nobles of Spain; and the rich convents of Montserrat and Poblet (now in ruins) had special accommodations for royal and princely guests. Charles had formed it during the lifetime of the Empress Isabella, and agreed with her that they would spend the rest of their days in neighboring convents, and be buried under the same altar. In 1542 he announced his intention to Francisco de Borgia; but the current of events involved him in a new and vain attempt to restore once more the Holy Roman Empire in the fullness of its power. Now his work was done, and he longed for rest. His resolution was strengthened by the desire to atone for sins of unchastity committed after the death of his wife.324 Yuste is situated in the mountainous province of Estremadura, about eight leagues from Plasencia and fifty leagues from Valladolid (then the capital of Spain), in a well-watered valley and a salubrious climate, and was in every way well fitted for the wishes of the Emperor.325 Here he spent about eighteen months till his death,—a remarkable instance of the old adage, Sie transit gloria mundi. His Cloister Life. There is something grand and romantic, as well as sad and solemn, in the voluntary retirement of a monarch who had swayed a scepter of unlimited power over two hemispheres, and taken a leading part in the greatest events of an eventful century. There is also an idyllic charm in the combination of the innocent amusements of country life with the exercises of piety. The cloister life of Charles even more than his public life reveals his personal and religious character. It was represented by former historians as the life of a devout and philosophic recluse, dead to the world and absorbed in preparation for the awful day of judgment;326 but the authentic documents of Simancas, made known since 1844, correct and supplement this view.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Descriptions of marvellous gardens similar to that of Guillaume de Lorris had appeared in several of Boccaccio’s earlier works, notably the Amorosa visione , but here in the Third Day of the Decameron his intention is made unmistakably clear by the company’s unanimous assertion that ‘if Paradise were constructed on earth, it was inconceivable that it could take any other form.’ The topos of the paradiso terrestre , the Earthly Paradise or Garden of Eden, was one that appealed strongly to medieval writers, especially after Dante’s visionary treatment of the theme in the concluding cantos of his Purgatorio , where the Garden of Eden is envisaged as a wooded region surrounded by Lethe, the stream of forgetfulness. But whereas Dante locates the Earthly Paradise in the afterlife, at the summit of the mountain of Purgatory, rising in sheer and aweinspiring majesty from the waters of the southern hemisphere, Boccaccio characteristically implies that it is still accessible to those determined to escape from their literally (as well as symbolically) plague-ridden life on earth. Woods and streams are a prominent feature of the Decameron’s third locus amœnus , the so-called Valley of the Ladies, described in the concluding section of the Sixth Day. The valley is perfectly circular in shape, and surrounded by six hills, each with a castle-like palace perched on its summit. A waterfall issues forth from a gorge between two of the hills, forming a clear stream on reaching the floor of the valley. The stream in turn forms a lake in the valley’s centre, and from the lower end of the lake a second stream makes its way to the narrow defile that provides the valley’s only means of access. This last particular offers a clue (if any were needed) to the valley’s significance, recalling as it does the passage from St Matthew’s gospel giving notice that ‘strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.’ Apart, however, from its obvious paradisal connotations, the Valley of the Ladies has been seen as the culminating point of a highly complex allegory, in which the cormice is viewed as representing Art or Poetry, without which society is meaningless. 22 If that is so, the six castles dominating the valley could be taken to represent the six days of storytelling in the Decameron already in place, while the crystal-clear lake at its centre could signify the font of artistic inspiration to which the storytellers are led in preparation for the remainder of their narrative endeavours. When the seven young ladies (and later on, the three young men) discard their clothes and bathe in the waters of the lake, they are in effect renewing their commitment to the artistic process on which they had embarked at Pampinea’s bidding on the first day of their spiritual and aesthetic retreat.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  When I urged the old, rag-doll-like driver to go faster, he would merely lean to one side with a special half-circular movement of his arm, so as to make his horse believe he was about to produce the short whip he kept in the leg of his right felt boot; and that would be sufficient for the shaggy little hack to make as vague a show of speeding up as the driver had made of getting out his knutishko. In the almost hallucinatory state that our snow-muffled ride engendered, I refought all the famous duels a Russian boy knew so well. I saw Pushkin, mortally wounded at the first fire, grimly sit up to discharge his pistol at d’Anthès. I saw Lermontov smile as he faced Martïnov. I saw stout Sobinov in the part of Lenski crash down and send his weapon flying into the orchestra. No Russian writer of any repute had failed to describe une rencontre, a hostile meeting, always of course of the classical duel à volonté type (not the ludicrous back-to-back-march-face-about-bang-bang performance of movie and cartoon fame). Among several prominent families, there had been tragic deaths on the dueling ground in more or less recent years. Slowly my dreamy sleigh drove up Morskaya Street, and slowly dim silhouettes of duelists advanced upon each other and leveled their pistols and fired—at the crack of dawn, in damp glades of old country estates, on bleak military training grounds, or in the driving snow between two rows of fir trees. And behind it all there was yet a very special emotional abyss that I was desperately trying to skirt, lest I burst into a tempest of tears, and this was the tender friendship underlying my respect for my father; the charm of our perfect accord; the Wimbledon matches we followed in the London papers; the chess problems we solved; the Pushkin iambics that rolled off his tongue so triumphantly whenever I mentioned some minor poet of the day. Our relationship was marked by that habitual exchange of homespun nonsense, comically garbled words, proposed imitations of supposed intonations, and all those private jokes which are the secret code of happy families. With all that he was extremely strict in matters of conduct and given to biting remarks when cross with a child or a servant, but his inherent humanity was too great to allow his rebuke to Osip for laying out the wrong shirt to be really offensive, just as a first-hand knowledge of a boy’s pride tempered the harshness of reproval and resulted in sudden forgiveness. Thus I was more puzzled than pleased one day when upon learning that I had deliberately slashed my leg just above the knee with a razor (I still bear the scar) in order to avoid a recitation in class for which I was unprepared, he seemed unable to work up any real wrath; and his subsequent admission of a parallel transgression in his own boyhood rewarded me for not withholding the truth.