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.

Page 9 of 45 · 20 per page

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  The sidewalks were piled high with snow. A foot-wide pathway had been shoveled from the entrance of my building to the bodega. My slippers were brown suede with shearling on the inside, and the salt on the ground stained them with white crusts. I kept my head down, away from the biting air and the joy of the holiday. I didn’t want to be reminded of Christmases past. No associations, no heartstrings snagged on a tree in a window, no memories. Since it had turned cold, I’d lived in flannel pajamas, the big down-filled ski jacket. Sometimes I even slept in that jacket because I kept the temperature inside the apartment so low. The Egyptian on duty gave me my coffees for free that night because the ATM had run out of cash. Stacks of old, unsold newspapers were piled up against a broken window next to the fridge of milk and sodas. I read the headlines slowly, my eyes blurring and crossing as I stared. The new president was going to be hard on terrorists. A Harlem teenager had thrown her newborn baby down a sewage drain. A mine caved in somewhere in South America. A local councilman was caught having gay sex with an illegal immigrant. Someone who used to be fat was now extremely thin. Mariah Carey gave Christmas gifts to orphans in the Dominican Republic. A survivor of the Titanic died in a car crash. I had a vague notion that Reva was coming over that night. She probably wanted to pretend to want to cheer me up. “I’ll pay you back for a pack of Parliaments,” I told the Egyptian. “Plus a Klondike bar. And these M&M’s.” I pointed to the peanut kind. He nodded okay. I looked down through the sliding glass cover of the freezer where all the ice cream and popsicles were kept. There was stuff frozen solid at the bottom that had been there for years, embedded in the white fuzz of ice. A glacial world. I stared at the mountains of ice crystals and spaced out for a minute imagining that I was down there, climbing the ice, surrounded by the whiteness of the smoky air, an Arctic landscape. There was a row of old Häagen-Dazs down there, from before they changed the packaging. There were boxes of Klondike bars down there. Maybe that’s where I should go, I thought—Klondike. Yukon. I could move to Canada. I leaned down into the freezer and scraped at the frost and managed to pick out a Klondike for Reva. If she brought me a Christmas gift and I had nothing for her, it would fuel her judgment and “concern” for weeks. I thought I’d also give her some of the fuchsia underwear from Victoria’s Secret I never wore. And a pair of jeans.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  It had, that serve of hers, beauty, directness, youth, a classical purity of trajectory, and was, despite its spanking pace, fairly easy to return, having as it did no twist or sting to its long elegant hop. That I could have had all her strokes, all her enchantments, immortalized in segments of celluloid, makes me moan to-day with frustration. They would have been so much more than the snapshots I burned! Her overhead volley was related to her service as the envoy is to the ballade; for she had been trained, my pet, to patter up at once to the net on her nimble, vivid, white-shod feet. There was nothing to choose between her forehand and backhand drives: they were mirror images of one another—my very loins still tingle with those pistol reports repeated by crisp echoes and Electra’s cries. One of the pearls of Dolly’s game was a short half-volley that Ned Litam had taught her in California. She preferred acting to swimming, and swimming to tennis; yet I insist that had not something within her been broken by me—not that I realized it then!—she would have had on the top of her perfect form the will to win, and would have become a real girl champion. Dolores, with two rackets under her arm, in Wimbledon. Dolores endorsing a Dromedary. Dolores turning professional. Dolores acting a girl champion in a movie. Dolores and her gray, humble, hushed husband-coach, old Humbert. There was nothing wrong or deceitful in the spirit of her game—unless one considered her cheerful indifference toward its outcome as the feint of a nymphet. She who was so cruel and crafty in everyday life, revealed an innocence, a frankness, a kindness of ball-placing, that permitted a second-rate but determined player, no matter how uncouth and incompetent, to poke and cut his way to victory. Despite her small stature, she covered the one thousand and fifty-three square feet of her half of the court with wonderful ease, once she had entered into the rhythm of a rally and as long as she could direct that rhythm; but any abrupt attack, or sudden change of tactics on her adversary’s part, left her helpless. At match point, her second serve, which—rather typically—was even stronger and more stylish than her first (for she had none of the inhibitions that cautious winners have), would strike vibrantly the harp-cord of the net—and ricochet out of court. The polished gem of her dropshot was snapped up and put away by an opponent who seemed four-legged and wielded a crooked paddle. Her dramatic drives and lovely volleys would candidly fall at his feet. Over and over again she would land an easy one into the net—and merrily mimic dismay by drooping in a ballet attitude, with her forelocks hanging. So sterile were her grace and whipper that she could not even win from panting me and my old-fashioned lifting drive.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  L. Stevenson’s footprint on an extinct volcano: the Scottish writer (1850–1895) followed the woman he loved to California, where he lived for a year (1870–1880). In From Scotland to Silverado, James D. Hart, ed. (1966), collects his writing about the state. Stevenson is buried on the volcanic Mount Vaea in Samoa; but H.H., who may or may not know that, is here referring to his honeymoon stay on Mount St. Helena, California, generally thought to be an extinct volcano (it is in fact not one). There is a Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial there, but he left no actual footprint. H.H., having just noted “The ugly villas of handsome actresses,” was no doubt more impressed by the footprints and handprints of movie stars immortalized in the cement pavements outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. For further Stevenson allusions, see Treasure Island and Mr. Hyde. Mission Dolores: good title for book: this book, of course. The mission observed by H.H. exists, in San Francisco. festoons: in architecture, a molded or carved ornament representing a festoon (a garland or wreath hanging in a curve). H.H. is observing the coastline of Monterey. Russian Gulch State Park: in Sonoma, California; named by Russian colonists. The Bearded Woman read our jingle and now she is no longer single: H.H. conflates a series of roadside advertising signs erected by the Burma Shave Company, or invents his own version. “The first form of sequential advertising,” report Sally Henderson and Robert Landau in Billboard Art (1981), “the Burma Shave signs spoke to the public in a new way with both humor and wit. The small signs, installed at the roadside in sets of six, took approximately eighteen seconds to read when the car was traveling at a speed of thirty-five miles per hour.” Burma Shave signs dotted the countryside from 1925 to 1963. Lolita would have been more interested in this cognate series: “The Bearded Lady / Tried AJar / She’s Now a Famous / Movie Star / Burma Shave.” Weathered old Burma Shave signs turn up today in “antique” stores, bathed in a very warm light indeed. Now that the old roads and their kitsch and clutter have given way to sleek super-highways and standardized conveniences, the once despised diners, gas stations, and one-of-a kind motels of the past have been deemed vernacular art and archeology by grieving nostalgists and students of a democratic culture. Picture-books such as John. Margolies’s The End of the Road: Vanishing Highway Architecture in America (1981) and Michael Wallis’s Route 66: The Mother Road (1990), may also serve to document the vanishing cross-country quotidian world of Lolita and Jack Kerouac’s more romanticized On the Road (1957). The photographs in Robert Frank’s The Americans (1959) complement H.H.’s most melancholy rooms and ruminations, as he would put it.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  So you can lean on Claudia or whoever when it comes time to deal with all that. She might know a good upholsterer.” I hung up. I felt better. I called down to the doorman. “My friend Trevor is on his way. Let him up when he gets here.” I unlocked the door to my apartment, turned off my phone and sealed it in Tupperware with packing tape and slid it into the depths of the highest shelf in the cabinet over the sink. I took a few more Ambien, ate the pear, watched a commercial for ExxonMobil and tried not to think of Trevor. While I waited, I ticked open a slat in the blinds and saw that it was the dead of night, black and cold and icy, and I thought of all the cruel people out there sleeping soundly, like newborn babes in blankets held to the bosoms of their loving mothers, and thought of my mother’s bony clavicles, the white lace of her bras and white lace of her silk camisoles and slip dresses that she wore under everything, and the white of her terry-cloth robe hanging on the back of her bathroom door, thick and luxurious like the ones at nice hotels, and the gray satin dressing gown whose belt slipped out of its loops because it was slippery silk satin, and it rippled like the water in a river in a Japanese painting, my mother’s taut, pale legs flashing like the white bellies of sun-flashed koi, their fanlike tails stirring the silt and clouding the pond water like a puff of smoke in a magic show, and my mother’s powdered foundation, how when she dipped her fat, rounded brush in it, then lifted it to her wan, sallow face shiny with moisturizer, it also made a puff of smoke, and I remembered watching her “put her face on,” as she called it, and wondering if one day I’d be like her, a beautiful fish in a man-made pool, circling and circling, surviving the tedium only because my memory can contain only what is imprinted on the last few minutes of my life, constantly forgetting my thoughts. For a moment, a life like that didn’t sound bad at all, so I got up off the sofa and took an Infermiterol, brushed my teeth, went into my room, took off all my clothes, got into bed, pulled the duvet up over my head, and woke up sometime later—a few days, I guessed—gagging and coughing, Trevor’s testicles swinging in my face. “Jesus Christ,” he was mumbling. I was still adrift, dizzy. I closed my eyes and kept them closed, heard the crackling of his hand jerking his spit-covered penis, then felt him ejaculate on my breasts.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  You, in turn, present yourself as representing that ideal, as offering a chance to recapture lost youth through adventure—through seduction. In her later years, Queen Elizabeth I of En- gland was known as a rather stern and demanding ruler. She made it a point not to let her courtiers see anything soft or weak in her. But then Robert Devereux, the second Earl of Essex, came to court. Much younger than the queen, the dashing Essex would often chastize her for her sourness. The queen would forgive him—he was so exuberant and spontaneous, he could not control himself. But his comments got under her skin; in the pres- ence of Essex she came to remember all the youthful ideals—spiritedness, feminine charm—that had since vanished from her life. She also felt a little of that girlish spirit return when she was around him. He quickly became her favorite, and soon she was in love with him. Old age is constantly se- duced by youth, but first the young people must make it clear what the older ones are missing, how they have lost their ideals. Only then will they feel that the presence of the young will let them recapture that spark, the rebellious spirit that age and society have conspired to repress. This concept has infinite applications. Corporations and politicians know that they cannot seduce their public into buying what they want them to buy, or doing what they want them to do, unless they first awaken a sense of need and discontent. Make the masses uncertain about their identity and you can help define it for them. It is as true of groups or na- tions as it is of individuals: they cannot be seduced without being made to feel some lack. Part of John F. Kennedy's election strategy in 1960 was to make Americans unhappy about the 1950s, and how far the country had strayed from its ideals. In talking about the 1950s, he did not mention the nation's economic stability or its emergence as a superpower. Instead, he implied that the period was marked by conformity, a lack of risk and ad- venture, a loss of our frontier values. To vote for Kennedy was to embark American frontier. • But I trust that no one in this vast assemblage will agree with those sentiments. . . . • . . . I tell you the New Frontier is here, whether we seek it or not. . . . It would be easier to shrink back from that frontier, to look to the safe mediocrity of the past, to be lulled by good intentions and high rhetoric—and those who prefer that course should not cast their votes for me, regardless of party. • But I believe that the times demand invention, innovation, imagination, decision. I am asking each of you to be new pioneers on that New Frontier. My call is to the young in heart, regardless of age. —JOHN F.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  More important, a child represents a world from which we have been forever exiled. Because adult life is full of boredom and compromise, we harbor an illusion of childhood as a kind of golden age, even though it can often be a period of great confusion and pain. It cannot be denied, how- ever, that childhood had certain privileges, and as children we had a plea- surable attitude to life. Confronted with a particularly charming child, we often feel wistful: we remember our own golden past, the qualities we have lost and wish we had again. And in the presence of the child, we get a little of that goldenness back. Natural seducers are people who somehow avoided getting certain childish traits drummed out of them by adult experience. Such people can be as powerfully seductive as any child, because it seems uncanny and mar- velous that they have preserved such qualities. They are not literally like children, of course; that would make them obnoxious or pitiful. Rather it is the spirit that they have retained. Do not imagine that this childishness is something beyond their control. Natural seducers learn early on the value of retaining a particular quality, and the seductive power it contains; they Long-past ages have a great and often puzzling attraction for men's imagination. Whenever they are dissatisfied with their present surround- ings—and this happens often enough—they turn back to the past and hope that they will now be able to prove the truth of the inextinguishable dream of a golden age. They are probably still under the spell of their childhood, which is presented to them by their not impartial memory as a time of uninterrupted bliss. —SIGMUND FREUD, THE STASDARD EDITION OF THE COMPLETE PSYCHOLOGICAL WORKS OF SIGMUND FREUD, VOLUME 23 When Hermes was born on Mount Cyllene his mother Maia laid him in swaddling bands on a winnowing fan, but he grew with astonishing quickness into a little boy, and as soon as her back was turned, slipped off and went looking for adventure. Arrived at Pieria, where Apollo was tending a fine herd of cows, he decided to 55 56 • The Art of Seduction adapt and build upon those childlike traits that they managed to preserve, exactly as the child learns to play with its natural charm. This is the key. It is within your power to do the same, since there is lurking within all of us a devilish child straining to be let loose. To do this successfully, you have to be able to let go to a degree, since there is nothing less natural than seeming hesitant. Remember the spirit you once had; let it return, without self- consciousness. People are much more forgiving of those who go all the way, who seem uncontrollably foolish, than the halfhearted adult with a childish streak. Remember who you were before you became so polite and self-effacing.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time! NO NA ME IN THE STREET for Berdis Baldwin and Beauford Delaney and Rudy Lombard and Jerome His remembrance shall perish from the earth and He shall have no name in the street. He shall be driven from light into darkness, and chased out of the world. Job 18:1 7-18 Take Me to the Water If I had-a- my way I'd tear this building down. Great God, then, if I had-a- my way If I had-a- my way, little children, I'd tear this building down. -SLAVE SoNG Just a little while to stay here, Just a little while to stay. -TRADITIONAL T HAT is a good idea," I heard my mother say. She was staring at a wad of black velvet, which she held in her hand, and she carefully placed this bit of cloth in a closet. We can guess how old I must have been from the fact that for years afterward I thought that an "idea" was a piece of black velvet. Much, much, much has been blotted out, coming back only lately in bewildering and untrustworthy flashes. I must have been about five, I should think, when I made my connection between ideas and velvet, but I may have been younger; this may have been the same year that my father had me circum cised, a terrifying event which I scarcely remember at all; or I may think I was five because I remember tugging at my moth er's skirts once and watching her face while she was telling someone else that she was twenty-s even. This meant, for me, that she was virtually in the grave already, and I tugged a little harder at her skirts. I already knew, for some reason, or had given myself some reason to believe, that she had been twenty- two when I was born. And, though I can't count to day, I could count when I was litt le.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  The transcendence of solipsism is a central concern in Nabokov. He recommends no escape, and there is an unmistakable moral resonance in his treatment of the theme: it is only at the outset of Lolita that Humbert can say that he had Lolita “safely solipsized.” The coldly unromantic scrutiny which his exiles endure is often overlooked by critics. In Pnin the gentle, addlepated professor is seen in a new light in the final chapter, when the narrator assumes control and makes it clear that he is inheriting Pnin’s job but not, he would hope, his existence. John Shade asks us to pity “the exile, the old man / Dying in a motel,” and we do; but in the Commentary, Kinbote says that a “king who sinks his identity in the mirror of exile is guilty of [a regicide].” “The past [is] the past,” Lolita tells Humbert toward the end of that novel, when he asks her to relive what had always been inexorably lost. As a book about the spell exerted by the past, Lolita is Nabokov’s own parodic answer to his previous book, the first edition of Speak, Memory. Mnemosyne is now seen as a black muse, nostalgia as a grotesque cul-de-sac. Lolita is the last book one would offer as “autobiographical,” but even in its totally created form it connects with the deepest reaches of Nabokov’s soul. Like the poet Fyodor in The Gift, Nabokov could say that while he keeps everything “on the very brink of parody … there must be on the other hand an abyss of seriousness, and I must make my way along this narrow ridge between my own truth and a caricature of it”. An autobiographic theme submitted to the imagination thus takes on a new life: frozen in art, halted in space, now timeless, it can be lived with. When the clownish Gradus assassinates John Shade by mistake, in a novel published forty years after Nabokov’s father was similarly murdered, one may remember the butterfly which the seven-year-old Nabokov caught and then lost, but which was “finally overtaken and captured, after a forty-year race, on an immigrant dandelion … near Boulder” (Speak, Memory). One recognizes how art makes life possible for Nabokov, and why he calls Invitation to a Beheading a “violin in a void.” His art records a constant process of becoming—the evolution of the artist’s self through artistic creation—and the cycle of insect metamorphosis is Nabokov’s controlling metaphor for the process, provided by a lifetime of biological investigations which established in his mind “links between butterflies and the central problems of nature.” Significantly, a butterfly or moth will often appear at the end of a Nabokov novel, when the artistic “cycle” of that book is complete.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  After that I began a long rationalizing speech about marriage and my sexual needs and how I was a poet not a secretary. I stood at the lectern and ranted at the audience. Mrs. McIntosh looked soberly disapproving. Then I was picking my way down the steep steps, half crouching and terrified of falling. I looked into the sea of faces and suddenly realized that I had forgotten to take my scroll. In a panic I knew that I had forfeited everything: graduation, my fellowship grant, my harem of three husbands. The final dream I remember is strangest of all. I was walking up the library steps again to reclaim my diploma. This time it was not Mrs. McIntosh at the lectern, but Colette. Only she was a black woman with frizzy reddish hair glinting around her head like a halo. “There is only one way to graduate,” she said, “and it has nothing to do with the number of husbands.” “What do I have to do?” I asked desperately, feeling I’d do anything. She handed me a book with my name on the cover. “That was only a very shaky beginning,” she said, “but at least you made a beginning.” I took this to mean I still had years to go. “Wait,” she said, undoing her blouse. Suddenly I understood that making love to her in public was the real graduation, and at that moment it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. Very aroused, I moved toward her. Then the dream faded. AFTERWORD Happy Thirtieth Birthday , Fear of Flying T hirty years! It can’t be thirty years since Fear of Flying was published. Either time is an illusion (as I’ve always suspected) or I’ve been sleeping through the decades like Rip Van Winkle. The girl who wrote this book is young enough to be my daughter. I look back on her tenderly. What a maniac she was. Raging hormones ruled her life. She was always in love with the wrong man and always compulsively writing about it. I want to say to her: “Slow down, be calm, meditate, do yoga, everything will turn out all right.” But she can’t hear me. There is no time machine to take me back to her and revise the contents of her teeming brain. And if there were , this book would not exist. The twenties are as frenetic a decade as the teens. You have a voice inside your head repeating I want, I want, I want , but you don’t know what you want or how to get it. You hardly know who you are. You go on instinct. And your instinct mostly pushes you toward adventures you won’t grasp until you look back on them. Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward, some sage once said.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  surable attitude to life. Confronted with a particularly charming child, we often feel wistful: we remember our own golden past, the qualities we have lost and wish we had again. And in the presence of the child, we get a little When Hermes was born on Mount Cyllene his of that goldenness back. mother Maia laid him in Natural seducers are people who somehow avoided getting certain swaddling bands on a childish traits drummed out of them by adult experience. Such people can winnowing fan, but he grew with astonishing be as powerfully seductive as any child, because it seems uncanny and mar- quickness into a little boy, velous that they have preserved such qualities. They are not literally like and as soon as her back children, of course; that would make them obnoxious or pitiful. Rather it was turned, slipped off and is the spirit that they have retained. Do not imagine that this childishness is went looking for adventure. Arrived at Pieria, where something beyond their control. Natural seducers learn early on the value Apollo was tending a fine of retaining a particular quality, and the seductive power it contains; they herd of cows, he decided to 55 56 • The Art of Seduction steal them. But, fearing to adapt and build upon those childlike traits that they managed to preserve, be betrayed by their tracks, exactly as the child learns to play with its natural charm. This is the key. It he quickly made a number is within your power to do the same, since there is lurking within all of us a oj shoes from the bark of a fallen oak and tied them devilish child straining to be let loose. To do this successfully, you have to until plaited grass to the be able to let go to a degree, since there is nothing less natural than seeming feet of the cows, which he hesitant. Remember the spirit you once had; let it return, without self-then drove off by night along the road. Apollo consciousness. People are much more forgiving of those who go all the discovered the loss, but way, who seem uncontrollably foolish, than the halfhearted adult with a Hermes's trick deceived childish streak. Remember who you were before you became so polite and him, and though he went self-effacing. To assume the role of the Natural, mentally position yourself as far as Pylus in his westward search, and to in any relationship as the child, the younger one. Onchestus in his eastern, The following are the main types of the adult Natural. Keep in mind he was forced, in the end, that the greatest natural seducers are often a blend of more than one of to offer a reward for the apprehension of the thief. these qualities. Silenus and his satyrs, greedy of reward, spread out in different directions to track him down but, for a

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Madame Récamier could not have known about Chateaubriand's ideal type, but she did know something about him, well before she ever met him. She had read all of his books, and his characters were highly autobiographical. She knew of his obsession with his lost youth; and everyone knew of his endless and unsatisfying affairs with women, his hyperrestless spirit. Madame Récamier knew how to mirror people, entering their spirit, and one of her first acts was to take Chateaubriand to Vallée aux Loups, where he felt he had left part of his youth. Alive with memories, he regressed further into his childhood, to the days in the castle. She actively encouraged this. Most important, she embodied a spirit that came naturally to her, but that matched his youthful ideal: innocent, noble, kind. (The fact that so many men fell in love with her suggests that many men had the same ideals.) Madame Récamier was Lucile/Sylphide. It took him years to realize it, but when he did, her spell over him was complete. It is nearly impossible to embody someone's ideal completely. But if you come close enough, if you evoke some of that ideal spirit, you can lead that person into a deep seduction. To effect this regression you must play the role of the therapist. Get your targets to open up about their past, particularly their former loves and most particularly their first love. Pay attention to any expressions of disappointment, how this or that person did not give them what they wanted. Take them to places that evoke their youth. In this regression you are creating not so much a relationship of depen- 346 • The Art of Seduction dency and immaturity but rather the adolescent spirit of a first love. There is a touch of innocence to the relationship. So much of adult life involves compromise, conniving, and a certain toughness. Create the ideal atmosphere by keeping such things out, drawing the other person into a kind of mutual weakness, conjuring a second virginity. There should be a dreamlike quality to the affair, as if the target were reliving that first love but could not quite believe it. Let all of this unfold slowly, each encounter revealing more ideal qualities. The sense of reliving a past pleasure is simply impossible to resist. 4. Some time in the summer of 1614, several members of England's upper nobility, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, met to decide what to do about the Earl of Somerset, the favorite of King James I, who was forty-eight at the time. After eight years as the favorite, the young earl had accumulated such power and wealth, and so many titles, that nothing was left for anyone else. But how to get rid of this powerful man? For the time being the conspirators had no answer.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  As adults we tend to overvalue our childhood. In their dependency and powerlessness, children genuinely suffer, yet when we get older we conveniently forget about that and sentimentalize the supposed paradise we have left behind. We forget the pain and remember only the pleasure. Why? Because the responsibilities of adult life are a burden so oppressive at times that we secretly yearn for the dependency of childhood, for that per- [ In Japan, ] much in the son who looked after our every need, assumed our cares and worries. This traditional way of child-daydream of ours has a strong erotic component, for the child's feeling of rearing seems to foster passive dependence. The being dependent on the parent is charged with sexual undertones. Give child is rarely left alone, people a sensation similar to that protected, dependent feeling of childhood day or night, for it usually and they will project all kinds of fantasies onto you, including feelings of sleeps with the mother. love or sexual attraction that they will attribute to something else. We When it goes out the child is not pushed ahead in a won't admit it, but we long to regress, to shed our adult exterior and vent pram, to face the world the childish emotions that linger beneath the surface. alone, but is tightly bound Early in his career, Sigmund Freud confronted a strange problem: many to the mother's back in a snug cocoon. When the of his female patients were falling in love with him. He thought he knew mother bows, the child does what was happening: encouraged by Freud, the patient would delve into too, so the social graces are her childhood, which of course was the source of her illness or neurosis. acquired automatically while feeling the mother's She would talk about her relationship with her father, her earliest experi- heartbeat. Thus emotional ences of tenderness and love, and also of neglect and abandonment. The security tends to depend process would stir up powerful emotions and memories. In a way, she almost entirely on the physical presence of the would be transported back into her childhood. Intensifying this effect was mother. • . . . Children the fact that Freud himself said little and made himself a little cold and dis- learn that a show of tant, although he seemed to be caring—in other words, quite like the tradi- passive dependence is the best way to get favors as tional father figure. Meanwhile the patient was lying on a couch, in a well as affection. There is a helpless or passive position, so that the situation duplicated the roles of par- verb for this in Japanese: ent and child. Eventually she would begin to direct some of the confused amaeru, translated in the emotions she was dealing with toward Freud himself. Unaware of what was dictionary as "to presume upon another's love; to

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  When I was a boy, I served with my brother on Holy Thursday. One of us carried the pitcher that held warm water. The other carried the basin that caught the water poured over each man’s right foot. The foot washing was awkward for both the men and the priest. It required the men to strip off a shoe and sock from a foot that had already been carefully washed at home. The priest had to bend down, nearly on his hands and knees, to reach the white feet projecting from dark pant legs. When my father died, I did not take his place as unofficial sacristan. I did have my right foot washed on Holy Thursday night.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  They feared the storms he would bring. Napoleon ruled the country for one hundred days, until the allies and his enemies from within defeated him. This time he was shipped off to the remote island of St. Helena, where he was to die. Interpretation. Napoleon always thought of France, and his army, as a tar- get to be wooed and seduced. As General de Ségur wrote of Napoleon: "In moments of sublime power, he no longer commands like a man, but se- duces like a woman." In the case of his escape from Elba, he planned a bold, surprising gesture that would titillate a bored nation. He began his re- turn to France among the people who would be most receptive to him: the peasantry who had revered him. He revived the symbols—the revolution- ary colors, the eagle standards—that would stir up the old sentiments. He placed himself at the head of his army, daring his former soldiers to fire on him. The march on Paris that brought him back to power was pure theater, calculated for emotional effect every step of the way. What a contrast this former amour presented to the dolt of a king who now ruled them. Napoleon's second seduction of France was not a classical seduction, following the usual steps, but a re-seduction. It was built on old emotions 428 • The Art of Seduction and revived an old love. Once you have seduced a person (or a nation) there is almost always a lull, a slight letdown, which sometimes leads to a separation; it is surprisingly easy, though, to re-seduce the same target. The old feelings never go away, they lie dormant, and in a flash you can take your target by surprise. It is a rare pleasure to be able to relive the past, and one's youth—to feel the old emotions. Like Napoleon, add a dramatic flair to your re-seduction: revive the old images, the symbols, the expressions that will stir memory. Like the French, your targets will tend to forget the ugliness of the separa- tion and will remember only the good things. You should make this second seduction bold and quick, giving your targets no time to reflect or wonder. Like Napoleon, play on the contrast to their current lover, making his or her behavior seem timid and stodgy by comparison. Not everyone will be receptive to a re-seduction, and some moments will be inappropriate. When Napoleon came back from Elba, the Parisians were too sophisticated for him, and could see right through him.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I tried to teach her to play tennis so we might have more amusements in common; but although I had been a good player in my prime, I proved to be hopeless as a teacher; and so, in California, I got her to take a number of very expensive lessons with a famous coach, a husky, wrinkled old-timer, with a harem of ball boys; he looked an awful wreck off the court, but now and then, when, in the course of a lesson, to keep up the exchange, he would put out as it were an exquisite spring blossom of a stroke and twang the ball back to his pupil, that divine delicacy of absolute power made me recall that, thirty years before, I had seen him in Cannes demolish the great Gobbert! Until she began taking those lessons, I thought she would never learn the game. On this or that hotel court I would drill Lo, and try to relive the days when in a hot gale, a daze of dust, and queer lassitude, I fed ball after ball to gay, innocent, elegant Annabel (gleam of bracelet, pleated white skirt, black velvet hair band). With every word of persistent advice I would only augment Lo’s sullen fury. To our games, oddly enough, she preferred—at least, before we reached California—formless pat ball approximations—more ball hunting than actual play—with a wispy, weak, wonderfully pretty in an ange gauche way coeval. A helpful spectator, I would go up to that other child, and inhale her faint musky fragrance as I touched her forearm and held her knobby wrist, and push this way or that her cool thigh to show her the back-hand stance. In the meantime, Lo, bending forward, would let her sunny-brown curls hang forward as she stuck her racket, like a cripple’s stick, into the ground and emitted a tremendous ugh of disgust at my intrusion. I would leave them to their game and look on, comparing their bodies in motion, a silk scarf round my throat; this was in south Arizona, I think— and the days had a lazy lining of warmth, and awkward Lo would slash at the ball and miss it, and curse, and send a simulacrum of a serve into the net, and show the wet glistening young down of her armpit as she brandished her racket in despair, and her even more insipid partner would dutifully rush out after every ball, and retrieve none; but both were enjoying themselves beautifully, and in clear ringing tones kept the exact score of their ineptitudes all the time.

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  238 My brother and I played Monopoly with the boy across the street and the three brothers who lived one block east. We would begin the game on the morning of one day. It might end—after long breaks and arguments and reconciliations—two days later in someone else’s house. We made the rules up as we went along, to keep the game going as long as possible. 239 When we played Monopoly, we stretched out the game by doubling the money in the bank from other sets. We let players go into debt, ignored fines, allowed players to mortgage properties to each other, and forgave rents. Late in the afternoon on the last day of one of these games, we would lose the point of playing. We moved the metal tokens around the board and realized that no one could win under these rules. By consent, the game ended when the first player was finally called to dinner. [image "Image" file=Image00018.jpg] 240 Chevron’s real estate division decided to auction off the street names in its new subdivision as a fund raiser for the YMCA. Several city council members bid successfully for a street name of their own. One city official paid to have a street named after his daughter. I paid $200 to have a street named after my family. The street is a cul-de-sac at the border of the city. There are eighteen houses on the dead-end street. The houses there are more than double the size of mine. Behind them, beyond a high cinder-block wall, is a trailer park built on a landfill in the city of Long Beach. 241 As a boy, I made cities in the dirt behind my house. After school, and on summer afternoons, Billy C and I knelt on the grass at the edge of my mother’s garden, under the window to the room I shared with my brother. We played where my mother’s enormous rose bushes hung over our heads. We laid out roads, parking lots, and rows of roofless houses with pale dirt walls. Sometimes Billy and I uncovered a bone or half of the smooth white jaw of a cat buried beneath the roses. 242 Billy C and I made garages for the metal trucks my mother bought at the big Woolworth’s store in the shopping center. The rows of dirt garage walls, as high as the width of a boy’s palm, would harden in the two or three hours we played. Some of the trucks were cast from dies made before the war. The trucks preserved the aerodynamic designs of the 1930s. They were painted in primary colors—blue, yellow, and red. Sometimes we left a truck in the dirt, and it would disappear before we returned another day to dig. The lost trucks turned up, sometimes years later, in the garden. They had nearly no paint. Their wire axles were rusted, and the rubber tires were gone. 243 The dirt in my backyard is part sand and part clay.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “But I hope, count, you would not consent to live in the country always,” said Countess Nordston. “I don’t know; I have never tried for long. I experienced a queer feeling once,” he went on. “I never longed so for the country, Russian country, with bast shoes and peasants, as when I was spending a winter with my mother in Nice. Nice itself is dull enough, you know. And indeed, Naples and Sorrento are only pleasant for a short time. And it’s just there that Russia comes back to me most vividly, and especially the country. It’s as though....” He talked on, addressing both Kitty and Levin, turning his serene, friendly eyes from one to the other, and saying obviously just what came into his head. Noticing that Countess Nordston wanted to say something, he stopped short without finishing what he had begun, and listened attentively to her. The conversation did not flag for an instant, so that the princess, who always kept in reserve, in case a subject should be lacking, two heavy guns—the relative advantages of classical and of modern education, and universal military service—had not to move out either of them, while Countess Nordston had not a chance of chaffing Levin. Levin wanted to, and could not, take part in the general conversation; saying to himself every instant, “Now go,” he still did not go, as though waiting for something. The conversation fell upon table-turning and spirits, and Countess Nordston, who believed in spiritualism, began to describe the marvels she had seen. “Ah, countess, you really must take me, for pity’s sake do take me to see them! I have never seen anything extraordinary, though I am always on the lookout for it everywhere,” said Vronsky, smiling. “Very well, next Saturday,” answered Countess Nordston. “But you, Konstantin Dmitrievitch, do you believe in it?” she asked Levin. “Why do you ask me? You know what I shall say.” “But I want to hear your opinion.” “My opinion,” answered Levin, “is only that this table-turning simply proves that educated society—so called—is no higher than the peasants. They believe in the evil eye, and in witchcraft and omens, while we....” “Oh, then you don’t believe in it?” “I can’t believe in it, countess.” “But if I’ve seen it myself?” “The peasant women too tell us they have seen goblins.” “Then you think I tell a lie?” And she laughed a mirthless laugh. “Oh, no, Masha, Konstantin Dmitrievitch said he could not believe in it,” said Kitty, blushing for Levin, and Levin saw this, and, still more exasperated, would have answered, but Vronsky with his bright frank smile rushed to the support of the conversation, which was threatening to become disagreeable. “You do not admit the conceivability at all?” he queried. “But why not? We admit the existence of electricity, of which we know nothing. Why should there not be some new force, still unknown to us, which....”

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  232 Marshall Boyar considered naming streets Stevenson and Adlai. But after Eisenhower’s election victory in 1952, Boyar changed his mind. 233 Robbie Bomberry’s daughter, who lives in Illinois, wrote city hall with the news of her father’s death. She wanted to remind city officials that a street had been named after her father, and that he had been a hero. 234 There are eighteen people to whom the city no longer sends any mail. Mr. L is one of them. For years, Mr. L sent back everything the city sent him. The mail was unopened, and stamped with a bewildering number of biblical and political exhortations. Mr. L thinks the country’s currency is illegal, that income taxes need not be paid, and that conspiracies of many kinds dictate the doings of government. Mr. L doesn’t like the city attorney, whose ordinances compel Mr. L to pay for weekly trash collection. Mr. L doesn’t want his trash collected by the city. He says he takes it to the dump himself. He says he shouldn’t have to pay for a service he doesn’t use. Under state law, the city forces Mr. L to pay his trash bill through his property tax, which Mr. L does pay, or he would lose his house. Mr. L has a daughter. She teaches an aerobics class for women, offered through the city’s recreation department. The city offers hundreds of classes each year. The part-time instructors are paid by class registration fees. The aerobics class is taught at a new community facility, built with state and federal park grants and named in honor of John S. Todd, the city attorney and one of the city’s original incorporators. It’s a popular class. 235 I remember exactly how my father drove. He was a very good driver. Los Angeles freeways were designed for my father’s kind of driving. He was never impatient or uncontrolled. He never had an accident or received a ticket. We drove everywhere. 236 Every family speaks its own language. The language I learned had the flavor of big cities in it. Sometimes my mother, brother, and I ate lunch at the counter in the Woolworth’s in the shopping center. Sometimes the waitress would comment on the way we spoke, and ask us if we were English. 237 I live on Graywood Avenue. The next street west is Hazelbrook. The first street east is Faculty. These three streets, with about 140 houses, are bounded by Hedda Street and South Street. All of my friends came from within the rectangle of these three blocks that I could reach without crossing at an intersection. From age six to thirteen, I spent part of nearly every day and nearly all summer in the company of my brother and other boys who lived in houses like mine. The character of those seven years is what makes a suburban childhood seem like an entire life.

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  249 The cities Billy C and I built in my mother’s garden all ended in the same way. We took my father’s garden hose and laid it some feet away from the rows of houses and garages. One of us turned the water on so that it barely flowed. In a few minutes, the water would pool at one end of the main street in our dirt city. A little later, water would pour through the doorways and fill up the rooms. The mud walls melted. 250 My city is concerned about disaster. County and state agencies evaluated their response to the Northridge earthquake and warned city officials that communities like mine will be on their own for three days following a major earthquake. Police and fire departments will be overwhelmed. The Red Cross and National Guard will concentrate in urban areas, not in these neighborhoods of small houses. In preparation, the city is trying to get residents to change their habits. I’ve written articles for the Chamber of Commerce newspaper urging residents to keep a three-day supply of food and water at home and to carry clothing and simple camping equipment in their car. I’ve taped educational programs on earthquake preparedness for the city’s cable channel. I once interviewed Dr. Kate Hutton, a seismologist at the California Institute of Technology, about the risks of being in one of these stucco and chicken-wire houses during a major earthquake. Dr. Hutton talked about houses sliding off their foundations and the dangers of flying glass and falling bookshelves. Apart from that, she said, these houses were about the safest place you could be. 251 These postwar houses were built so lightly that they might even shelter us in a major earthquake. The burden of our habits may do the same. I avoided most of my father’s Catholicism, but I still live here. 252 Sometimes I think the only real forces here are circumstance and grace. 253 The danger here during a major earthquake is liquefaction. In a wet year, the water table is only three or four feet from the ground’s surface in some parts of the city where I live. Prolonged shaking during an earthquake causes the loose, alluvial soil to shift, letting the water wick upward. In less than a minute, solid ground flows under the weight of the structures built on it. Tall buildings sink. Horizontal buildings crack and fall apart. Square, frame houses may slide off their foundations. In the 1960s, California disaster planners recognized this and mapped the region’s liquefaction zones. On the maps of my city, the areas of potential liquefaction are the beds of buried rivers. 254 Fifty feet beneath my house is the Bellflower aquiclude, a thick layer of clay that traps the Artesia aquifer under it. The Artesia aquifer is a fifty-foot-thick layer of sand and gravel that was once a river bed. It still is, in a way.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “No, my dear, for me there are no balls now where one enjoys oneself,” said Anna, and Kitty detected in her eyes that mysterious world which was not open to her. “For me there are some less dull and tiresome.” “How can _you_ be dull at a ball?” “Why should not _I_ be dull at a ball?” inquired Anna. Kitty perceived that Anna knew what answer would follow. “Because you always look nicer than anyone.” Anna had the faculty of blushing. She blushed a little, and said: “In the first place it’s never so; and secondly, if it were, what difference would it make to me?” “Are you coming to this ball?” asked Kitty. “I imagine it won’t be possible to avoid going. Here, take it,” she said to Tanya, who was pulling the loosely-fitting ring off her white, slender-tipped finger. “I shall be so glad if you go. I should so like to see you at a ball.” “Anyway, if I do go, I shall comfort myself with the thought that it’s a pleasure to you ... Grisha, don’t pull my hair. It’s untidy enough without that,” she said, putting up a straying lock, which Grisha had been playing with. “I imagine you at the ball in lilac.” “And why in lilac precisely?” asked Anna, smiling. “Now, children, run along, run along. Do you hear? Miss Hoole is calling you to tea,” she said, tearing the children from her, and sending them off to the dining-room. “I know why you press me to come to the ball. You expect a great deal of this ball, and you want everyone to be there to take part in it.” “How do you know? Yes.” “Oh! what a happy time you are at,” pursued Anna. “I remember, and I know that blue haze like the mist on the mountains in Switzerland. That mist which covers everything in that blissful time when childhood is just ending, and out of that vast circle, happy and gay, there is a path growing narrower and narrower, and it is delightful and alarming to enter the ballroom, bright and splendid as it is.... Who has not been through it?” Kitty smiled without speaking. “But how did she go through it? How I should like to know all her love story!” thought Kitty, recalling the unromantic appearance of Alexey Alexandrovitch, her husband. “I know something. Stiva told me, and I congratulate you. I liked him so much,” Anna continued. “I met Vronsky at the railway station.” “Oh, was he there?” asked Kitty, blushing. “What was it Stiva told you?” “Stiva gossiped about it all. And I should be so glad ... I traveled yesterday with Vronsky’s mother,” she went on; “and his mother talked without a pause of him, he’s her favorite. I know mothers are partial, but....” “What did his mother tell you?”