Pride

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 113 of 174 · 20 per page

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  “Exactly,” Caleb said. “And it’s like, ‘I know you have your phone right there! We all always have our phones on us. It’s not like you didn’t see the Snapchat.’ So then you’re left staring at it waiting for them to reply.” “Plus, you don’t know what anything means,” Ellie added. “There’s no inflection. Like, if someone texts you, ‘Thanks for a great night.’ That could mean: ‘I want it to happen again,’ or it could be closing it off. You just don’t know.” “What about when a guy slides into your DMs on Instagram?” said LeeAnn. “That’s totally different than a text,” Caleb said. “A DM is more like you know why you’re talking. You’re going to hook up. DMs are the most casual. Anyone can DM you. If you’re really interested in a girl, you’ll text. Maybe you’ll Snap.” Nearly every interview I’ve ever conducted on hookup culture, like this one, quickly devolved into a discussion of its drawbacks. Why, I asked the group, do you continue to participate? “Well, it is a lot easier,” Ellie said. “And it can be fun.” “And it’s still sex,” Caleb added. “Even bad sex is still sex.” The Feminist Fuckboy “I do believe, though, that you can have a casual sexual lifestyle and also be respectful and loving.” Wyatt was entering his junior year at a small liberal arts college on the East Coast that, despite having no Greek life, was known for its entrenched hookup scene. In part, that was due to a dearth of men on what was formerly an all-women’s campus: competition for male attention was fierce. Added to that, Wyatt was a rare heterosexual male dance major and handsome—wavy chestnut hair, sculpted features, a well-muscled body that he was only too happy to flaunt at parties, removing his shirt at the least provocation. He pretty much had his pick of partners on campus, and over the past year, he had taken full advantage of that. “At my school, they call it ‘Golden Dick Syndrome,’” he said. “There is this inherent godliness that straight men tend to feel here, where it’s just like, ‘Everybody wants me.’ It’s just the way it is. Instead of one girl across the party that you know is interested in you, imagine there are six. It can actually feel kind of weird.” Wyatt had not been popular when he was younger. As he said, “Most people who go to colleges like mine weren’t exactly the kings of their high schools, you know?” He was more the guy who stayed home on Saturday nights playing Grand Theft Auto and listening to hip-hop. “I’m a big Kanye defender,” he said. “For how hypermasculine he is, he actually strips it down more than most big stars. He talks about what a jerk he is and how he’s a sex addict and has depression and anxiety. In the end, I think he’s a lot more up-front than most men.”

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  “I don’t want to feel this way because society tells me to feel this way. I want to judge for myself whether I did something that I should feel bad about. And so I really tried to look at it from a historical perspective. From the cave etchings and drawings and the history of erotic expression and art. Is it bad? And what about modern-day pornography? Is this something bad? Have I done something really terrible? Did I harm my sisters in the movement? “I did come to the conclusion that there really is nothing wrong with performing sexually for other people to enjoy viewing, that it has been done historically, that humans have always been very curious to look at each other and look at sexual, erotic situations. Whether it’s art or just clumsy drawings, I think it’s just human nature.” That didn’t mean that she was going to continue the pornographic tradition of portraying women as insatiable objects who can never get enough penetration. She had seen which way the wind was blowing, and the same demand that drove the successful launch of the VCR allowed her to continue to make erotic films, and to find a market for products that did not make her feel ashamed. This was the third revolution that pornography sparked: it helped drive a new technology that allowed people, first within the adult industry and then beyond, gain greater control and freedom over the media they produced and consumed. This revolution happened independent of the format war, which was settled for reasons that are far from the stuff of legends. “In the early 1980s, Beta’s format began to dwindle as far as market share,” Ray Glasser told me. “The rest of the world got VHS because the machines were cheaper, the tapes were cheaper, they ran longer than Beta, and all their friends got VHS.” Both camps improved their product—longer tapes, better picture and sound, more features, lower prices. But JVC’s VHS simply hit the right technological notes at the right time. And once the balance started to tip toward VHS, there was no turning back. Video stores had every interest in settling the matter quickly so that they would no longer have to stock copies of every movie and TV show in both formats, and stock two kinds of players for rental. “The video stores started carrying fewer and fewer titles in Beta and more and more in VHS,” said Glasser. “There was a time when video stores had a small Beta room, and the rest of the store was VHS. Then a couple of shelves were devoted to Beta, then Beta vanished from the video stores entirely.” It was as simple as that. No conspiracy of pornographers, no debilitating prohibition from Sony. Just the right features at the right time to have the format war go JVC’s way.

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  Cable TV in late ’76 was nothing. [Manhattan Cable] had about eighty thousand subscribers, which is nothing in New York City, it was nothing. There had been sex shows on already, but they were very poor sex shows, I mean ugly girls. I have one clip of one of the girls who was on around the time. She is so bad you would probably throw up. But her attitude was, “Look at me, I’m nude, you have a chance to see my wonderful cellulite-ridden nude body.” So basically it was low-lifes or anyone desperate enough to look at very ugly women taking their clothes off, so it did not make a great impact on the technology. They looked at the girls, rolled over and went to bed and they never thought about it. What I had to do was, now again this is hard for you to understand because you’re in a normal place, New York women are incredibly beautiful, incredibly successful and incredibly cold, all right? They’re not friendly at all. Probably because so many jerky guys approach them. So I found I needed both hands. No girl ever willingly took her bra off for me. That never happened, so I had to do it. All the while the girl was protesting, “I don’t want to do this,” “It’s not what I want to do,” “Hey, take your hands off my bra,” “Hey, you’re pulling my panties down” and all this. How could you hold the video camera at the same time you got a reluctant girl in a hallway for fifteen minutes who’s probably never going to come back, but you gotta do what you gotta do for fifteen minutes? So, at that time, as you know, cameras were cumbersome, you had a big camera and a big recorder with a cable, you also had lights that you had to carry, and the sound wasn’t very good, so the parabolic, as you probably know, is really for sound. I had to rig up this backpack so I wouldn’t have to hold anything. I could just set the camera to run and the parabolic would just pick up the sound. And then in a very short time, we have a lot of Hispanics here in New York, and they saw the backpack and they would say, “Hey, jou know jou look like an astronaut, are jou an astronaut?” So I said wait a minute, I gotta make up a silver suit, cause they’re calling me astronaut. So I did. And the whole thing fell into place, as you know. That’s where Bill Murray walked up to me on the street and he said, “Where do you think I got the idea for Ghostbusters? Why do you think they wear silver suits and backpacks? You helped us make $200 million. Thanks a lot, George, see you around.” I haven’t seen him since then.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I stared, then felt my cheeks grow red; but he only meant, of course, the act: ‘I hear you’re working the halls together; and are quite a pair, by all accounts.’Now I smiled. ‘How did you find that out? I am very quiet about it with my family.’‘I read the Era, don’t I? “Kitty Butler and Nan King”. I know a stage-name when I see one ...’I laughed, ‘Oh, isn’t it funny, Tony? Isn’t it just the most marvellous thing? We are in Cinderella at the minute, at the Brit. Kitty’s the Prince, and I’m Dandini. I have to speak, sing, dance, slap my thigh, the works, in velvet breeches. And the crowd go mad for it!’He smiled at my pleasure - it was lovely to be allowed to be pleased with myself, at last! - then shook his head. ‘Your folks, from what I’ve heard them say, don’t know the half of it. Why don’t you have them up to see you on the stage? Why the big secret?’I shrugged, then hesitated; then, ‘Alice doesn’t care for Kitty ...’ I said.‘And you and Kitty: you’re still in her pocket? You’re still struck with her like you always was?’ I nodded. He sniffed. ‘Then, she’s a lucky girl ...’He seemed only to be flirting again; but I had the queerest impression, too, that he knew more than he was letting on - and didn’t care a fig about it. I answered, ‘I’m the lucky one,’ and held his gaze.He tapped with his pen again upon his blotter. ‘Maybe.’ Then he winked.I stayed at the Palace until it became rather obvious that Tony had other business to get on with, then took my leave of him. Once outside, I stood again before the foyer doors, reluctant to resign the reek of beer and grease-paint and confront the altogether different scents of Whitstable, our Parlour and our home. It had been good to talk of Kitty - so good that, seated at the supper-table later, between silent Alice and nasty Rhoda with her tiny, flashing sapphire, I missed her all the more. I was due to spend another day with them, but now I thought I could not face it. I said, as we started on our puddings, that I had changed my mind and would take the morning, rather than the evening train tomorrow - that I had remembered things that I must do at the theatre, that I shouldn’t put off till Thursday.They didn’t seem surprised, though Father said it was a shame.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Chapter 6I Know I’m a Good Guy, But . . .On a foggy summer morning, I met Liam, eighteen, for breakfast at a San Francisco café. He had just graduated high school and was heading to college in North Carolina. He was a slender, studious-looking boy with dark hair and oversize plastic glasses—if it weren’t for the trail of hickeys on his neck, a souvenir from the previous night’s hookup, I would never have pegged him as a player. Liam described himself as “athletic but not varsity material.” That’s why, he figured, his surest route to respect once he got to high school was to hook up with as many girls as possible. “There was a hierarchy among guys at my school,” he explained, “and it was completely based on sports, looks, who you’re friends with, and your sex life—and on those things alone. Personality? Not really. Maybe if you’re a funny guy, then you’re ‘the funny guy,’ whatever. So bragging about how many girls I’d hooked up with, joking about it, was definitely a way to gain status. And I did that, I admit it.” When we met, his “body count” was fifty-one. “I only had sex with four of them, though,” he said. “Mostly it was making out. But I did go further than that with a lot. And that got me so much status in every aspect of my life. Doing it was physically pleasurable, too, of course, but it was more about buying into the general culture. It was, absolutely, a competition with other guys.” The secret to Liam’s success, he said, was all about confidence, or at least the appearance of it. “Even in places like the Bay Area, which is super liberal, super feminist, super all about female empowerment, when it gets down to business, there’s still the expectation that the guy will make the first move or nothing is going to happen. It’s fine some of the time, but I think what’s not really talked about is that guys get really nervous, too, and being intimate with someone can be nerve-racking for both parties. So the reality is that confidence is mostly artificial: it’s just about telling yourself, ‘I’m confident,’ and acting on that. It’s not necessarily actual confidence.”

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Sami. I grew up as the mixed-race child of a white single mother in a small, Catholic town in Kentucky. I went to twelve years of Catholic school. This shaped a lot of who I am today, growing up around no people of color, no out queer people, no women of color with bodies shaped like mine—I struggled with my racial and sexual identities as well as with eating disorders growing up, but I was blessed to have a mother who knew I was different and wanted to support my interests in reading and writing. One summer, she signed me up for a creative writing camp at a nonprofit in Cincinnati called Young Women Writing for (a) Change. In some ways, the origins of who I am today started there. I was already a writer, but there I discovered feminism, deep listening, safe space, and authentic voice. I attended camps throughout high school and assisted with the girls’ camps. Later, in college, I continued to teach there, and I led writing circles inspired by that work during graduate school as well. Growing up, though, I always had this sense that some other way of living was possible, so even though I tried to envision a life like those around me, I was pretty sure I was going to leave. I came out in college, developed my relationship to Blackness, engaged in activism, and encountered disability studies. This next stage shaped my academic path to an MFA in poetry and a PhD in gender studies with a focus on Black feminism and disability studies. But the most current version of me has been vastly shaped by my graduate school experiences with queer community, BDSM, and polyamory. Through these spaces I have come to embrace myself as a fat Black queer sexual being whose desires and politics can exist happily alongside one another. amb. We’re gonna get to the BDSM and polyamory, but I am curious about what made you tune into the realm of disability? You mention encountering disability studies, and I am curious about why it particularly sparked your interest.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  But some women had refused to accept this exclusion, had set up colleges of their own, and the university had eventually accepted them. The five women’s colleges of Oxford had been a Trojan horse, smuggling the weaker sex into the male preserve of academia, but now, some believed, their day was over. All the colleges should be open to both sexes. Men should be allowed to come to St. Anne’s and women should be admitted to the prestigious male colleges of Magdalene and Balliol. The present arrangements did not penalize women educationally. All students attended exactly the same lectures and took the same examinations. Men and women competed against one another on equal terms. The college could arrange for us to study with any tutor of our choice. Fellows of St. John’s and Merton had taught me, for example, and the St. Anne’s fellows, especially in the English department, which had an exceptional reputation, tutored male students. In fact, the women’s colleges often had a higher rate of academic success; because there were fewer places for women, the standard of those selected at the entrance examinations tended to be higher. During my years at Oxford, St. Anne’s regularly came out on top of the Norrington Scale, the league table that charted the performance of undergraduates in the final examinations. By the 1960s, therefore, women had proved that they were quite capable of holding their own in the university. So to many, mixed-sex colleges seemed the next logical step. But that might take time. Women, for example, would require better bathroom facilities than the gruesome arrangements in the men’s colleges. But as a preliminary, students all over the university were demanding that the gate hours be abolished. We all had to be in college by midnight, and visitors were obliged to write their names in a book at the porter’s lodge and sign out before the gates were closed. Of course, people disregarded these gate hours. There were several places where it was very easy to climb over the college wall; everybody knew this and most turned a blind eye. If somebody were caught, he or she would suffer a mild reprimand and pay a small fine. But in these heady days of revolution, these rules seemed absurd to the more radical, and in my new official capacity, I had to attend heated meetings in which students and dons argued about them. As far as I was concerned, the question was wholly academic. There was no man clamoring to spend the night in my small college room, and the possibility of my climbing over the college wall after a love tryst was about as remote as my scaling the Great Wall of China. Moreover, until a few weeks before, I had been a very visible representative of an institution that condemned all sex outside marriage as gravely sinful.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Am I an alienated person? Some who have read this far might say so—some might say that a man who comes onto an unknown woman’s ecstatically squinting orgasm-face without her being aware of it is definitely an alienated person—or worse. And temps are prima facie alienated by virtue of their vocational rootlessness. But I don’t see that nasal, sociological-sounding word applying in any useful way to me. I get along well with people. I haven’t perhaps done such a good job of establishing my sanity in this sketch of my life, since I have had to concentrate on the episodes of temporal distortion that make my experience unique, and they almost always embrace the controlled mental disorder known as sexual arousal, but I’m not by any means a crazy person. I don’t have a flat affect. I’m friendly and likable. I go out on the occasional date. I have several male friends, even. I have had long-term relationships with three women, Rhody being the most recent. The only major difference between me and any number of residents of the greater Boston area is that I have been able to invent and make use of several sorts of chronoclutch. No, there is a difference, I think: I’m arrogant enough to believe, at least to believe sometimes, that the reason that I have been chosen over any other contemporary human to receive and develop this chronanistic ability (if there is indeed some supernatural temp agency doing the choosing) is maybe that I can be trusted with it—trusted at least not to do any real harm. Morals depend in part on consequence; consequence on time; and since my amoralities flourish and expire entirely in momentary pico-states of timeless inconsequence, the usual rules just don’t have the same prohibitive force. Nobody else should be entitled to take off women’s clothes at will, at the snap of a finger or the flip of a switch, but I think I should be, because, for one thing, my curiosity has more love and tolerance in it than other men’s does. Before Rhody broke up with me, she once told me that the attraction to having an affair with a painter (a figurative painter, she meant) was the possibility that he would really see her and know all that was to be known about the shape of her body—when she undressed for him there would be a thrilling completeness to her undressing. To nobody else would her physical self mean as much as it meant to his eye, and so her own nudity would feel sexier with him than with anyone else. I’m not a painter, I’m only a temp and an occasional creative rotter, and yet I do contend that when I strip a passing woman on the street because her face or body calls out to me, I see more in her than others do. Of course there is plenty of self-deception possible here. But I can truthfully say that I’m never disappointed, never—I’m never able to feel anything but love and gratitude toward a woman when I secretly take off her clothes. Say there is a low cesarean scar that nobody but her husband has seen at close range. Say there is some part of her body that I will see that she isn’t very proud of. In seeing it, I feel the goodness in me blossom—I know that she would be embarrassed about my having seen this feature, whatever it is, and I turn the knowledge of her imputed embarrassment into an upwelling of affection for her and her vulnerabilities.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  People are somewhat puzzled by me when I first show up at their office—What is this unyoung man, this thirty-five-year-old man, doing temping? Maybe he has a criminal past, or maybe he’s lost a decade to drugs, or: Maybe He’s an Artist? But after a day or two, they adjust, since I am a fairly efficient and good-natured typist, familiar with most of the commonly used kinds of software (and some of the forgotten kinds too, like nroff, Lanier, and NBI, and the good old dedicated DEC systems with the gold key), and I am unusually good at reading difficult handwriting and supplying punctuation for dictators who in their creative excitement forget. Once in a great while I use my Fold-powers to amaze everyone with my apparent typing speed, transcribing a two-hour tape in one hour and that kind of thing. But I’m careful not to amaze too often and become a temp legend, since this is my great secret and I don’t want to imperil it—this is the one thing that makes my life worth living. When some of the more intelligent people in a given office ask little probingly polite questions to try to figure me out, I often lie and tell them that I’m a writer. It is almost funny to see how relieved they are to have a way of explaining my lowly work status to themselves. Nor is it so much of a lie, because if I had not wasted so much of my life waiting for the next Fermata-phase to come along I would very likely have written some sort of a book by now. And I have written a few shorter things.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  There—that was a typical early Drop. I know that I could probably make much better use of my gift than I do. For me it is just a sexual aid. Others might put it to fuller avaricious or intellectual use: government secrets, technological espionage, etc. Surely over the centuries a few individuals have developed this ability and used it to consolidate power or to liquidate enemies. J. S. Bach, for instance, could not have cranked out a cantata a week without some sort of temporal trickery: he was probably seventy-five when he died, not sixty-five, but he had borrowed the last decade of his life and used it up piecemeal in earlier Drops. I was reading Cardano’s autobiography not long ago, to see how one is supposed to write one’s autobiography (it’s harder than I thought!), and I had a suspicion at one point that he had discovered a way into the Fold, but was not going to reveal that fact to us. Something he said about preferring solitude is what alerted me. He said, “I question the right of anyone to waste our time. The wasting of time is an abomination.” In my place, some would toggle time and cheat on their Ph.D. orals or simply take money from open cash registers. Cheating and stealing don’t tempt me, though.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  What is obedience?” I was astonished at myself, because we were never supposed to challenge our superiors in this way, especially while we were being reprimanded. My fellow novices were gazing at me in dismay, clearly waiting for a thunderous riposte. But Mother Walter looked shocked, and for a moment was quite at a loss for words. She soon recovered herself, though the scolding she gave me was not up to her usual standard of scathing invective. But during those few seconds, while she fumbled for a suitable response, I could almost see an unwelcome insight breaking the surface of her mind, and forcing her to question the wisdom of her methods of training in a way that, perhaps, she had never done before. Despite my difficulties, I was allowed to make five-year vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience on August 25, 1965. It was a triumphant day. I felt that, like the heroes of myth, I had come through an ordeal and that life could only get better. I would soon get over the strains and tension that had made my life so miserable. Very quickly now, I would become mature and holy, and in five years’ time, if all went well, I would take the final vows that would commit me to the society for life. And at first, things did go well. After the noviceship, we left the mother house in Sussex and went to London for two further years of training, known as the scholasticate. During the noviceship, we had concentrated on our spiritual lives. We had spent most of the time learning about prayer and the meaning of our rule. Ironically, considering my aversion to domesticity, we also spent our days doing simple manual tasks, though in the second year we had been permitted to read a little theology. In the scholasticate, however, we began our professional training. Since our order was dedicated to the education of Catholic girls, most of us were destined to become teachers in one of the society’s many schools. I had already completed the matriculation requirements for college, and it was decided that I should now prepare for the competitive entrance examinations to Oxford University, where the order had been sending nuns ever since women had been allowed to take degrees. For the next twelve months I attended classes and tutorials at a crammer near Marble Arch. My subject was to be English literature. That meant that I had to take two three-hour papers in literature, one paper in English language and philology, two translation papers—one in Latin and the other in French—and a paper on topics of general interest. I loved it. I am a natural student and like nothing better than immersing myself in a pile of books.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Thread transfer proceeded with increasing speed. The little spool wobbled wildly as it was stripped of its cotton integument. I grabbed the spool and held it tightly, so that the thread being drawn into the machine had to snap—at that instant of rupture I expected time to be all mine. But time wasn’t mine even then; I still, it seemed, wasn’t connected intimately enough to the pure state of spin. As so often happens, success finally came through the convergence of several independent paths of research. There was a long rope swing in our back yard. I had been climbing this swing a little higher every day, on the hunch that something unusual might happen when I was able to make it all the way to the knot at the top, which was perhaps thirty feet off the ground. The rope was smooth where we normally held it to swing (sitting on a rolled-up remnant of industrial carpeting tied in place and launching ourselves from a wooden refrigerator crate), but the higher I climbed, the rougher its hempen texture became. Every day I got a little stronger, in my stomach muscles as well as my arms, and I also got better at relieving some of the burden on my arms by winding the rope around one leg and clamping it between the top of one sneaker and the sole of the other. My hands burned more each time. I opened and closed my fists when I was safely back on the ground to make the pain inside them go away. After a week and a half, I finally reached the knot at the top and slapped the finely cracked bark on the load-bearing bough, amazed and even somewhat terrified that I had been able to work my way up so high. I expected, after that conquering slap, to return to earth with new powers, but in fact I had no new powers: I only had fourteen or fifteen excellent oval calluses on my fingers, of which I was very proud. In private I pushed at these calluses while I was thinking. One weekend during this period my father took me to the hardware store. A man we called the Needle Man was in the parking lot. The Needle Man was deaf and dumb; he went around the city selling packets of sewing needles for a living. He was a short, toothless person of about sixty who always wore a baseball cap; there was something wrong with one of his knees, which bent sideways when he put his weight on it. He approached us and went into his silent sales pitch: he flashed the packet of needles, shrugged, looked away, flashed the packet of needles again, licked his thumb and tested the wind direction, smiled, gummed, shrugged, looked away, looked at us. My father gave him a dollar for the needles.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  [image file=image_rsrc1BH.jpg] 2I WAS BORN WITH A KNOT IN MY UMBILICAL CORD, A SIMPLE pretzel knot. I doubt that this fact of my birth has anything to do with my later chronanisms, but I will put it down here just in case it does. I am proud of having set immediately to work art-nouveauing the functional furnishings of my intrauterine deanery. Somehow I was able to form a loop and then swim right through it. I tied a knot in myself. Like many child prodigies, however, I fizzled early. The Fermata, first unfolding itself for me in fourth grade, has been a lifelong distraction. I have wanted to keep it a secret, and as a result it has swallowed up large chunks of my personality. But I hope that will change now.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Some people in my life were still involved in religion. Jacob continued to attend Mass, because a member of the Blackfriars congregation had volunteered to take him. And then there was my sister, Lindsey. She had not stayed long in Canada. The man she had pursued had been a disappointment, and she hated the long winters. So she had married an Englishman whom she had met in Winnipeg and had driven all the way to California with him and their two Siamese cats. She had also become a Buddhist of the Nichiren school. I had no idea what that involved, but apparently it did not require her to wear a yellow robe or become a vegetarian. She chanted a mantra for about an hour each day, my mother told me. I found it hard to imagine this. Lindsey and I seemed to have changed places. “I don’t know what it is with this family and religion,” my long-suffering mother said in mock bewilderment. “Where did I go wrong?” Well, at least she didn’t have to worry about my religious obsessions anymore. My involvement with God was well and truly over. Pleased with myself, and with a mounting sense of excitement, I patted the bulky parcel containing three copies of my thesis, duly typed and bound in important-looking black covers with gilt lettering. It was a very satisfying sight. It had not been easy, but I had managed to complete this task. Against the odds, I had persevered, had shaped an idea and argued it through—like any other doctoral student. During these last few months, all the different themes had come together and fallen elegantly into place, almost of their own volition. My supervisor was pleased, and two professors whom I had consulted were impressed. Another, it was true, had been extremely rude about it, but my supervisor assured me that he did not approve of the close linguistic study of literature that I had attempted. Because he was known to have this bias, he would not be my examiner. So it all seemed hopeful. Here at least there had been no disaster. My mind still boiled with visions and paralyzing panic attacks, but this piece of sustained work was a guarantee of its ultimate integrity. The thesis was my passport to a job and a career, an earnest of my survival in a world that had once seemed so impossibly alien. I watched the girl behind the post office grille slap on the stamps and the registration forms. Then she put the parcel in a pile at the end of the room, whence they would be conveyed to Oxford.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Because I had no experience, Joel had feared that this could not work, but in fact, I sailed through it all precisely because I thought that this was how it was always done; and after a slightly shaky start beside the statue of Artemis in the Israel Museum, we zipped through the schedule at top speed, everybody looking progressively more cheerful until, by the end of the day, they were positively elated. Despite the pressures, it was the most relaxed filming I have ever done. There was no fussing with powder puffs, no tweaking of my hair, and no anguished discussion of my wardrobe—which last could have been because the crew had such a gloomy view of my appearance. “Karen! You are not a pretty girl,” Joel said on the first morning. “You have big teeth, and you walk clumsy. Okay! What we can do? We will just have to build the film around this!” Charming. But it was said with so little malice that it was impossible to take offense. Joel might have been remarking on the filmic qualities of a rock or a tree. And in any case, no one had time on this shoot to be upset by a chance remark. “Karen!” Joel also announced on the first day. “You are not in England now. Do not be a polite English lady. If you think I am unreasonable, tell me to get lost, to shut up—whatever you like!” For me, this was a novel invitation, and the first time I took Joel up on his offer, I was astonished at myself. We had just arrived in Caesarea, in the late afternoon, after a hectic day in Galilee. We had a considerable number of my pieces to shoot to camera before sunset, and tension was high. Joel was tired and anxious. When he snapped at me, rudely questioning the number of presentations we were about to do, I simply threw my script at him, told him to refresh his memory, and marched off to change my clothes behind a nearby rock. “I was proud of you! Really!” Joel told me afterward. “ ‘Refresh your memory’—it’s a good phrase, I must remember it.”

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I haven’t been punished for it, either. Dr. Jekyll, Faustus, Stravinsky’s soldat, the ballet dancer in The Red Shoes, Gollum, Wells’s invisible man and time traveler, Dr. Frankenstein, and a thousand more recent horror heroes, all master some quasi-supernatural power and are punished for it, worn out by it, destroyed by it. How false and wearisome this outcome is. Why should a life with some unusual metaphysical feature built into it inevitably end in unhappiness and early death? Why should all the heroes have some fatal flaw that causes them to overreach and hence to self-destruct? It’s too convenient. Even the two quieter (and surprisingly similar, one to another) literary artifacts that treat conditions of temporal halt which resemble my own private Foldouts—I am speaking here of Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and Borges’s “The Secret Miracle”—both punish their heroes severely: they end with military executions. I read these two stories in high school with a sense of deep personal dissatisfaction. Is this all a writer thinks a Fold-drop could be about? Putting off death at the last minute? Where are the supervenient hebephrenias? Where is the life? Where are the tits? In reality, I’m here to report, people very often get away with things. I have not been caught and imprisoned for what I have done; and besides, I am not Dr. Jekyll or Dr. Frankenstein and don’t deserve torments and agonies. Even if I publish this memoir as a book, and someone recognizes herself in it and prosecutes me for a relevant sex-offense (I have gone through the manuscript, by the way, and altered a few names and fudged a few dates to decrease the possibility of this happening, but it still might), my life will still seem to me to have been a good life and I will seem to myself to have been a man who wanted to do no harm and who in fact did no harm.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  What are we supposed to do? What is obedience?” I was astonished at myself, because we were never supposed to challenge our superiors in this way, especially while we were being reprimanded. My fellow novices were gazing at me in dismay, clearly waiting for a thunderous riposte. But Mother Walter looked shocked, and for a moment was quite at a loss for words. She soon recovered herself, though the scolding she gave me was not up to her usual standard of scathing invective. But during those few seconds, while she fumbled for a suitable response, I could almost see an unwelcome insight breaking the surface of her mind, and forcing her to question the wisdom of her methods of training in a way that, perhaps, she had never done before. Despite my difficulties, I was allowed to make five-year vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience on August 25, 1965. It was a triumphant day. I felt that, like the heroes of myth, I had come through an ordeal and that life could only get better. I would soon get over the strains and tension that had made my life so miserable. Very quickly now, I would become mature and holy, and in five years’ time, if all went well, I would take the final vows that would commit me to the society for life. And at first, things did go well. After the noviceship, we left the mother house in Sussex and went to London for two further years of training, known as the scholasticate. During the noviceship, we had concentrated on our spiritual lives. We had spent most of the time learning about prayer and the meaning of our rule. Ironically, considering my aversion to domesticity, we also spent our days doing simple manual tasks, though in the second year we had been permitted to read a little theology. In the scholasticate, however, we began our professional training. Since our order was dedicated to the education of Catholic girls, most of us were destined to become teachers in one of the society’s many schools. I had already completed the matriculation requirements for college, and it was decided that I should now prepare for the competitive entrance examinations to Oxford University, where the order had been sending nuns ever since women had been allowed to take degrees. For the next twelve months I attended classes and tutorials at a crammer near Marble Arch. My subject was to be English literature. That meant that I had to take two three-hour papers in literature, one paper in English language and philology, two translation papers—one in Latin and the other in French—and a paper on topics of general interest. I loved it.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Sensing a major discovery that would crown his new edition, Sparkling went back to Sewanee University, where Albedo’s manuscripts were kept, and looked again through some of the notebooks that the Master had kept during the time he was composing that particular movement of Map. Albedo’s later life had been decorated with odd incidents and minor scandals—there had been actual rumors of insanity. In the notebooks there were tantalizing annotations over certain motivic scraps—things like “Oh God, yes!” and “And here the Field develops greater potency.” Alan began to have the sense that Map had been more than a piece of piano music to Albedo; that it had constituted some sort of magic sonic recipe or spell for him. He also began strongly to suspect that the errors in the Yates and Boling edition had not been the fault of the publisher but had been intentional last-minute alterations on Albedo’s part, meant to disable whatever powers Map gave its performer, so that he, Albedo, could remain in sole possession of them. Finally, in one of the notebooks he came across a heavily erased part of a page under a large fermata and, with the help of a magnifying glass, was able to read the chord written there. It was an incomparably finer variant of the wrong-sounding fermata chord in Map. Deeply impressed with himself, Professor Sparkling took the last plane to Boston, sure now that he had a masterwork of twentieth-century music in his briefcase, polished, cleaned, restored, awakened from its dodecaphonic slumber by his profound scholarship and delicate musicological instinct. The next day was his day of giving piano lessons. Rhody was his very best student; and that morning she tore through the Tombeau de Couperin with such verve that, on a whim he didn’t himself quite understand, he turned toward her with an expression of great seriousness and seized her shoulders and told her that she alone must work up the new authorized version of Map. He made a copy of his own corrections for her so that she could incorporate them into her score. A week passed. Alan, gloating over his discoveries, played bits and pieces of Map for himself, and listened to it skimmingly in his head, but he devoted most of his time to finishing his article about it for The Quarterly of New Music. Since it was a formidably difficult work, he did not make any attempt to play the whole composition through, even sloppily, from beginning to end. That was what gifted students like Rhody were for, he felt.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Yet Mother Walter herself was undergoing a painful transition, watching the religious practices that she had known and loved for so long thrown aside. It must have been a period of great suffering for her. It would never, of course, have occurred to me at the time, but I now suspect that she was not very intelligent, and therefore was unable to understand the effect of some of her policies. I remember once that, toward the end of my noviceship, when she was savaging us for what she regarded as a failure in obedience, I suddenly cracked and told her that I no longer knew what obedience really was. “We seem to swing, like a pendulum, from one extreme to another,” I protested, “from one disorder to another! One day we will be told off for not obeying absolutely to the letter, however absurd the command may be, and the next day we’ll be in trouble because we did obey blindly instead of using our intelligence and showing initiative! What are we supposed to do? What is obedience?” I was astonished at myself, because we were never supposed to challenge our superiors in this way, especially while we were being reprimanded. My fellow novices were gazing at me in dismay, clearly waiting for a thunderous riposte. But Mother Walter looked shocked, and for a moment was quite at a loss for words. She soon recovered herself, though the scolding she gave me was not up to her usual standard of scathing invective. But during those few seconds, while she fumbled for a suitable response, I could almost see an unwelcome insight breaking the surface of her mind, and forcing her to question the wisdom of her methods of training in a way that, perhaps, she had never done before. Despite my difficulties, I was allowed to make five-year vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience on August 25, 1965. It was a triumphant day. I felt that, like the heroes of myth, I had come through an ordeal and that life could only get better. I would soon get over the strains and tension that had made my life so miserable. Very quickly now, I would become mature and holy, and in five years’ time, if all went well, I would take the final vows that would commit me to the society for life.

• From Wild (2012)

  I was entering. I was leaving. California streamed behind me like a long silk veil. I didn’t feel like a big fat idiot anymore. And I didn’t feel like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen. I felt fierce and humble and gathered up inside, like I was safe in this world too. PART FIVE BOX OF RAINI’m a slow walker, but I never walk back. ABRAHAM LINCOLN Tell me, what is it you plan to do With your one wild and precious life? MARY OLIVER, “The Summer Day” 15 BOX OF RAINI woke in the darkness on my second-to-last night in California to the sound of wind whipping the branches of the trees and the tap-tapping of rain against my tent. It had been so dry all summer long that I’d stopped putting the rain cover on, sleeping with only a wide pane of mesh between the sky and me. I scrambled barefoot into the dark to pull my rain cover over my tent, shivering, though it was early August. It had been in the nineties for weeks, sometimes even reaching a hundred, but with the wind and the rain, the weather had suddenly shifted. Back in my tent, I put on my fleece leggings and anorak, crawled into my sleeping bag, and zipped it all the way up to my chin, cinching its hood tight around my head. When I woke at six, the little thermometer on my backpack said that it was 37 degrees. I hiked along a high ridgeline in the rain, dressed in most of what I had. Each time I stopped for more than a few minutes, I grew so chilled that my teeth chattered comically until I walked on and began to sweat again. On clear days, my guidebook claimed, Oregon was in view to the north, but I couldn’t see anything for the thick fog that obscured anything beyond ten feet. I didn’t need to see Oregon. I could feel it, huge before me. I would walk its entire length if I made it all the way to the Bridge of the Gods. Who would I be if I did? Who would I be if I didn’t? Midmorning, Stacy appeared out of the mist, walking southbound on the trail. We’d hiked away from Seiad Valley together the day before, after spending a night with Rex and the couples. In the morning, Rex had caught a bus back to his real life, while the rest of us walked on, splitting up a few hours out. I was fairly certain I wouldn’t see the couples on the trail again, but Stacy and I had made plans to meet up in Ashland, where she was going to lay over for a few days waiting for her friend Dee to arrive before they began their hike through Oregon. Seeing her now startled me, as if she were part woman, part ghost.