Sadness

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Girls (2016)

  Her face still muted with sleep, her hair scraggled by the pillow—maybe she’d been trying to nap, too. “Do you want some tea?” I asked. It took her a moment to nod, like she’d forgotten who I was. —Sasha was quiet at the table. Studying her fingernails, sighing with cosmic boredom. I remembered this pose from my own adolescence—thrusting my jaw forward, staring out the car window like a wrongfully accused prisoner, all along desperately wishing that my mother would say something. Sasha was waiting for me to breach her reserve, to ask her questions, and I could feel her eyes on me while I poured the tea. It was nice to be watched, even suspiciously. I used the good cups and the buckwheat crackers I fanned along the saucers were only a little stale. I wanted to please her, I realized, setting the plate gently in front of her. The tea was too hot; there was a lull while we huddled over the cups, my face dampening in the thin vegetal steam. When I asked Sasha where she was from, she grimaced. “Concord,” she said. “It sucks.” “And you go to college with Julian?” “Julian’s not in college.” I wasn’t sure if this was information Dan knew. I tried to remember what I’d last heard. When Dan did mention his son, it was with performative resignation, playing the clueless dad. Any trouble reported with sitcom sighs: boys will be boys. Julian had been diagnosed with some behavioral disorder in high school, though Dan made it sound mild. “Have you guys been together long?” I asked. Sasha sipped at the tea. “A few months,” she said. Her face grew animate, like just talking about Julian was a source of sustenance. She must have already forgiven him for leaving her behind. Girls were good at coloring in those disappointing blank spots. I thought of the night before, her exaggerated moans. Poor Sasha. She probably believed that any sadness, any flicker of worry over Julian, was just a problem of logistics. Sadness at that age had the pleasing texture of imprisonment: you reared and sulked against the bonds of parents and school and age, the things that kept you from the certain happiness that awaited. When I was a sophomore in college, I had a boyfriend who spoke breathlessly of running away to Mexico—it didn’t occur to me that we could no longer run away from home. Nor did I imagine what we would be running to, beyond the vagueness of warm air and more frequent sex. And now I was older, and the wishful props of future selves had lost their comforts. I might always feel some form of this, a depression that did not lift but grew compact and familiar, a space occupied like the sad limbo of hotel rooms. “Listen,” I said, slotting into a parental role that was laughably unearned. “I hope Julian is being nice to you.” “Why wouldn’t he be nice?” she said. “He’s my boyfriend.

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  Hoch and spit they are both nasty words I think?" He said aloud: "It is a catarro de los pulmones." Carl talked to the doctor outside under the narrow arcade with rain bouncing up from the street against his pant legs, thinking how many people he tell it to, and the stairs, porches, lawns, driveways, corridors and streets of the world there in the doctor's eyes... stuffy German alcoves, butterfly trays to the ceiling, silent portentous smell of uremia seeping under the door, suburban lawns to sound of the water sprinkler, in calm jungle night under silent wings of the Anopheles mosquito.(Note: This is not a figure. Anopheles mosquitoes are silent.) Thickly carpeted, discreet nursing home in Kensington: stiff brocade chair and a cup of tea, the Swedish modern living room with water hyacinths in a yellow bowl -- outside the China blue Northern sky and drifting clouds, under bad watercolors of the dying medical student. "A schnaps I think Frau Underschnitt." The doctor was talking into a phone with a chess board in front of him. "Quite a severe lesion I think... of course without to see the Horoscope." He picks up the knight and then replaces it thoughtfully. "Yes... Both lungs... quite definitely." He replaces the receiver and turns to Carl. "I have observed these people show amazingly quick wound recovery, with low incidence of infection. It is always the lungs here... pneumonia and, of course, Old Faithful." The doctor grabs Carl's cock, leaping into the air with a coarse peasant guffaw. His European smile ignores the misbehavior of a child or an animal. He goes on smoothly in his eerily unaccented, disembodied English. "Our Old Faithful Bacillus Koch." The doctor clicks his heels and bows his head. "Otherwise they would multiply their stupid peasant asshole into the sea, is it not?" He shrieks, thrusting his face into Carl's. Carl retreats sideways with the grey wall of rain behind him. "Isn't there some place where he can be treated?" "I think there is some sort of sanitarium ," he drags out the word with ambiguous obscenity, "up at the District Capital. I will write for you the address." "Chemical therapy?" His voice falls flat and heavy in the damp air. "Who can say. They are all stupid peasants, and the worst of all peasants are the so-called educated. These people should not only be prevented from learning to read, but from learning to talk as well. No need to prevent them from thinking; nature has done that." "Here is the address ," the doctor whispered without moving his lips. He dropped a pill of paper into Carl's hand. His dirty fingers, shiny over the dirt, rested on Carl's sleeve. "There is the matter of my fee." Carl slipped him a wadded banknote... and the doctor faded into the grey twilight, seedy and furtive as an old junky. Carl saw Joselito in a big clean room full of light, with private bath and concrete balcony.

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints (2023)

  4. Perpetua and Felicity: Mothers and Martyrs Felicity’s World There were two male converts present at the time of the arrest and two enslaved people from Perpetua’s household, named Revocatus and Felicity. We know that Felicity belonged to the household of the Vibia, that she was a Christian catechumen along with others in the household, and that she was in her third trimester of pregnancy at the time of her arrest. These are sparse facts, but from them, we can extrapolate much about Felicity’s life and world. In an urban, well-off household, her duties might have entailed tending to the family’s clothes, child minding, food preparation, and general tidying and cleaning. We don’t know about her family or about the father of her child. It’s possible that Felicity was pregnant as a result of rape by either Perpetua’s father or brothers or an enslaved man. Roman histories make clear that men treated the sexual abuse of slaves as their right, and Roman wives turned a blind eye. We have records in which enslaved couples refer to each other as husband and wife. However, because their relationship was not legally formalized, no rights bound the family together; any one of them could be sold at any time. Felicity’s hopes of legal freedom were likely slim. Pregnancy only added to the difficulty of her situation. Christianity offered a welcome support and community for the enslaved and the poor, and it’s unsurprising that Felicity and Revocatus should have found solace in it. The Arrest, Trial, and Imprisonment By the time of Perpetua and Felicity’s arrest, the city of Carthage held half a million people, of whom perhaps 2,000 were Christians. There is a popular misconception that large numbers of Christians were persecuted under the Romans. The truth is that the Romans, while mildly prejudiced against Christians, simply didn’t care that much about them. But Christians did make for excellent scapegoats when the need arose, and any persecutions were local and relatively small-scale. 27

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Therefore Ivan renounced this second way as well, deciding to choose the third way—withdrawal into proud silence. He did not succeed in realizing it fully, and had willy-nilly to answer, though charily and glumly, a whole series of questions. Thus they got out of Ivan decidedly everything about his past life, down to when and how he had fallen ill with scarlet fever fifteen years ago. A whole page having been covered with writing about Ivan, it was turned over, and the woman in white went on to questions about Ivan’s relatives. Some sort of humdrum started: who died when and why, and whether he drank or had venereal disease, and more of the same. In conclusion he was asked to tell about yesterday’s events at the Patriarch’s Ponds, but they did not pester him too much, and were not surprised at the information about Pontius Pilate. Here the woman yielded Ivan up to the man, who went to work on him differently and no longer asked any questions. He took the temperature of Ivan’s body, counted his pulse, looked in Ivan’s eyes, directing some sort of lamp into them. Then the second woman came to the man’s assistance, and they pricked Ivan in the back with something, but not painfully, drew some signs on the skin of his chest with the handle of a little hammer, tapped his knees with the hammer, which made Ivan’s legs jump, pricked his finger and took his blood, pricked him inside his bent elbow, put some rubber bracelets on his arms . . . Ivan just smiled bitterly to himself and reflected on how stupidly and strangely it had all happened. Just think! He had wanted to warn them all of the danger threatening from the unknown consultant, had intended to catch him, and all he had achieved was to wind up in some mysterious room, telling all sorts of hogwash about Uncle Fyodor, who had done some hard drinking in Vologda. Insufferably stupid! Finally Ivan was released. He was escorted back to his room, where he was given a cup of coffee, two soft-boiled eggs and white bread with butter. Having eaten and drunk all that was offered him, Ivan decided to wait for whoever was chief of this institution, and from this chief to obtain both attention for himself and justice. And he did come, and very soon after Ivan’s breakfast. Unexpectedly, the door of Ivan’s room opened, and in came a lot of people in white coats. At their head walked a man of about forty-five, as carefully shaven as an actor, with pleasant but quite piercing eyes and courteous manners. The whole retinue showed him tokens of attention and respect, and his entrance therefore came out very solemn. ‘Like Pontius Pilate!’ thought Ivan.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  The writer nodded affably to the citizeness, in passing put some scrawl in the proffered ledger, and proceeded to the veranda. ‘Alas, not to us, not to us,’ Koroviev began sadly, ‘but to him will go that ice-cold mug of beer, which you and I, poor wanderers, so dreamed of together. Our position is woeful and difficult, and I don’t know what to do.’ Behemoth only spread his arms bitterly and put his cap on his round head, covered with thick hair very much resembling a cat’s fur. And at that moment a low but peremptory voice sounded over the head of the citizeness: ‘Let them pass, Sofya Pavlovna.’ 10 The citizeness with the ledger was amazed. Amidst the greenery of the trellis appeared the white tailcoated chest and wedge-shaped beard of the freebooter. He was looking affably at the two dubious ragamuffins and, moreover, even making inviting gestures to them. Archibald Archibaldovich’s authority was something seriously felt in the restaurant under his management, and Sofya Pavlovna obediently asked Koroviev: ‘What is your name?’ ‘Panaev,’ 11 he answered courteously. The citizeness wrote this name down and raised a questioning glance to Behemoth. ‘Skabichevsky,’ 12 the latter squeaked, for some reason pointing to his primus. Sofya Pavlovna wrote this down, too, and pushed the book towards the visitors for them to sign. Koroviev wrote ‘Skabichevsky’ next to the name ‘Panaev’, and Behemoth wrote ‘Panaev’ next to ‘Skabichevsky’. Archibald Archibaldovich, to the utter amazement of Sofya Pavlovna, smiled seductively, and led the guests to the best table, at the opposite end of the veranda, where the deepest shade lay, a table next to which the sun played merrily through one of the gaps in the trellis greenery, while Sofya Pavlovna, blinking with amazement, studied for a long time the strange entries made in the book by the unexpected visitors. Archibald Archibaldovich surprised the waiters no less than he had Sofya Pavlovna. He personally drew a chair back from the table, inviting Koroviev to sit down, winked to one, whispered something to the other, and the two waiters began bustling around the new guests, one of whom set his primus down on the floor next to his scuffed shoe. The old yellow-stained tablecloth immediately disappeared from the table, another shot up into the air, crackling with starch, white as a Bedouin’s burnous, and Archibald Archibaldovich was already whispering softly but very significantly, bending right to Koroviev’s ear: ‘What may I treat you to? I have a special little balyk 13 here . . . bagged at the architects’ congress . . .’ ‘Oh . . . just give us a bite of something . . . eh? . . .’

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints (2023)

  9. Margaret of Cortona: Midwife and Mystic Margaret returned to her father, but he was unwilling to have her in the house. The family’s business relationships and their other children’s future prospects would have been materially affected by what the neighbors saw as Margaret’s public disgrace. Margaret, bereft, sat beneath a fig tree in her father’s yard and wept. While the devil tempted her with an easy life as a concubine to more wealthy men, Margaret experienced an epiphany from God that directed her to go to Cortona and “surrender yourself to the obedience of my Friars Minor.” Margaret’s Penitent Life and Good Works Margaret entered Cortona in 1272 as a single mother without resources or shelter. Her early days in the city would not have been easy. Nor was her transition to the penitent life, despite her growing mysticism and personal connection with the divine. The Friars Minor were not convinced by her conversion. They were reluctant to become responsible for penitents like Margaret. Those who imitated religious clothing but still lived a secular life risked being mistaken for corrupt friars, bringing the order into disrepute. The Franciscan It took Margaret 3 years of ascetic living order had a and good works to win the Franciscans’ long history of grudging permission to even wear the discomfort with clothing of a penitent. During that time, she depended on two wealthy patronesses ministering to who granted Margaret and her son a small women. They room in a house they owned and arranged for her to work as a midwife. feared the scandal and gossip Margaret was filled with self-reproach for her former sinfulness and began to deny that closeness herself basic needs and comforts such as between male and adequate food and shelter. This denial seems to have extended even to her son, as female religious she often neglected him during this period. might provoke. 66

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  He didn’t go up to it. He sat sprawled on the bench.’ These questions were the investigator’s last. After them he got up, gave Ivanushka his hand, wished him a speedy recovery, and expressed the hope that he would soon be reading his poetry again. ‘No,’ Ivan quietly replied, ‘I won’t write any more poetry.’ The investigator smiled politely, allowed himself to express his certainty that, while the poet was presently in a state of some depression, it would soon pass. ‘No,’ Ivan responded, looking not at the investigator but into the distance, at the fading sky, ‘it will never pass. The poems I used to write were bad poems, and now I understand it.’ The investigator left Ivanushka, having obtained some quite important material. Following the thread of events from the end to the beginning, they finally succeeded in reaching the source from which all the events had come. The investigator had no doubt that these events began with the murder at the Patriarch’s Ponds. Of course, neither Ivanushka nor this checkered one had pushed the unfortunate chairman of Massolit under the tram-car; physically, so to speak, no one had contributed to his falling under the wheels. But the investigator was convinced that Berlioz had thrown himself under the tram-car (or tumbled under it) while hypnotized. Yes, there was already a lot of material, and it was known who had to be caught and where. But the thing was that it proved in no way possible to catch anyone. We must repeat, there undoubtedly was someone in the thrice-cursed apartment no. 50. Occasionally the apartment answered telephone calls, now in a rattling, now in a nasal voice, occasionally one of its windows was opened, what’s more, the sounds of a gramophone came from it. And yet each time it was visited, decidedly no one was found there. And it had already been visited more than once and at different times of day. And not only that, but they had gone through it with a net, checking every corner. The apartment had long been under suspicion. Guards were placed not just at the way to the courtyard through the gates, but at the back entrance as well. Not only that, but guards were placed on the roof by the chimneys. Yes, apartment no. 50 was acting up, and it was impossible to do anything about it. So the thing dragged on until midnight on Friday, when Baron Meigel, dressed in evening clothes and patent-leather shoes, solemnly proceeded into apartment no. 50 in the quality of a guest. One could hear the baron being let in to the apartment. Exactly ten minutes later, without any ringing of bells, the apartment was visited, yet not only were the hosts not found in it, but, which was something quite bizarre, no signs of Baron Meigel were found in it either.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  202 Lecture 28: The Great Divorce between East and West The Great Divorce between East and West Lecture 28 I n the 11 th century, relations between Christianity in the East and in the West, between Orthodoxy and Catholicism, were severed and remain so to the present. The two earliest forms of Christianity have been in a state of schism for more than 1,000 years. The symbolic date for the split is 1054, but as with so many divorces, this one built on centuries of growing alienation. And like other divorces, this one was undoubtedly sad in the experiencing; it is surely one of the most depressing sequences in Christianity’s long history to recount, testimony to the consequences of a religion deeply overinvolved with politics. Administrative Division and Rivalry • The story begins with the administrative division of the Roman Empire that was initiated by Diocletian and perfected by Constantine. It institutionalized the possibility of faction among and between strong leaders, and insofar as emperors were regarded as “bishops for external affairs,” religious policy could differ dramatically in the East and the West. • The ecclesiastical rivalry among the four patriarchates (Alexandria, Antioch, Rome, and Constantinople) that mirrored such administrative “spheres of influence” stimulated and expressed polemical views on doctrinal matters. o After the Muslim conquests of the 7 th and 8 th centuries, only Rome and Constantinople remained as functioning patriarchies. o This did not diminish but exacerbated the rivalry between the two most politically defined centers of Christianity. • Even more than these simple political, structural elements, the historical and cultural developments in the East and West were dramatically different.

• From Comrade Loves of the Samurai (1972)

  Ihara Saikaku's youthful writings were unsuccessful, but when he published his novel The Armorous Life of Yonosuke, the gateway to fame and prosperity opened to him. Among his many popular bawdy best sellers is Five Women Who Loved Love (Charles E. Tuttle). The Songs of the Geisha is quite unassociated with the stories of Ihara Saikaku. It is a collection of geisha folk songs composed to be sung to the accompaniment of the shamisen. Ninety of these songs were retranslated by E. Powys Mathers from Gaston Morphy's anthology Le Livre des Geisha . The remainder are from Chansons des Geishas by Steinilber Oberlin and Hidetake Iwamura. All have that charmingly nostalgic quality which fitted well the time and the circumstances for which they were composed. Geisha entered the entertainment trade in old Japan under sad circumstances, most often being sold to procurers by impoverished parents for training in the ways of pleasure houses (for the whole story see De Becker's The Nightless City (Charles E. Tuttle). For lonely girls who were courtesans and geisha the only hope was to find a lover to purchase their freedom, but until this happened —which was rare—they were obliged to spend many years in erotic slavery. When youthful bloom had faded and their time of service had expired, they were often cast aside undesired. So these songs, freely composed and intimately personal, expressed the feelings of the geisha toward their sympathetic listeners. Unlike classic songs, they reach to the heart of the common people. Love, frustration, and the futility of hope are their main themes. Here is an example from "Who Loves": A body that loves Is fragile and uncertain, A floating boat. The fires in the fishing boat at night Burn red, my heart burns red. Wooden stakes hold up the nets Against the tide of Uji. The tide is against me. These song-poems, mere thumbnail sketches of life, belong to a very ancient oral tradition in Japan. The best known are popularly quoted and sung, but for a true rendering they must be heard from a beautiful geisha with a shamisen, and in a teahouse. The effect is unique. After long training in singing, dancing, and playing instruments, the geisha became herself a living work of art. These lyrics, for all their erotic symbolism, are restrained and tactful. Their erotic beauty must be felt rather than heard. Ihara(or Ibara)Saikaku, whose real name was probably Hirayama Togo, was born in Osaka, 1642. As a poet and novelist he was one of the most illustrious writers of Japan's seventeenth-century literary revival. He excelled in describing the life of the common people and, in satirical tone, the samurai, who were in his age falling from positions of grace before the money power of the merchants.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  234 Lecture 32: Papal Revolution • The high point of Innocent III’s papacy was the Fourth Lateran Council, called in 1213 and held in 1215. It was attended by many bishops, abbots, priors, and the representatives of several monarchs. o The council ratified the primacy of the papacy over other patriarchates, as well as its role in secular affairs; it also approved the election of Frederick II as emperor. o In addition to an exposition of the faith and of the sacraments, the canons of the council regulated religious orders and dioceses in considerable detail. Provincial councils every three years would look to the reformation of clergy. Clergy were to receive education at cathedral schools. o Particular attention was paid to the misconduct of clergy and to the regulation of marriage. Christians were to receive extreme unction before death and were to confess their sins at least once a year to the parish priest. o Jews and Muslims were to wear special clothing to distinguish them from Christians, and Christian princes were called on to take measures against anyone who blasphemed Jesus Christ. Saint Francis and Saint Dominic • Even though the Fourth Lateran Council forbade the establishment of new religious orders, Innocent III had already given approval to two significant innovations to the committed Christian life. The mendicant orders (the term comes from the Latin word for “beggars”) were able more flexibly than monks to address changing needs and pursue the goals of a centralized church. • Francis of Assisi (1181/2–1226) abandoned his wealth and status to serve Christ in poverty. He was a mystic and, before his death, received the stigmata—his body bore the wounds on hands and feet that were like those of the crucified Christ. His “little brothers” gathered around his charismatic figure and, wearing simple garments, preached everywhere, depending on alms for their support. A noblewoman named Clare founded a corresponding

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  Monnica’s other son, Navigius, was with her at the end—it was to him she confided her resignation of any hope to be buried with her husband in Africa (T 9.27). Part of the inscription over her tomb was found in 1945 by some boys playing by a church in Ostia. Godsend broke down at the death of his grandmother, but Augustine mastered his sorrow for his mother with Christian hope for her soul’s future life. The passage stands in clear contrast with his earlier hysteria over the death of Amicus. With the winter season now cutting off his return to Carthage, Augustine had no reason to stay in Ostia. He probably had influential Christian hosts there, but he would need libraries, better to be found in Rome, since he meant to keep up the furious pace of his writing. 6. Rome: 387–388 WHEN AUGUSTINE STAYED in Rome before, he was feted by Manichean and pagan notables, cultivating and being cultivated by Symmachus. This time he no doubt met Rome’s Christian community. Pope Damasus had died, and his protégé Jerome had been driven out of town. Siricius, the new pope, had just been working with Ambrose to prevent a heresy trial of Priscillian by the usurper Maximus, so Milan ties would have brought Augustine to the pope’s attention. Augustine was now the man who gave up a court orator’s post to be baptized by Ambrose. But Augustine tells us nothing about his stay in Rome, whose glamour had dimmed with the renunciation of Virgil’s world. Though he was often urged to return to Roman councils after he became a bishop in Africa, his dealings with the papacy would always be formal but distant. Deprived of his large cast of characters from Cassiciacum, Augustine had to content himself with one interlocutor in his Roman dialogues, but this man, Evodius, was a curious and persistent questioner. He had belonged to the large network of imperial secret police, but he abandoned that life to follow Augustine from Milan to Africa (Mandouze 366–73). Augustine finished one dialogue (How to Measure the Soul) and began another (Freedom of Choice) in Rome, and wrote a treatise, Catholic and Manichean Moral Systems. He could have left Rome when spring opened the sea lanes, but he may have lingered, once he got into his work rhythms, until the onset of autumn threatened to close off the sea again. Reluctantly he went aboard a boat for the second and last time, going home. III AFRICA (388–430) 1. Thagaste: 388–390

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  162 Lecture 22: The Court of Justinian and Byzantine Christianity position by decree in 533 and secured the approval of Pope John II in 534. o In the affair of the Three Chapters, Justinian sought to appease the monophysite party by condemning, in 543, three 4 th -century writers as guilty of Nestorianism. The West and Pope Vigilius at first refused to accept this condemnation, but through isolation and privation, Justinian pressured the pope to do so. The Second Council of Constantinople in 553 condemned the Three Chapters and, by implication, Vigilius, though it continued to declare communion with Rome. o These incidents reveal a growing chasm between the western (Chalcedonian) and eastern (monophysite) churches. We shall see how the rift will grow ever greater until a final schism occurs in the 11 th century. • Justinian’s strong patronage of Christianity had as its dark side the active suppression of other religious traditions. o His Codex proscribed paganism, even in private life, and the remnants of pagan observance were actively suppressed. o The civil rights of Jews were further restricted, and religious privileges were threatened. Adding insult to injury, Justinian wanted Jews to read Torah in the Greek Septuagint translation rather than in Hebrew! o Against the Samaritans, Justinian leveled severe edicts because they resisted conversion to Christianity, and many Manichaeans were persecuted and killed during his reign. • Such interventions reveal a situation that would later be termed caesaropapism, in which the state exercises total authority over the church. o The Second Council of Constantinople in 553 declared that the church could affirm nothing contrary to the emperor’s will. 163 o The other side of the coin was that the emperor was the supreme benefactor of the church, enacting its decisions (when it agreed with him) and, as the Codex indicates, providing legal support for ecclesiastical policies. Mixed Results of Justinian’s Reign • As remarkable as the reign of Justinian was, the results of his efforts were mixed. • Certainly, his goal of restoration fell short: The expanded empire shrank back in size after brief success in the west. Further, the policies of Justinian set some bad precedents. o The system of taxation was efficient but also oppressive and, ultimately, not a real economic plan; as conquests failed and crops were poor, the resources of the empire were steadily drained over time. o The increased use of mercenaries in the imperial army made the empire reliant on others and was incredibly expensive, another drain on the imperial treasury. o Finally, the policy of pacifying enemies through tribute was shortsighted: It won temporary relief but could not be a permanent solution. • Even more devastating was the blow struck at the empire and Justinian himself by the “Plague of Justinian,” a health disaster that was unparalleled until the Black Death hit Europe in the 14 th

• From The Girls (2016)

  Life didn’t accumulate as I’d once imagined. I graduated from boarding school, two years of college. Persisted through the blank decade in Los Angeles. I buried first my mother, then my father. His hair gone wispy as a child’s. I paid bills and bought groceries and got my eyes checked while the days crumbled away like debris from a cliff face. Life a continuous backing away from the edge. There were moments of forgetting. The summer I had visited Jessamine in Seattle after she had her first child—when I saw her waiting at the curb with her hair tucked into her coat, the years unknit themselves and I felt, for a moment, the sweet and blameless girl I had once been. The year with the man from Oregon, our shared kitchen hung with houseplants and Indian blankets on the seats of our car, covering the rips. We ate cold pita with peanut butter and walked in the wet green. Camping in the hills around Hot Springs Canyon, far down the coast, near a group who knew all the words to The People’s Song Book. A sun-hot rock where we lay, drying from the lake, our bodies leaving behind a conjoined blur. But the absence opened up again. I was almost a wife but lost the man. I was almost recognizable as a friend. And then I wasn’t. The nights when I flicked off the bedside lamp and found myself in the heedless, lonely dark. The times I thought, with a horrified twist, that none of this was a gift. Suzanne got the redemption that followed a conviction, the prison Bible groups and prime-time interviews and a mail-in college degree. I got the snuffed-out story of the bystander, a fugitive without a crime, half hoping and half terrified that no one was ever coming for me. —It was Helen, in the end, who ended up talking. She was only eighteen, still desirous of attention—I’m surprised they stayed out of jail as long as they did. Helen had been picked up in Bakersfield for using a stolen credit card. Just a week in a county jail and they would have let her go, but she couldn’t help bragging to her cellmate. The coin-operated television in the common room showing a bulletin of the ongoing murder investigation. “The house is way bigger than it looks in those pictures,” Helen said, according to her cellmate. I can see Helen: nonchalant, thrusting her chin forward. Her cellmate must have ignored her at first. Rolling her eyes at the girlish bluster. But then Helen kept going, and suddenly the woman was listening closely, calculating reward money, a reduced sentence. Urging the girl to tell her more, to keep talking. Helen was probably flattered by the attention, unspooling the whole mess. Maybe even exaggerating, drawing out the haunted spaces between words, as in the incantation of a ghost story at a sleepover. We all want to be seen.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  rows of books in Count Waldstein’s library of more than forty thousand volumes, bending over his writing desk alone on a bleak November afternoon. He had taken off his powdered wig, and his own sparse hair was wafting above his head in a little white cloud, like a sign of the dissolution of his corporeal being. He wrote on and on, his left shoulder slightly raised. There was nothing to be heard but the scratching of his pen, which stopped only when the writer looked up for a couple of seconds, and his watery eyes, already half blind for long-distance vision, sought what little brightness was still left in the sky above the park of Dux. On the other side of the enclosed land, in deep darkness, lay the whole region extending from Teplice to Most and Chomutov. Over to the north, from end to end of the horizon, stood the black wall of the Grenzmark mountains, and in front of them, along their foothills, the torn and ravaged land, with slopes and terraces which dropped far below what had formerly been the surface of the earth. Where roads had passed over firm ground, where human beings had lived, foxes had run across country and birds of many kinds had flown from bush to bush, now there was nothing but empty space, and at the bottom of it stones and gravel and stagnant water, untouched even by the natural movement of the air. The shadowy forms of power stations with their glowing furnaces drifted like ships in the somber air: chalk-colored buildings like blocks, cooling towers with jagged rims, tall chimneys above which motionless plumes of smoke stood white against the sickly colors streaking the western sky. A few stars showed only on the pallid, nocturnal side of the firmament, sooty, smoking lights extinguished one by one, leaving scab-like traces in the orbits through which they have always moved. To the south, in a broad semicircle, rose the cones of the extinct Bohemian volcanoes, which I wished in my nightmare would erupt and cover everything around with black dust.—Not until around half-past two the next day, when I had to some degree pulled myself together again, did I go from Kampa Island to the Sporkova to pay what would be my last visit for the time being, Austerlitz continued. I had already told Vera that I must retrace my journey from Prague to London by train, all the way across Germany, a country unknown to me, but that then I would soon come back and perhaps take a flat somewhere near her for a few months. It was one of those radiant spring days when the weather is clear as glass. Vera was complaining of a dull pain behind her eyes which had been troubling her since early that morning, and she asked me to pull the curtains over the windows on the sunny side of the room. Leaning back in her red velvet armchair in the gloom, with her tired eyelids closed, she listened as I told her what I had seen in Terezin. I also asked Vera about the Czech word for a squirrel, and after a while, with a smile spreading slowly over her beautiful face, she said it was veverka. And then, said

• From Comrade Loves of the Samurai (1972)

  [image file=image_rsrc1KJ.jpg] 6 The Tragic Love of Two EnemiesTHE LORD OF THE PROVINCE ETJIGO WAS called Jibudayu Mashikura. One day his chief minister, Gyobu Tokuzawa, summoned his master's first page, Senpatji Akanashi, who was in the vestibule with the other pages, whispering: 'I have something to say to you, Akanashi. Come with me.'And, leading him to a secret place behind the trees in the garden, he said to him: 'My master has ordered me to choose someone very Strong to kill his courtier Shingokeï Dizaki, and I can think of no one better fitted than you for this mission. Go then to Shingokefs house and kill him. I am sure that my master has an excellent reason for having him destroyed.' Senpatji asked: 'What is the offence which Shingokeï must expiate? 'But the minister himself did not know. Then Senpatji said to him: '1 have confidence in your word, yet I should like to hear this order from my master's own lips.'So the minister brought Senpatji before the Lord, who, as Senpatji kneeled before him, said: 'Senpatji, you must kill Shingokei, as my minister has told you.' Senpatji returned to his house very sad at having to kill Shingokei, who was one of his best friends. Nevertheless he went to that man's house and, after a short conversation, killed him, saying: 'It is at the command of my master.'Shingokei's slaves tried to seize the murderer; but Senpatji calmed them by saying: 'I have acted on my master's order, and you must obey him.' The Lord confiscated all Shingokei's property and his wealth. His widow was inconsolable. She was the daughter of a retired samurai of the neighbouring Province, and had married Shingokei the year before with customary rites, for Shingokei and her father were old friends. They loved each other tenderly, and her husband's death Stunned her. She wished to die with him and follow him into the other world; but she was pregnant, and could not kill herself because of the child she carried in her womb. So she left the Province, bitterly bewailing her husband's and her own sad destiny. After a long solitary journey full of hardship she came to another very remote Province in the mountains, and decided to live there. Some time after, quite alone and without assistance, she gave birth to a son. She took infinite care of the child, working with her needle to gain a livelihood; for in all the village there was not a single woman who could sew. The two lived thus together in poverty in that place.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Trees and living beings also have shadows. Do you want to skin the whole earth, tearing all the trees and living things off it, because of your fantasy of enjoying bare light? You’re stupid.’ ‘I won’t argue with you, old sophist,’ replied Matthew Levi. ‘You also cannot argue with me, for the reason I’ve already mentioned: you’re stupid,’ Woland replied and asked: ‘Well, make it short, don’t weary me, why have you appeared?’ ‘He sent me.’ ‘What did he tell you to say, slave?’ ‘I’m not a slave,’ Matthew Levi replied, growing ever angrier, ‘I’m his disciple.’ ‘You and I speak different languages, as usual,’ responded Woland, ‘but the things we speak of don’t change for all that. And so? . . .’ ‘He has read the master’s work,’ said Matthew Levi, ‘and asks you to take the master with you and reward him with peace. Is that hard for you to do, spirit of evil?’ ‘Nothing is hard for me to do,’ answered Woland, ‘you know that very well.’ He paused and added: ‘But why don’t you take him with you into the light?’ ‘He does not deserve the light, he deserves peace,’ Levi said in a sorrowful voice. ‘Tell him it will be done,’ Woland replied and added, his eye flashing: ‘And leave me immediately.’ ‘He asks that she who loved him and suffered because of him also be taken with him,’ Levi addressed Woland pleadingly for the first time. ‘We would never have thought of it without you. Go.’ Matthew Levi disappeared after that, and Woland called Azazello and ordered him: ‘Fly to them and arrange it all.’ Azazello left the terrace, and Woland remained alone. But his solitude did not last. Over the flags of the terrace came the sound of footsteps and animated voices, and before Woland stood Koroviev and Behemoth. But now the fat fellow had no primus with him, but was loaded with other things. Thus, under his arm he had a small landscape in a gold frame, from one hand hung a half-burnt cook’s smock, and in the other he held a whole salmon with skin and tail. Koroviev and Behemoth reeked of fire, Behemoth’s mug was all sooty and his cap was badly burnt. ‘Greetings, Messire!’ cried the irrepressible pair, and Behemoth waved the salmon. ‘A fine sight,’ said Woland. ‘Imagine, Messire!’ Behemoth cried excitedly and joyfully, ‘I was taken for a looter!’ ‘Judging by the things you’ve brought,’ Woland replied, glancing at the landscape, ‘you are a looter!’ ‘Believe me, Messire . . .’ Behemoth began in a soulful voice. ‘No, I don’t,’ Woland replied curtly. ‘Messire, I swear, I made heroic efforts to save everything I could, and this is all I was able to rescue.’ ‘You’d better tell me, why did Griboedov’s catch fire?’ asked Woland.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  I soon found out that it was not just my father who was given to black and chaotic moods. By the time I was sixteen or seventeen, it became clear that my energies and enthusiasms could be exhausting to the people around me, and after long weeks of flying high and sleeping little, my thinking would take a downward turn toward the really dark and brooding side of life. My two closest friends, both males—attractive, sardonic, and intense—were a bit inclined to the darker side as well, and we became an occasionally troubled trio, although we managed to navigate the more normal and fun-loving side of high school as well. Indeed, all of us were in various school leadership positions and very active in sports and other extracurricular activities. While living at school in these lighter lands, we wove our outside lives together in close friendship, laughter, deadly seriousness, drinking, smoking, playing truth games through the night, and engaging in passionate discussions about where our lives were going, the hows and whys of death, listening to Beethoven, Mozart, and Schumann, and vigorously debating the melancholic and existential readings—Hesse, Byron, Melville, and Hardy—we had set for ourselves. We all came by our black chaos honestly: two of us, we were to discover later, had manic-depressive illness in our immediate families; the other’s mother had shot herself through the heart. We experienced together the beginnings of the pain that we each would know, later, alone. In my case, later proved rather sooner than I might have wished.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  mentioned yesterday, I often visited with Hilary when I was studying at Oxford. I clearly remember, said Austerlitz, how on such an excursion, after walking for a long time in a park densely overgrown with young sycamore and birch trees, we came to a silent house of this kind, one of which on average, according to a calculation I made then, was being demolished every two or three days in the 1950s. We saw quite a number of houses at that time from which almost everything had been ripped out—the bookshelves, the paneling and banisters, the brass central heating pipes and the marble fireplaces; houses with their roofs falling in, houses knee-deep in rubble, refuse, and detritus, houses full of sheep and bird droppings, and great lumps of plaster come down from the ceilings. Iver Grove, however, said Austerlitz, a house which stood in the middle of its wilderness of a park at the foot of a gentle south-facing slope, seemed largely intact, at least from the outside. Nonetheless, as we paused on the broad stone steps which had been colonized by hart’s-tongue ferns and other weeds and looked up at the blind windows, it seemed to us as if silent horror had seized upon the house at the prospect of its imminent and shameful end. Inside we found heaps of grain in one of the large ground-floor reception rooms, as if the place were a barn. In a second great hall, ornamented with baroque stucco work, hundreds of sacks of potatoes leaned against each other. We stood gazing at this sight for some time, until—just as I was about to take some photographs—the owner of Iver Grove, who turned out to be a certain James Mallord Ashman, came towards the house along the western terrace. Fully understanding our interest in the buildings now everywhere falling into decay, he told us during a long conversation that after the family seat had been requisitioned for use as a convalescent home during the war years, the expense of putting it back into any kind of order, however makeshift, had been far beyond his means, so that he had been obliged to move to Grove Farm, which

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

  The papal policy had met with complete but blighting success and, after the thirteenth century, heresy in Southern France was almost like a noiseless underground stream. Languedoc at the opening of the wars had been one of the most prosperous and cultured parts of Europe. At their close its villages and vineyards were in ruins, its industries shattered, its population impoverished and decimated. The country that had given promise of leading Europe in a renaissance of intellectual culture fell behind her neighbors in the race of progress. Protestant generations, that have been since sitting in judgment upon the barbarous measures, conceived and pushed by the papacy, have wondered whether another movement, stirred by the power of the Gospel, will not yet arise in the old domain that responded to the religious dissent and received the warm blood of the Albigenses, the Waldenses, and of Peter de Bruys and his followers. The Stedinger. While the wars against the Albigenses were going on, another people, the Stedinger, living in the vicinity of Bremen and Oldenburg, were also being reduced by a papal crusade. They represented the spirit of national independence rather than doctrinal dissent and had shown an unwillingness to pay tithes to the archbishop of Bremen. When a husband put a priest to death for an indignity to his wife, the archbishop Hartwig II. announced penalty after penalty but in vain. Under his successor, Gerhard (1219–1258), the refractory peasants were reduced to submission. A synod of Bremen, in 1230, pronounced them heretics, and Gregory IX., accepting the decision, called upon a number of German bishops to join in preaching and prosecuting a crusade. The same indulgence was offered to the crusaders in the North as to those who went on the Church’s business to Palestine. The first campaign in 1233 was unsuccessful, but a second carried all the horrors of war into the eastern section of the Stedingers’ territory. In 1231 another army led by a number of princes completely defeated this brave people at Altenesch. Their lands were divided between the archbishop of Bremen and the count of Oldenburg. § 86. The Inquisition. Its Origin and Purpose.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Then, seeing that I was an old friend of her Jo-Jo—that was how she called him—she ran downstairs and brought back a couple of bottles of white wine. I was to stay and have dinner with her—she insisted on it. As she drank she became by turns gay and maudlin. I didn’t have to ask her any questions—she went on like a self-winding machine. The thing that worried her principally was—would he get his job back when he was released from the hospital? She said her parents were well off, but they were displeased with her. They didn’t approve of her wild ways. They didn’t approve of him particularly—he had no manners, and he was an American. She begged me to assure her that he would get his job back, which I did without hesitancy. And then she begged me to know if she could believe what he said—that he was going to marry her. Because now, with a child under her belt, and a dose of clap besides, she was in no position to strike a match—with a Frenchman anyway. That was clear, wasn’t it? Of course, I assured her. It was all clear as hell to me—except how in Christ’s name Fillmore had ever fallen for her. However, one thing at a time. It was my duty now to comfort her, and so I just filled her up with a lot of baloney, told her everything would turn out all right and that I would stand godfather to the child, etc. Then suddenly it struck me as strange that she should have the child at all—especially as it was likely to be born blind. I told her that as tactfully as I could. “It doesn’t make any difference,” she said, “I want a child by him.” “Even if it’s blind?” I asked. “Mon Dieu, ne dites pas ça!” she groaned. “Ne dites pas ça!” Just the same, I felt it was my duty to say it. She got hysterical and began to weep like a walrus, poured out more wine. In a few moments she was laughing boisterously. She was laughing to think how they used to fight when they got in bed. “He liked me to fight with him,” she said. “He was a brute.” As we sat down to eat, a friend of hers walked in—a little tart who lived at the end of the hall. Ginette immediately sent me down to get some more wine. When I came back they had evidently had a good talk. Her friend, Yvette, worked in the police department. A sort of stool pigeon, as far as I could gather. At least that was what she was trying to make me believe. It was fairly obvious that she was just a little whore. But she had an obsession about the police and their doings. Throughout the meal they were urging me to accompany them to a bal musette .