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 Wild (2012)

  By the time I arrived in the town of Mojave, California, on the night before I began hiking the PCT, I’d shot out of Minnesota for the last time. I’d even told my mother that, not that she could hear. I’d sat in the flowerbed in the woods on our land, where Eddie, Paul, my siblings, and I had mixed her ashes in with the dirt and laid a tombstone, and explained to her that I wasn’t going to be around to tend her grave anymore. Which meant that no one would. I finally had no choice but to leave her grave to go back to the weeds and blown-down tree branches and fallen pinecones. To snow and whatever the ants and deer and black bears and ground wasps wanted to do with her. I lay down in the mother ash dirt among the crocuses and told her it was okay. That I’d surrendered. That since she died, everything had changed. Things she couldn’t have imagined and wouldn’t have guessed. My words came out low and steadfast. I was so sad it felt as if someone were choking me, and yet it seemed my whole life depended on my getting those words out. She would always be my mother, I told her, but I had to go. She wasn’t there for me in that flowerbed anymore anyway, I explained. I’d put her somewhere else. The only place I could reach her. In me. The next day I left Minnesota forever. I was going to hike the PCT. It was the first week of June. I drove to Portland in my 1979 Chevy Luv pickup truck loaded with a dozen boxes filled with dehydrated food and backpacking supplies. I’d spent the previous weeks compiling them, addressing each box to myself at places I’d never been, stops along the PCT with evocative names like Echo Lake and Soda Springs, Burney Falls and Seiad Valley. I left my truck and the boxes with my friend Lisa in Portland—she’d be mailing the boxes to me throughout the summer—and boarded a plane to Los Angeles, then caught a ride to Mojave with the brother of a friend. We pulled into town in the early evening, the sun dipping into the Tehachapi Mountains a dozen miles behind us to the west. Mountains I’d be hiking the next day. The town of Mojave is at an altitude of nearly 2,800 feet, though it felt to me as if I were at the bottom of something instead, the signs for gas stations, restaurants, and motels rising higher than the highest tree. “You can stop here,” I said to the man who’d driven me from LA, gesturing to an old-style neon sign that said WHITE’S MOTEL with the word TELEVISION blazing yellow above it and VACANCY in pink beneath. By the worn look of the building, I guessed it was the cheapest place in town. Perfect for me.

• From Wild (2012)

  Together we descended Trail Pass Trail two miles down to a picnic area and campground at Horseshoe Meadows, where we met up with Doug and Tom and hitched a ride into Lone Pine. I hadn’t planned to go there. Some PCT hikers had resupply boxes sent to Lone Pine, but I’d planned to push through to the town of Independence, another fifty trail miles to the north. I still had a few days’ worth of food in my bag, but when we reached town I went immediately to a grocery store to replenish my stock. I needed enough to last for the ninety-six-mile section I’d be hiking once I made the bypass, from Sierra City to Belden Town. Afterwards, I found a pay phone and called Lisa and left a message on her answering machine, explaining my new plan as quickly as I could, asking her to send my box addressed to Belden Town immediately and hold all the others until I gave her the details of my new itinerary. I felt dislocated and melancholy when I hung up the phone, less excited about being in town than I thought I’d be. I walked along the main street until I found the men. “We’re heading back up,” said Doug, his eyes meeting mine. My chest felt tight as I hugged him and Tom goodbye. I’d come to feel a sort of love for them, but on top of that, I was worried. “Are you sure you want to go up into the snow?” I asked. “Are you sure you don’t?” Tom replied. “You still have your good luck charm,” said Doug, pointing to the black feather he’d given me back in Kennedy Meadows. I’d wedged it into Monster’s frame, up over my right shoulder. “Something to remember you by,” I said, and we laughed. After they left, I walked with Greg to the convenience store that doubled as the town’s Greyhound bus station. We passed bars that billed themselves as Old West saloons and shops that had cowboy hats and framed paintings of men astride bucking broncos displayed in their front windows. “You ever see High Sierra with Humphrey Bogart?” Greg asked. I shook my head. “That was made here. Plus lots of other movies. Westerns.” I nodded, unsurprised. The landscape did in fact look straight out of Hollywood—a high sage-covered flat that was more barren than not, rocky and treeless with a view that went on for miles. The white peaks of the Sierra Nevada to the west cut so dramatically up into the blue sky that they seemed almost unreal to me, a gorgeous façade. “There’s our ride,” Greg said, pointing to a big Greyhound bus in a parking lot of the store as we approached.

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  When I shall with my whole self cleave to Thee, I shall no where have sorrow or labour; and my life shall wholly live, as wholly full of Thee. But now since whom Thou fillest, Thou liftest up, because I am not full of Thee I am a burden to myself. Lamentable joys strive with joyous sorrows: and on which side is the victory, I know not. Woe is me! Lord, have pity on me. My evil sorrows strive with my good joys; and on which side is the victory, I know not. Woe is me! Lord, have pity on me. Woe is me! lo! I hide not my wounds; Thou art the Physician, I the sick; Thou merciful, I miserable. Is not the life of man upon earth all trial? Who wishes for troubles and difficulties? Thou commandest them to be endured, not to be loved. No man loves what he endures, though he love to endure. For though he rejoices that he endures, he had rather there were nothing for him to endure. In adversity I long for prosperity, in prosperity I fear adversity. What middle place is there betwixt these two, where the life of man is not all trial? Woe to the prosperities of the world, once and again, through fear of adversity, and corruption of joy! Woe to the adversities of the world, once and again, and the third time, from the longing for prosperity, and because adversity itself is a hard thing, and lest it shatter endurance. Is not the life of man upon earth all trial: without any interval? And all my hope is no where but in Thy exceeding great mercy. Give what Thou enjoinest, and enjoin what Thou wilt. Thou enjoinest us continency; and when I knew, saith one, that no man can be continent, unless God give it, this also was a part of wisdom to know whose gift she is. By continency verily are we bound up and brought back into One, whence we were dissipated into many. For too little doth he love Thee, who loves any thing with Thee, which he loveth not for Thee. O love, who ever burnest and never consumest! O charity, my God, kindle me. Thou enjoinest continency: give me what Thou enjoinest, and enjoin what Thou wilt.

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

  One of the areas tackled by the council fathers was the religious life, which urgently needed reform. Many of the orders had got stuck in a traditional rut. Customs that had made perfect sense in the nineteenth century, when my own community had been founded, now seemed arbitrary and unnatural. Practices that had no intrinsic spiritual value but were cultural relics of the Victorian age had acquired sacred significance, and change was regarded as betrayal. The council urged the religious orders to go back to the original spirit of their founders, who had been men and women of insight and imagination, innovators and pioneers, not guardians of the status quo. Nuns and monks should also let the bracing spirit of change invade their cloisters; they should throw out the rubble that had accumulated over the years and craft a new lifestyle that was in tune with the times. But this proved to be a monumentally complex task. Nuns had to decide what was essential in their rule, and then translate this into present-day idiom. But they themselves had been shaped by the old regime at a profound level, and many found that they could not think in any other way. They could modernize their clothes but they could not change the habits of their minds and hearts, which had been formed by a training that had been carefully designed in a different world and was meant to last a lifetime. For some, this was a time of great anguish. They saw a cherished way of life disappearing, yet nothing of equal value had emerged to take its place. I left the religious life in 1969, just ahead of a massive exodus of religious who left their convents and monasteries like flocks of migratory birds during the 1970s. The intense discussions surrounding the reforms had led them to call everything into question, even their own vocation. This, I believe, was a healthy development. The title of my first book, Through the Narrow Gate, comes from a text in Saint Matthew’s gospel in which Jesus tells his disciples that only a few find the narrow gate that leads to life. By the end of my seven years in the convent, I had come to the conclusion that only a very small number of people could live up to the demands of a life that requires the entire subjugation of the ego and a self-abandonment that—I realized sadly—was beyond me. I knew nuns who beautifully enshrined this ideal, but I realized that I was not of that caliber. I suspect that many of those who left during the seventies had also faced up to this hard truth.

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

  But the gain in outward appearance and splendor was balanced by many a loss in simplicity and spirituality. While the senses and the imagination were entertained and charmed, the heart not rarely returned cold and hungry. Not a few pagan habits and ceremonies, concealed under new names, crept into the church, or were baptized only with water, not with the fire and Spirit of the gospel. It is well known with what peculiar tenacity a people cleave to religious usages; and it could not be expected that they should break off in an instant from the traditions of centuries. Nor, in fact, are things which may have descended from heathenism, to be by any means sweepingly condemned. Both the Jewish cultus and the heathen are based upon those universal religious wants which Christianity must satisfy, and which Christianity alone can truly meet. Finally, the church has adopted hardly a single existing form or ceremony of religion, without at the same time breathing into it a new spirit, and investing it with a high moral import. But the limit of such appropriation it is very hard to fix, and the old nature of Judaism and heathenism which has its point of attachment in the natural heart of man, continually betrayed its tenacious presence. This is conceded and lamented by the most earnest of the church fathers of the Nicene and post-Nicene age, the very persons who are in other respects most deeply involved in the Catholic ideas of cultus. In the Christian martyr-worship and saint-worship, which now spread with giant strides over the whole Christian world, we cannot possibly mistake the succession of the pagan worship of gods and heroes, with its noisy popular festivities. Augustine puts into the mouth of a heathen the question: "Wherefore must we forsake gods, which the Christians themselves worship with us?" He deplores the frequent revels and amusements at the tombs of the martyrs; though he thinks that allowance should be made for these weaknesses out of regard to the ancient custom. Leo the Great speaks of Christians in Rome who first worshipped the rising sun, doing homage to the pagan Apollo, before repairing to the basilica of St. Peter. Theodoret defends the Christian practices at the graves of the martyrs by pointing to the pagan libations, propitiations, gods, and demigods. Since Hercules, Aesculapitis, Bacchus, the Dioscuri, and many other objects of pagan worship were mere deified men, the Christians, he thinks, cannot be blamed for honoring their martyrs—not making them gods but venerating them as witnesses and servants of the only, true God. Chrysostom mourns over the theatrical customs, such as loud clapping in applause, which the Christians at Antioch and Constantinople brought with them into the church. In the Christmas festival, which from the fourth century spread from Rome over the entire church, the holy commemoration of the birth of the Redeemer is associated—to this day, even in Protestant lands—with the wanton merriments of the pagan Saturnalia.

• From Another Country (1962)

  For themselves, because they’ve lost their toy.” “That’s a terribly grim view,” he said, “of love.” “I know what I’m talking about. That’s what most people mean, when they say love.” She picked up a cigarette and waited for him to light it. “Thank you. You weren’t here, you never saw Rufus’s last girl friend—a terrible little whore of a nymphomaniac, from Georgia. She wouldn’t let him go, he tried all kinds of ways of getting away from her. He even thought of running away to Mexico. She got him so he couldn’t work—I swear, there’s nothing like a Southern white person, especially a Southern woman , when she gets her hooks into a Negro man.” She blew a great cloud of smoke above his head. “And now she’s still living, the filthy white slut, and Rufus is dead.” He said, hoping that she would really hear him but knowing she would not, perhaps could not, “I hope you don’t think I loved your brother in that terrible way that you describe. I think we really were very good friends, and—and it was an awful shock for me to hear that he was dead. I was in Paris when I heard.” “Oh! I’m not accusing you . You and I are going to be friends. Don’t you think so?” “I certainly hope so.” “Well, that settles it, as far as I’m concerned.” Then, smiling, with her eyes very big, “What did you do in Paris all that time?” “Oh”—he smiled—“I tried to grow up.” “Couldn’t you have done that here? Or didn’t you want to?” “I don’t know. It was more fun in Paris.” “I’ll bet.” She crushed out her cigarette. “ Have you grown up?” “I don’t know,” he said, “any longer, if people do .” She grinned. “You’ve got a point there, Buster.” Vivaldo came back to the table. She looked up at him. “Well? How are the kids?” “They’re all right. Cass sounded a little distraught, but she sends her love to both of you and hopes to see you soon. Are we going to hang around here, or what are we going to do?’ “Well, let’s have supper,” Ida said. Vivaldo and Eric looked at each other for the briefest of seconds. “You’ll have to count me out,” said Eric, quickly. “I’m bushed, I’ve had it, I’m going to go home and hit the sack.” “It’s so early ,” Ida said. “Well, I just got off a boat and I’m still vibrating.” He stood up. “I’ll take a rain check on it.” “Well,” she looked at Vivaldo, humorously, “I’m sorry the lord and master isn’t in a better mood.” She moved herself out of the booth. “I’ve got to go to the little girl’s room. Wait for me upstairs.” “I’m sorry,” said Vivaldo, as they climbed the stairs into the street, “I’d really looked forward to sitting around and bullshitting with you tonight and all, but I guess you really better leave us alone.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  You survive what I do to you as I come to recognize you as not-me; I use you; I forget you; But you remember me; I keep forgetting you; I lose you; I am sad. Winnicott’s concept of “good enough” mothering is in resurgence right now. You can find it everywhere from mommy blogs to Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Are You My Mother? to reams of critical theory. (One of this book’s titles, in an alternate universe: Why Winnicott Now?) Despite his popularity, however, you still can’t procure an intimidating multivolume set titled The Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott. His work has to be encountered in little bits—bits that have been contaminated by their relationship to actual, blathering mothers, or by otherwise middlebrow venues, which prohibit any easy enshrinement of Winnicott as a psychological heavyweight. In the back of one collection, I note the following sources for the essays therein: a presentation to the Nursery School Association of Great Britain and Northern Ireland; BBC broadcasts to mothers; a Q&A for a BBC program titled Woman’s Hour; conferences about breast-feeding; lectures given to midwives; and “letters to the editor.” Such humble, contaminated sources are surely part of the reason why, in Iggy’s first year of life, Winnicott was the only child psychologist who retained any interest or relevance for me. Klein’s morbid infant sadism and bad breast, Freud’s blockbuster Oedipal saga and freighted fort/da, Lacan’s heavy-handed Imaginary and Symbolic—suddenly none seemed irreverent enough to address the situation of being a baby, of caretaking a baby. Do castration and the Phallus tell us the deep Truths of Western culture or just the truth of how things are and might not always be? It astonishes and shames me to think that I spent years finding such questions not only comprehensible, but compelling. In the face of such phallocentric gravitas, I find myself drifting into a delinquent, anti-interpretive mood. In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art. But even an erotics feels too heavy. I don’t want an eros, or a hermeneutics, of my baby. Neither is dirty, neither is mirthful, enough. On one of the long afternoons that has since bled into the one long afternoon of Iggy’s infancy, I watch him pause on all fours at the threshold to our backyard, as he contemplates which scraggly oak leaf to scrunch toward first with his dogged army crawl. His soft little tongue, always whitened in the center from milk, nudges out of his mouth in gentle anticipation, a turtle bobbing out of its shell. I want to pause here, maybe forever, and hail the brief moment before I have to jump into action, before I must become the one who eliminates the inappropriate object, or, if I’m too late, who must harvest it from his mouth.

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

  I smiled as Jane glared at herself in the mirror and threw back her long blond hair. It was indeed difficult to imagine her wilting feebly: she was built on too large a scale, was too confident for that. “Have you ever fainted before?” she asked, suddenly serious. I nodded. “It used to happen quite a lot in the convent. It’s all emotional—all in the mind. At least, that’s what the nuns said.” “Don’t tell me! I was at a convent school, remember? And I suppose you have been under a strain, giving up that lovely peaceful life.” I grimaced slightly, amazed as I always was that even people who knew nuns at first hand had such an unrealistically idyllic image of convent life. “Tell me,” Jane said abruptly, “do you feel guilty?” I thought hard for a moment. People often asked me this, because they seemed to associate Catholicism with guilt. “No,” I said at last, “I don’t feel at all guilty. ‘Guilt’ is not the word.” One of the good things that I had learned from my superiors was that guilt could be pure self-indulgence, a wallowing in the ego. Guilt, I was told, usually sprang from misplaced pride; it might simply be chagrin that you were not as wonderful as you hoped. “I feel sad,” I went on, “a failure, in some ways. But not guilty exactly.” “God, you are lucky!” Jane flung herself down in my armchair. “I feel endlessly, endlessly guilty about sleeping with Mark. It means that I can’t go to Mass, Communion, or confession, because I don’t have a ‘firm purpose of amendment,’ as they say. I’m not going to stop doing it, so I haven’t truly repented. So now I’m that dreadful thing called a ‘lapsed Catholic.’ ” “Do you miss it?” I asked, and then surprised myself by adding, “Do you care?” I noticed how far I had moved in the last few months. This time last year, I could not have imagined living outside the Catholic Church, but now I wasn’t so sure. Did God really care so much about Jane’s sexual life? Was sleeping with her fiancé as bad as telling lies or being unkind, sins which didn’t debar anybody from the sacraments? Jane sat quite still for a moment and then shrugged. “In some ways, no—of course, I don’t care. I can’t believe that God—if there is a God; I must say I do wonder sometimes—is really a narrow-minded prude. And I know that lots of people right here in college just carry on going to Communion, no matter what they do. But I can’t manage that. It seems dishonest . . .” “But do you miss it?” I probed. Jane seemed so much at ease with the world and so bracingly positive that it was hard to imagine her style cramped by a disapproving church.

• From Another Country (1962)

  She lit a cigarette, she crossed her legs. Ida looked out at the lights, and the crowds. “I’m wondering if I’m ever going to marry. I guess I’m not. I’ll never marry Vivaldo, and”— she tapped her ring again—“it’s hard to see what’s coming, up the road. But I don’t seem to see a bridegroom.” Cass was silent. Then, “Why will you never marry Vivaldo? Don’t you love him?” Ida said, “Love doesn’t have as much to do with it as everybody seems to think. I mean, you know, it doesn’t change everything, like people say. It can be a goddam pain in the ass.” She shifted, restlessly, in their narrow, dark space, and looked out of the window again. “Sure, I love Vivaldo; he’s the sweetest man I’ve ever known. And I know I’ve given him a rough time sometimes. I can’t help it. But I can’t marry him, it would be the end of him, and the end of me.” “Well, why?” She paused; then, carefully, “You don’t mean just because he’s white—?” “Well, yes,” said Ida, forcefully, “in a way, I do mean that. That probably sounds terrible to you. I don’t care about the color of his skin. I don’t mean that.” She stopped, clearly trying to discover what she did mean. “I’ve only known one man better than Vivaldo, and that man was my brother. Well, you know, Vivaldo was his best friend—and Rufus was dying, but Vivaldo didn’t know it. And I was miles away, and I did!” “How do you know that Vivaldo didn’t know it? You’re being very unjust. And your knowing it didn’t stop anything, didn’t change anything—” “Maybe nothing can be stopped, or changed,” Ida said, “but you’ve got to know, you’ve got to know what’s happening.” “But, Ida, nobody really does know what’s happening—not really. Like, perhaps you know things that I don’t know. But isn’t it possible that I also know things that you don’t know? I know what it’s like to have a child, for example. You don’t.” “Oh, hell, Cass, I can have a damn baby, and then I’ll know. Babies aren’t my kick, but, you know, I can find out if I want to. The way Vivaldo carries on, I’m likely to find out, whether I want to or not,” and, incongruously, she giggled. “But”—she sighed—“it doesn’t work the other way around. You don’t know, and there’s no way in the world for you to find out, what it’s like to be a black girl in this world, and the way white men, and black men, too, baby, treat you. You’ve never decided that the whole world was just one big whorehouse and so the only way for you to make it was to decide to be the biggest, coolest, hardest whore around, and make the world pay you back that way.”

• From Wild (2012)

  “The gazebo is cool in the dark,” he whispered a few minutes later, and we both looked around, seeing it in the shadowy night light. Paul and I had gotten married in it. We’d built it together for the occasion of our wedding nearly seven years before, along with help from Eddie and my mom. It was the humble castle of our naïve, ill-fated love. The roof was corrugated tin; the sides, unsanded wood that would give you splinters if you touched it. The floor was packed dirt and flat stones we’d hauled through the woods in a blue wheelbarrow my family had owned for ages. After I married Paul in the gazebo, it had become the place in our woods where people would walk to when they walked, congregate when they congregated. Eddie had hung a wide rope hammock across its length, a gift to my mother years before. “Let’s get in this thing,” Leif said, gesturing to the hammock. We climbed in and I rocked us gently, pushing off with one foot from the very stone upon which I’d stood when I’d married Paul. “I’m divorced now,” I said without emotion. “I thought you were divorced before.” “Well, now it’s official. We had to send our paperwork to the state so they could process it. I just got the final papers last week with a stamp from the judge.” He nodded and said nothing. It seemed he had little pity for me and the divorce I’d brought on myself. He, Eddie, and Karen liked Paul. I couldn’t make them understand why I’d had to smash things up. But you seemed so happy was all they could say. And it was true: we had seemed that way. Just as I’d seemed to be doing okay after my mom died. Grief doesn’t have a face. As Leif and I swung in the hammock, we caught glimpses of the house lights and the bonfire through the trees. We could hear the dim voices of the partiers as the party died down and disappeared. Our mother’s grave was close behind us, maybe only another thirty steps farther on the trail that continued past the gazebo and out into a small clearing, where we’d made a flowerbed, buried her ashes, and laid a tombstone. I felt her with us and I felt Leif feeling her with us too, though I didn’t say a word about it, for fear my words would make the feeling go away. I dozed off without knowing it and roused as the sun began to seep into the sky, turning to Leif with a start, having forgotten for an instant where I was. “I fell asleep.” I said. “I know,” he replied. “I’ve been awake the whole time. The ’shrooms.” I sat up in the hammock and turned back to look at him. “I worry about you,” I said. “With drugs, you know.” “You’re the one to talk.”

• From Wild (2012)

  By evening the forest opened into a wide swath of what can only be called wilderness rubble, a landscape ripped up by its seams and logged clear, the PCT picking its way faintly along its edges. Several times I had to stop walking to search for the trail, obstructed as it was by fallen branches and clumps of turned-up soil. The trees that remained standing on the edge of the clear-cut seemed to mourn, their rough hides newly exposed, their jagged limbs reaching out at absurd angles. I’d never seen anything like it in the woods. It was as if someone had come along with a giant wrecking ball and let it swing. Was this the wilderness corridor Congress had in mind when they’d set it aside? It didn’t seem so, but I was hiking through national forest land, which, in spite of its promising name, meant that I was on land that the powers that be could use as they saw fit for the public good. Sometimes that meant that the land would remain untouched, as it had been on most of the PCT. Other times it meant that ancient trees were chopped down to make things like chairs and toilet paper. The sight of the churned, barren earth unsettled me. I felt sad and angry about it, but in a way that included the complicated truth of my own complicity. I used tables and chairs and toilet paper too, after all. As I picked my way through the rubble, I knew I was done for the day. I mounted a steep berm to reach the flattened clear-cut above and pitched my tent among the stumps and upturned mounds of soil, feeling lonely the way I seldom did on the trail. I wanted to talk to someone, and it wasn’t just anyone I wanted to talk to. I wanted to talk to Karen or Leif or Eddie. I wanted to have a family again, to be folded into something I believed was safe from destruction. Right alongside my longing for them, I felt something as hot as hate for each of them now. I imagined a big machine like the one that had mawed up this forest mawing up our forty acres in the Minnesota woods. I wished with all my heart that it really would. I would be free then, it seemed. Because we had not been safe from destruction after my mom died, total destruction would come now as a relief. The loss of my family and home were my own private clear-cut. What remained was only ugly evidence of a thing that was no more.

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

  “I’m leaving,” she said. The words fell heavily into the room. Rebecca was staring ahead, looking, as I knew only too well, into an unimaginable future. She had had a long, slow climb back to health, but though she was now back on her feet and able to do light tasks around the house, she was still painfully thin and could not sit down without a cushion, which she carried around with her as a child might carry a security blanket. Her skin looked transparent; her eyes still appeared enormous. Her whole body had suffered an enormous shock. “I’m leaving the order,” she said again, more to herself than to me, as though trying to convince herself that she really was going to do this. I could hardly say I was surprised. “How do you feel?” I asked. She sighed and huddled into the bulky cardigan she was wearing, cold despite the fact that it was a warm spring day and an electric fire was burning in the grate. “It’s the right thing,” she said slowly. “But I cannot imagine what it will be like. Not to be here. But of course, you know all about that.” I nodded. It would be an insult to offer hearty reassurances, jollily telling her that she would soon find her feet. I had found it almost impossibly difficult after a mere seven years in religious life; Rebecca had been in for twelve, and was leaving in much worse shape than I had. “There’s just no place for me here.” Rebecca poured out more tea. I looked around her room. It used to be one of the students’ rooms, when the convent had been a teachers’ training college. There was a pretty fireplace, an electric kettle, a delicate collection of cups and saucers, and a chenille bedspread. The order had also traveled a long way since I had left. “And I should go soon,” Rebecca went on. “They can’t forgive me, you see.” “For the anorexia?” I asked. She nodded. There was no need to explain. Despite their attempts to seem welcoming when I had arrived that day, I had sensed wariness in the nuns here. They knew what had happened to me, of course, and did not know how to deal with it. Rebecca and I had demonstrated the flaws of the system. The nuns, I knew, were good women, and it must be almost unbearably painful for them to realize that they had damaged us. It is always difficult to forgive people we have harmed. “But it should be different,” I said, gesturing around the room. “From the outside, at least, things have changed so much!” “Yes, it is different. And they know they’ve got to change,” Rebecca said. “But they can’t do it as quickly as they need to. Oh, they can wear different clothes, put us all into bed-sitting-rooms, but inside, they are the same. How can they be anything else? That training was meant to last a lifetime.”

• From Another Country (1962)

  For a moment he thought he would faint with hunger and he moved to a wall of the building and leaned there. His forehead was freezing with sweat. He thought: this is got to stop, Rufus. This shit is got to stop. Then, in weariness and recklessness, seeing no one on the streets and hoping that no one would come through the doors, leaning with one hand against the wall he sent his urine splashing against the stone-cold pavement, watching the faint steam rise. He remembered Leona. Or a sudden, cold, familiar sickness filled him and he knew he was remembering Leona. And he began to walk, very slowly now, away from the music, with his hands in his pockets and his head down. He no longer felt the cold. For to remember Leona was also—somehow—to remember the eyes of his mother, the rage of his father, the beauty of his sister. It was to remember the streets of Harlem, the boys on the stoops, the girls behind the stairs and on the roofs, the white policeman who had taught him how to hate, the stickball games in the streets, the women leaning out of windows and the numbers they played daily, hoping for the hit his father never made. It was to remember the juke box, the teasing, the dancing, the hard-on, the gang fights and gang bangs, his first set of drums—bought him by his father—his first taste of marijuana, his first snort of horse. Yes: and the boys too far out, jackknifed on the stoops, the boy dead from an overdose on a rooftop in the snow. It was to remember the beat: A nigger, said his father, lives his whole life, lives and dies according to a beat. Shit, he humps to that beat and the baby he throws up in there, well, he jumps to it and comes out nine months later like a goddamn tambourine. The beat: hands, feet, tambourines, drums, pianos, laughter, curses, razor blades; the man stiffening with a laugh and a growl and a purr and the woman moistening and softening with a whisper and a sigh and a cry. The beat—in Harlem in the summertime one could almost see it, shaking above the pavements and the roof. And he had fled, so he had thought, from the beat of Harlem, which was simply the beat of his own heart. Into a boot camp in the South, and onto the pounding sea. While he had still been in the Navy, he had brought back from one of his voyages an Indian shawl for Ida.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  We never did talk about that conversation, Marcus and I. Maybe it didn’t explain anything; there were more than enough reasons for someone like Marcus to feel restless in a place like Occidental. I know that in the months that followed, I began to notice changes in him, as if he were haunted by specters that had seeped through the cracks of our safe, sunny world. Initially, he became more demonstrative in his racial pride: He took to wearing African prints to class and started lobbying the administration for an all-black dormitory. Later, he grew uncommunicative. He began to skip classes, hitting the reefer more heavily. He let his beard grow out, let his hair work its way into dreadlocks. Finally he told me that he was going to take a leave from school for a while. “Need a break from this shit,” he said. We were walking through a park in Compton, hanging out at an all-day festival there. It was a beautiful afternoon, everybody in shorts, children screeching as they ran through the grass, but Marcus seemed distracted and barely spoke. Only when we passed a group of bongo players did he seem to come to life. We sat beside them under a tree, transfixed by the sound, watching the dark, barely cupped hands dance low off the hide. After a while I started to get bored and wandered off to talk to a pretty young woman selling meat pies. When I returned, Marcus was still there, except he was playing now, his long legs crossed, borrowed bongos nestling in his lap. Through the haze of smoke that surrounded him, his face was expressionless; his eyes were narrow, as if he were trying to shut out the sun. For almost an hour I watched him play without rhythm or nuance, just pounding the hell out of those drums, beating back untold memories. And right then I realized that Marcus needed my help as much as I needed his, that I wasn’t the only one searching for answers. I looked down now at the abandoned New York street. Did Marcus know where he belonged? Did any of us? Where were the fathers, the uncles and grandfathers, who could help explain this gash in our hearts? Where were the healers who might help us rescue meaning from defeat? They were gone, vanished, swallowed up by time. Only their cloudy images remained, and their once-a-year letters full of dime store advice ….

• From Another Country (1962)

  But what difference would it make if I did?” “None,” he said, promptly. Then, “Well, some. I’d worry about my judgment.” “Judgment,” she said, “has nothing to do with love.” He looked at her sharply, but with gratitude, too. “For it’s love we’re talking about—?” “For what you seem to be trying to prove,” she said, “It had better be.” She was silent. Then she said, “Of course, she may also have something to prove.” “I think she has something to forget,” he said. “I think I can help her forget it.” She said nothing. She watched the cold trees and the cold park. She wondered how Richard’s work had gone that morning; she wondered about the children. It seemed, suddenly, that she had been away a long time, had failed very great obligations. And all she wanted in the world right now was to get home safely and find everything as she had left it—as she had left it so long ago, this morning. “You’re so juvenile,” she heard herself saying. She was using her most matronly tone. “You know so little”—she smiled—“about life. About women.” He smiled, too, a pale, weary smile. “All right. But I want something real to happen to me. I do. How do you find out about”—he grinned, mocking her—“life? About women? Do you know a lot about men?” The great numbers above faraway Columbus Circle glowed in the gray sky and said that it was twelve twenty-seven. She would get home just in time to make lunch. Then the depression she had been battling came down again, as though the sky had descended and turned into fog. “Once I thought I did,” she said. “Once I thought I knew. Once I was even younger than you are now.” Again he stared at her but this time said nothing. For a moment, as the road swerved, the skyline of New York rose before them like a jagged wall. Then it was gone. She lit a cigarette and wondered why, in that moment, she had so hated the proud towers, the grasping antennae. She had never hated the city before. Why did everything seem so pale and so profitless: and why did she feel so cold, as though nothing and no one could ever warm her again? Low in his throat Vivaldo hummed the blues they had heard at the funeral. He was thinking of Ida, dreaming of Ida, rushing ahead to what awaited him with Ida. For a moment she hated his youth, his expectations, possibilities, she hated his masculinity.

• From Another Country (1962)

  It was great charge.” “I knew you’d dig it. I like you, man.” He was surprised and yet not surprised by the intensity in Harold’s eyes. But he could not bear it; he turned his face away; then he put the weight of Harold’s head on his chest. “Please, man,” he told him after a moment, “don’t bother. It’s not worth it, nothing will happen. It’s been too long.” “What’s been too long?” And Vivaldo smiled to himself suddenly, a smile as sad as his tears, thinking of shooting matches and other contests on rooftops and basements and in locker-rooms and cars half his lifetime ago. And he had dreamed of it since, though it was only now that he remembered the dreams that he had dreamed. Feeling very cold now, inwardly cold, with Harold’s hand on his cock and Harold’s head on his chest, and knowing that: yes, something could happen, he recalled his fantasies—of the male mouth, male hands, the male organ, the male ass. Sometimes, a boy—who always rather reminded him of his younger brother, Stevie, and perhaps this was the prohibition, as, in others, it might be the key—passed him, and he watched the boy’s face and watched his ass, and he felt something, wanting to touch the boy, to make the boy laugh, to slap him across his young behind. So he knew that it was there, and he probably wasn’t frightened of it any more; but it was, possibly, too expensive for him, it did not matter enough. So he said to Harold, gently, “Understand me, man, I’m not putting you down. But my time with boys was a long time ago. I’ve been busy with girls. I’m sorry.” “And nothing can happen now?” “I’d rather not. I’m sorry.” Harold smiled. “I’m sorry, too.” Then, “Can I lie here with you, like this, just the same?” Vivaldo held him and closed his eyes. When he opened them, the sky was a great brass bowl above him. Harold lay near him, one hand on Vivaldo’s leg, asleep. Belle and Lorenzo lay wrapped in the blanket, like two dirty children. He stood up, moving too close to the edge, getting a dreadful glimpse of the waiting, baking streets. His mouth felt like Mississippi in the days when cotton was king. He hurried down the stairs into the streets, hurrying home to Ida. She would say, “My God, Vivaldo, where’ve you been? I’ve been calling this house all night long to let you know I had to go and sit in with some fellows in Jersey City. I keep telling you we better get an answering service, but you never hear anything I say!”

• From Another Country (1962)

  “But it ain’t going to work,” said Rufus. “It ain’t going to work.” They heard the whistles on the river; he walked to the window again. “I ought to get out of here. I better get out of here.” “Well, then, go. Don’t hang around, waiting—just go.” “I’m going to go,” said Rufus. “I’m going to go. I just want to see Leona one more time.” He stared at Vivaldo. “I just want to get laid—get blowed—loved—one more time.” “You know,” said Vivaldo, “I’m not really interested in the details of your sex life.” Rufus smiled. “No? I thought all you white boys had a big thing about how us spooks was making out.” “Well,” said Vivaldo, “I’m different.” “Yeah,” said Rufus, “I bet you are.” “I just want to be your friend,” said Vivaldo. “That’s all. But you don’t want any friends, do you?” “Yes, I do,” said Rufus, quietly. “Yes, I do.” He paused; then, slowly, with difficulty, “Don’t mind me. I know you’re the only friend I’ve got left in the world, Vivaldo.” And that’s why you hate me, Vivaldo thought, feeling still and helpless and sad. Now Vivaldo and Rufus sat together in silence, near the window of the pizzeria. There was little left for them to say. They had said it all—or Rufus had; and Vivaldo had listened. Music from a nearby night club came at them, faintly, through the windows, along with the grinding, unconquerable hum of the streets. And Rufus watched the streets with a helpless, sad intensity, as though he were waiting for Leona. These streets had claimed her. She had been found, Rufus said, one freezing night, half-naked, looking for her baby. She knew where it was, where they had hidden her baby, she knew the house; only she could not remember the address. And then, Rufus said, she had been taken to Bellevue, and he had been unable to get her out. The doctors had felt that it would be criminal to release her into the custody of the man who was the principal reason for her breakdown, and who had, moreover, no legal claim on her. They had notified Leona’s family, and her brother had come from the South and carried Leona back with him. Now she sat somewhere in Georgia, staring at the walls of a narrow room; and she would remain there forever. Vivaldo yawned and felt guilty. He was tired—tired of Rufus’ story, tired of the strain of attending, tired of friendship. He wanted to go home and lock his door and sleep. He was tired of the troubles of real people. He wanted to get back to the people he was inventing, whose troubles he could bear. But he was restless, too, and unwilling, now that he was out, to go home right away. “Let’s have a nightcap at Benno’s,” he said. And then, because he knew Rufus did not really want to go there, he added, “All right?”

• From Another Country (1962)

  Something was going on in her mind, something she could not name or stop; but it was almost as though she were her mind’s prisoner, as though the jaws of her mind had closed on her. “Well, at least that proves that you’re intelligent,” she said. “Much good may it do you.” She watched the cab roll down the Avenue which would eventually turn into the Avenue she knew. “I’d like to prove to her—one day,” he said; and paused. He looked out of the window. “I’d like to make her know that the world’s not as black as she thinks it is.” “Or,” she said, dryly, after a moment, “as white.” “Or as white,” he said, mildly. She sensed that he was refusing to react to her tone. Then he said, “You don’t like her—Ida.” “I like her well enough. I don’t know her.” “I guess that proves my point,” he said. “You don’t know her and you don’t want to know her.” “It doesn’t matter whether I like Ida or not,” she said. “The point is, you like her. Well, that’s fine. I don’t know why you want me to object. I don’t object. But what difference would it make if I did?” “None,” he said, promptly. Then, “Well, some. I’d worry about my judgment.” “Judgment,” she said, “has nothing to do with love.” He looked at her sharply, but with gratitude, too. “For it’s love we’re talking about—?” “For what you seem to be trying to prove,” she said, “It had better be.” She was silent. Then she said, “Of course, she may also have something to prove.” “I think she has something to forget,” he said. “I think I can help her forget it.” She said nothing. She watched the cold trees and the cold park. She wondered how Richard’s work had gone that morning; she wondered about the children. It seemed, suddenly, that she had been away a long time, had failed very great obligations. And all she wanted in the world right now was to get home safely and find everything as she had left it—as she had left it so long ago, this morning. “You’re so juvenile,” she heard herself saying. She was using her most matronly tone. “You know so little”—she smiled—“about life. About women.” He smiled, too, a pale, weary smile. “All right. But I want something real to happen to me. I do. How do you find out about”—he grinned, mocking her—“life? About women? Do you know a lot about men?” The great numbers above faraway Columbus Circle glowed in the gray sky and said that it was twelve twenty-seven. She would get home just in time to make lunch. Then the depression she had been battling came down again, as though the sky had descended and turned into fog. “Once I thought I did,” she said. “Once I thought I knew. Once I was even younger than you are now.”

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

  As I rose to my feet, cold with embarrassment, I realized that my reactions were entirely different from those of most of my contemporaries in this strange new world. Perhaps they always would be. But there may have been another reason why I kissed the ground that evening. Ever since my dispensation had come through, many of my fellow students and tutors had made a point of congratulating me. “You must be so relieved to be out of all that!” one of them had said. “It never seemed quite right for you.” “How exciting!” others had exclaimed. “You can start all over again! You can do anything, be anything you want to be! Everything is ahead of you!” It was true, in a sense: now I could fall in love, wear beautiful clothes, travel, make a lot of money—all the things that, most people presumed, I had been yearning to do for the past seven years. But I didn’t feel excited or relieved. I didn’t want to do any of the things that people expected. I had no sense of boundless opportunity. Instead I felt, quite simply, sad, and was constantly wracked by a very great regret. When I pictured that dedicated Lenten scene in the convent, it seemed unbearably poignant because it was now closed to me forever. I mourned the loss of an ideal and the absence of dedication from my new life, and I also had a nagging suspicion that if only I had tried just a little bit harder, I would not have had to leave. There had been something missing in me. I had failed to make a gift of myself to God. And so I felt like a penitent, and perhaps, when I kissed the floor that night, I had unconsciously wanted—just once—to appear in my true colors to the rest of the world. In Beginning the World I described how I had threaded my way through the tables, flinching from the curious gaze of the other students, until I was rescued by a group who had become my friends and who had kept a kindly but tactful eye on me during the past difficult weeks. There was Rosemary, a cheerful extrovert, who was reading modern languages; Fiona, a gentler, more thoughtful girl; her constant companion, Pat, who had been a pupil at one of the boarding schools run by my order; and finally Jane, who was also reading English. All were Catholics. All had some experience of nuns.

• From Another Country (1962)

  “All ready.” He picked up her bag and gave it to her. They kissed briefly again, and walked down the stairs into the streets. He put his arm around her waist. They walked in silence, and the street they walked was empty. But there were people in the bars, gesticulating and seeming to howl in the yellow light, behind the smoky glass; and people in the side streets, loitering and skulking; dogs on leashes, sniffing with their masters. They passed the movie theater, and were on the Avenue, facing the hospital. And in the shadow of the great, darkened marquee, they smiled into each other’s faces. “I’m glad you called me,” he said. “I’m so glad.” She said, “I’m glad you were home.” They saw a cab coming crosstown and Eric put up his hand. “I’ll call you in a few days,” she said, “around Friday or Saturday.” “All right, Cass.” The cab stopped and he opened the door and put her in, leaned in and kissed her. “Be good, little gal.” “You, too.” He closed the door on her, and waved. The cab began to move, and she watched him move, alone, into the long, dark street. There were no phone booths on deserted Fifth Avenue and Vivaldo walked the high, silent block to Sixth Avenue and entered the first bar he came to, heading straight for the phone booth. He rang the number of the restaurant and waited quite a while before an irritated male voice answered. He asked for Miss Ida Scott.” “She didn’t come in tonight. She called in sick. Maybe you can get her at home.” “Thank you,” he said. But the man had already hung up. He felt nothing at all, certainly not astonishment; yet, he leaned against the phone for an instant, freezing and faint. Then he dialed his own number. There was no answer.