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.

Page 128 of 212 · 20 per page

• From Confessions of a Mask (1958)

  A second passed. There is not the slightest sensation of pleasure. Two seconds. It is just the same. Three seconds. . . . I understood everything. I drew away from her and stood for an instant regarding her with sad eyes. If she had looked into my eyes at that instant she would surely have received a hint as to the indefinable nature of my love for her. Whatever it was, no one could have asserted positively whether such a love was or was not humanly possible. But Sonoko, overwhelmed with bashfulness and innocent joy, kept her eyes cast down, doll-like. Saying not a word, I took her arm, as though she were an invalid, and we began walking toward the bicycles. I must flee, I kept telling myself. Without a moment's delay I must flee. I was in a panic. And to keep from arousing suspicion by looking as glum as I felt, I pretended to be even more cheerful than usual. The success of my little ruse placed me in an even more difficult position: during the evening meal my happy looks coincided so well with Sonoko's deep absentmindedness that everyone drew the obvious conclusion. Sonoko looked even younger and fresher than usual. There had always been a storybook quality about her face and figure. Now there was an air about her that reminded one exactly how a storybook maiden looks and acts when in love. Seeing her naive maidenly heart exposed before me in this way, I was only too clearly aware that I had had no right to hold such a beautiful spirit in my arms, and no matter how I attempted to continue my pretense at gaiety, my conversation flagged. Noticing this, Sonoko's mother expressed some anxiety concerning my health. Sonoko jumped to the hasty conclusion that she knew exactly what I was thinking, and in order to rally me, she shook her locket in my direction, giving the signal of "Don't worry." In spite of myself, I smiled back at her. The adults at the table showed a row of faces half-shocked and half-annoyed by our audacious exchange of smiles. Suddenly I realized that the imaginations behind this row of faces were already hard at work calling up pictures of a future for the two of us together, and again I was struck with terror. Next day we went again to the same spot by the golf course. I noticed a clump of wild flowers that we had trampled underfoot upon departing—yellow camomiles, relics of our yesterday. Today the grass was dry. Habit is a horrible thing. I repeated the kiss for which I had so repented. But this time it was like the kiss one gives his little sister. And by just this much did it savor all the more of immorality."I wonder when I'll see you next," she said.

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  There was also wisdom in those streets. I think now of the old rule that held that should a boy be set upon in someone else’s chancy hood, his friends must stand with him, and they must all take their beating together. I now know that within this edict lay the key to all living. None of us were promised to end the fight on our feet, fists raised to the sky. We could not control our enemies’ number, strength, nor weaponry. Sometimes you just caught a bad one. But whether you fought or ran, you did it together, because that is the part that was in our control. What we must never do is willingly hand over our own bodies or the bodies of our friends. That was the wisdom: We knew we did not lay down the direction of the street, but despite that, we could—and must—fashion the way of our walk. And that is the deeper meaning of your name—that the struggle, in and of itself, has meaning. That wisdom is not unique to our people, but I think it has special meaning to those of us born out of mass rape, whose ancestors were carried off and divided up into policies and stocks. I have raised you to respect every human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. “Slavery” is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren. But when she dies, the world—which is really the only world she can ever know—ends. For this woman, enslavement is not a parable. It is damnation. It is the never-ending night. And the length of that night is most of our history. Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains—whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  I’ve met some people in this predicament, and their lives are pretty harsh. Their partners feel confused and rebuffed, they feel miserable in their own skins, their lives get stalled in a variety of ways, and they are rarely enthusiastic about contributing to lesbian culture or politics. Butch women enjoy being butch. They’ve got their own lingo, fashion, style, and moves. I won’t claim that their relationship to being women is a simple one. It can be damn hard to claim your womanhood if a whole culture is telling you to stop “acting like a man.” But there’s a difference between the place of self-acceptance and sexiness that a butch woman gets to when she’s waded through the homophobic twaddle, and the perpetual, deep-seated sense of wrongness that a transman has in his body. We always want to take it too far. Strapping it on isn’t a simple matter of enjoying a sex toy for us. A dildo can be a prosthesis that temporarily makes us feel better, but it’s also a reminder of the gap between our physical and mental realities. As a consequence, many transmen can’t go near dildos or harnesses. It’s just too painful, not a fun sexual fantasy. People who have never needed to question the sex that appears on their birth certificate display some double standards when they invalidate the gender identity of my people. A similar process takes place when we are expected to justify our sexual orientations far past the standard of proof that cisgendered people (genetic men and women) need to feel self-satisfied and secure. These contradictions are especially clear when “radical dyke feminists” are pitted against “sell-out transmen.” Most lesbians and gay men will tell you that they didn’t choose to be homosexual. It’s an intrinsic part of their nature, something they became aware of at an early age, an inherent quality that cannot be changed by fundamentalist Christian “reparative therapy” or other forms of bullying. And most cisgendered men and women never wonder where their gender identity came from. They just take it for granted, like having ten fingers and toes, or a certain skin color. So why should lesbianism become a privileged identity that is somehow superior to other sexual orientations? If you can’t choose whether to become a lesbian or not, why is it a moral failing for others to be something different? The sexual orientations and gender identities of transgendered people come from the same place that other people’s do. The same social and biological processes that shaped you, shape us. If you are the product of genetic predisposition—so are we.

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  She called her son—Prince Jones—“Rocky” in honor of her grandfather, who went by “Rock.” I asked about his childhood, because the fact is that I had not known Prince all that well. He was among the people I would be happy to see at a party, whom I would describe to a friend as “a good brother,” though I could not really account for his comings and goings. So she sketched him for me so that I might better understand. She said that he once hammered a nail into an electrical socket and shorted out the entire house. She said that he once dressed himself in a suit and tie, got down on one knee, and sang “Three Times a Lady” to her. She said that he’d gone to private schools his entire life—schools filled with Dreamers—but he made friends wherever he went, in Louisiana and later in Texas. I asked her how his friends’ parents treated her. “By then I was the chief of radiology at the local hospital,” she said. “And so they treated me with respect.” She said this with no love in her eye, coldly, as though she were explaining a mathematical function. Like his mother, Prince was smart. In high school he was admitted to a Texas magnet school for math and science, where students acquire college credit. Despite the school drawing from a state with roughly the population of Angola, Australia, or Afghanistan, Prince was the only black child. I asked Dr. Jones if she had wanted him to go to Howard. She smiled and said, “No.” Then she added, “It’s so nice to be able to talk about this.” This relaxed me a little, because I could think of myself as something more than an intrusion. I asked where she had wanted him to go for college. She said, “Harvard. And if not Harvard, Princeton. And if not Princeton, Yale. And if not Yale, Columbia. And if not Columbia, Stanford. He was that caliber of student.” But like at least one third of all the students who came to Howard, Prince was tired of having to represent to other people. These Howard students were not like me. They were the children of the Jackie Robinson elite, whose parents rose up out of the ghettos, and the sharecropping fields, went out into the suburbs, only to find that they carried the mark with them and could not escape. Even when they succeeded, as so many of them did, they were singled out, made examples of, transfigured into parables of diversity. They were symbols and markers, never children or young adults. And so they come to Howard to be normal—and even more, to see how broad the black normal really is.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  This was no doubt supposed to be a bold and irrefutable demand; instead, it was a whine full of self-doubt and self-pity. “If I have anything that belongs to you, I’ll be happy to give it back,” the spoiler said carefully. “Damn right you will!” A long silence followed. What was he supposed to do, the spoiler wondered, start turning out his pockets? It finally occurred to him to simply say, “Can you explain this a little more? What’s happening here?” “Don’t play dumb, you sneaking, lying son of a bitch. What do you think this is, a hold-up? I don’t want your money, you asshole. I want my self-respect back! I want to be a man again.” “Oh. I see.” He thought that over, his brain working with serene rapidity despite the fact that this was a life-or-death situation. “If I hurt you, I’m sorry,” he said. “But I would never deprive anyone of his manhood. I love men. All I want to do is give them what they really want. How can anything that two men do together make one of them less than a man? If I did that I would defeat my own purpose, can’t you see?” “Bastard. You planned it. You plotted against me. I trusted you, and you turned on me. Now I’m going to show you what it feels like to lose control when you think you’re in the driver’s seat and everything is coming up roses. How do you like it so far, huh?” “I wish I understood why you are so angry,” the spoiler said, deeply saddened by his inability to console this man. “Did I do anything to you that you didn’t enjoy?” There was no answer. The gun shook. Would it go off by accident? “Did I do anything you didn’t want me to do?” Silence. “Did you really want me to stop? Would it make you happy to do the exact same thing to me, whatever it was, right now? Come inside with me. I promise I will let you. You can even take pictures.” He had no idea how haughty this sounded. One of the things he had never done to get next to someone was beg or plead. Quiet. Quiet busy as the grave. “Do you want to be sure no one ever does that to you again? I give you my word I won’t ever touch you or notice you. It will be like we never met.” Still no answer. ‘I’m getting tired of talking to myself,’ the spoiler thought. Was that grating sound pent-up weeping about to burst forth, or was it someone grinding his teeth as he cocked a trigger? “Can you think about anything else when you come?” Macho Sluts A Dash of Vanilla You’re lucky you’re handsome and I’m in love. Otherwise, I wouldn’t bother. It’s very difficult to get you off. I’m complaining, but there’s also a part of me that likes it.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  If you try to go stealth (start a new life in which you hide or deny your transsexual experience), you are vulnerable to being blackmailed or outed. We never know, if we make a friend or take a lover, whether we are letting somebody get too close and trusting the wrong person. Does that sound like any kind of “privilege” to you? Being out of the closet gives you peace of mind when it comes to being manipulated by a guilty secret, but cisgendered people just love to remind you that they would have known you were trans even if you kept your mouth shut. I don’t know why this is so important to y’all. God forbid a tranny get an hour or two to think about something else, like doing the dishes or reading the newspaper. An exlover of mine who worked as a bartender at a popular club for bears bitterly called this his “daily reminder.” It may be that trans liberation is motivated by much the same thing that led to the Stonewall Riots—the simple desire to be left the fuck alone. If I sound a bit raw, it’s because I am. I find this whole topic unbearably painful. I came out as a lesbian at age seventeen. By then, I had pushed my little boy so far down that I had almost forgotten the childhood arguments and ridicule that took place every time I told adults that I was not a little girl. Feminism, I thought, would cure me. I believed I only felt that way because a sexist society had taught me to hate being a woman. If I became a very strong and liberated woman, one who could do anything that men took for granted, and in fact beat men at their own game, I wouldn’t want to be a man any more. This repression was certainly aided by the fact that when I looked at the way most men lived, I was repulsed. Until I encountered the men’s leather community, I never saw men who might be role models or idols for me. So how am I, and how are you, to understand the three decades that I spent loving dykes, living in the lesbian community, and writing about the world from a queer woman’s point of view? I know that for many people, the political stances that I took were radical only as long as they were taken by a woman. It’s commonly believed that there’s nothing radical about a man defending pornography, for example.

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  That Sunday, with that host, on that news show, I tried to explain this as best I could within the time allotted. But at the end of the segment, the host flashed a widely shared picture of an eleven-year-old black boy tearfully hugging a white police officer. Then she asked me about “hope.” And I knew then that I had failed. And I remembered that I had expected to fail. And I wondered again at the indistinct sadness welling up in me. Why exactly was I sad? I came out of the studio and walked for a while. It was a calm December day. Families, believing themselves white, were out on the streets. Infants, raised to be white, were bundled in strollers. And I was sad for these people, much as I was sad for the host and sad for all the people out there watching and reveling in a specious hope. I realized then why I was sad. When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream. I have seen that dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is treehouses and the Cub Scouts. The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies. And knowing this, knowing that the Dream persists by warring with the known world, I was sad for the host, I was sad for all those families, I was sad for my country, but above all, in that moment, I was sad for you.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  The lady, hearing this, contained her tears, contrary to the nature of woman, though not without great unease, and answered, 'My lord, I ever knew my mean estate to be nowise sortable with your nobility, and for that which I have been with you I have still confessed myself indebted to you and to God, nor have I ever made nor held it mine, as given to me, but have still accounted it but as a loan. It pleaseth you to require it again and it must and doth please me to restore it to you. Here is your ring wherewith you espoused me; take it. You bid me carry away with me that dowry which I brought hither, which to do you will need no paymaster and I neither purse nor packhorse, for I have not forgotten that you had me naked, and if you account it seemly that this my body, wherein I have carried children begotten of you, be seen of all, I will begone naked; but I pray you, in requital of my maidenhead, which I brought hither and bear not hence with me, that it please you I may carry away at the least one sole shift over and above my dowry.' Gualtieri, who had more mind to weep than to otherwhat, natheless kept a stern countenance and said, 'So be it; carry away a shift.' As many as stood around besought him to give her a gown, so that she who had been thirteen years and more his wife should not be seen go forth of his house on such mean and shameful wise as it was to depart in her shift; but their prayers all went for nothing; wherefore the lady, having commended them to God, went forth his house in her shift, barefoot and nothing on her head, and returned to her father, followed by the tears and lamentations of all who saw her. Giannucolo, who had never been able to believe it true that Gualtieri should entertain his daughter to wife and went in daily expectation of this event, had kept her the clothes which she had put off the morning that Gualtieri had married her and now brought them to her; whereupon she donned them and addressed herself, as she had been wont to do, to the little offices of her father's house, enduring the cruel onslaught of hostile fortune with a stout heart.

• From Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1939)

  Only the means for realizing them, the paths traced over our 'hodological space' have changed. If for example, I have just learned that I am ruined, I no longer dispose of the same means (a private car, etc.) to accomplish them. I shall have to substitute means new to me (taking the motor-bus, etc.), which is precisely what I do not want to do. My melancholy is a method of suppressing the obligation to look for these new ways, by transforming the present structure of the world, replacing it with a totally undifferentiated structure. What it comes to, in short, is that I make the world into an affectively neutral reality, a system which is, affectively, in complete equilibrium. Objects highly charged with affect are de-charged, brought down to affective zero, and therefore apprehended as perfectly equivalent and interchangeable. In other words, lacking both the ability and the will to carry out the projects I formerly entertained, I behave in such a manner that the universe requires nothing more from me. This one can do only by acting upon oneself, by 'lowering the flame of life to a pin-point' — and the noetic correlate of this attitude is what we call Bleakness: the universe is bleak; that is, of undifferentiated structure. At the same time, therefore, we naturally draw back into ourselves, we 'efface ourselves', and the noetic counterpart of that is the Refuge. The entire universe is bleak, and it is precisely in order to protect ourselves from its frightful, illimitable monotony that we make some place or other into a 'shelter'. That is the one differentiating factor in the absolute monotony of the world: a bleak wall, a little darkness to screen us from that bleak immensity. Active sadness can take many forms; but the one cited by Janet (of the psychasthenic who throws a fit of nerves because she does not want to make her confession) may be characterized as a refusal. It exemplifies above all a negative behaviour intended to deny the urgency of certain problems and to replace them by others. The patient wants to move Janet's feelings. This means that she wants to change his attitude of impassible expectancy into one of affectionate concern. She wants this and she makes use of her body to bring it about. At the same time, by putting herself into such a state that the confession would be impossible, she is renouncing that act as beyond her power. Now, and for as long as she is in tears and shaken with her sobbing, all possibility of speaking is taken from her. Here, then, the potentiality is not eliminated, the confession remains 'to be made'. But it has retreated beyond the reach of the patient, who can no longer will to make it, but only hope to do so one day.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Tuar evening the old house seemed curiously thoughtful and curiously sad after all the merry-making. David’s second white bow had come untied and was hanging in two limp ends from his collar. Pauline had gone to church to light candles; Pierre, together with Pauline’s niece who would take Adèle’s place, was preparing dinner. And the sadness of the house flowed out like a stream to mingle itself with the sadness in Stephen. Adèle and Jean, the simplicity of it . . . they loved, they married, and after a while they would care for each other all over again, renew- ing their youth and their love in their children. So orderly, placid and safe it seemed, this social scheme evolved from creation; this guarding of two young and ardent lives for the sake of the lives that might follow after. A fruitful and peaceful road it must be. The same road had been taken by those founders of Morton who had raised up children from father to son, from father to son until the advent of Stephen; and their blood was her blood — what they had found good in their day, seemed equally good to their descendant. Surely never was outlaw more law-abiding at heart, than this, the last of the Gordons. So now a great sadness took hold upon her, because she per- ceived both dignity and beauty in the coming together of Adéle and Jean, very simply and in accordance with custom. And this sadness mingling with that of the house, widened into a flood that compassed Mary and through her David, and they both went and sat very close to Stephen on the study divan. As the twilight gradually merged into dusk, these three must huddle even closer together — David with his head upon Mary’s lap, Mary with her head against Stephen’s shoulder. ‘CHAPTER 50 I TEPHEN ought to have gone to England that summer; at Morton there had been a change of agent, and once again cer- tain questions had arisen which required her careful personal attention. But time had not softened Anna’s attitude to Mary, and time had not lessened Stephen’s exasperation — the more so as Mary no longer hid the bitterness that she felt at this treatment. So Stephen tackled the business by writing a number of long and wearisome letters, unwilling to set foot again in the house where Mary Llewellyn would not be welcome. But as always the thought of England wounded, bringing with it the old familiar longing — homesick she would feel as she sat at her desk writing those wearisome business letters. For even as Jamie must crave for the grey, wind-swept street and the wind-swept uplands of Beedles, so Stephen must crave for the curving hills, for the long green hedges and pastures of Morton. Jamie openly wept when such moods were upon her, but the easement of tears was denied to Stephen.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  At Morton she stopped the car by the lakes and sat staring through the trees at the glint of water. For a long while she sat there without knowing why, unless it was that she wished to re- member. But she found that she could not even be certain of the kind of dress that Angela had worn — it had been of some soft stuff, that much she remembered, so soft that it had easily torn, for the rest her memories of it were vague — though she very much wanted to remember that dress. A faint rumble of thunder came out of the west, where the clouds were banking up ominously purple. Some uncertain and rather hysterical swallows flew high and then low at the sound of the thunder. Her sense of depression was now much less gentle, it increased every raoment, turning to sadness. She was sad in spirit and mind and body — her body felt dejected, she was sad all over. And now some one was whistling down by the stables, old Williams, she suspected, for the whistle was tuneless. The loss of his teeth had disgruntled his whistle; yes, she was sure that that must be Williams. A horse whinnied as one bucket clanked against another — sounds came clearly this evening; they were watering the horses. Anna’s young carriage horses would be paw- ing their straw, impatient because they were feeling thirsty. Then a gate slammed. That would be the gate of the meadow where the heifers were pastured — it was yellow with king-cups. One of the men from the home farm was going his rounds, secur- ing all gates before sunset. Something dropped on the bonnet of the car with a ping. Looking up she met the eyes of a squirrel ; he was leaning well forward on his tiny front paws, peering crossly; he had dropped his nut on the bonnet. She got out of the car and retrieved his supper, throwing it under his tree while he THE WELL OF LONELINESS 157 waited. Like a flash he was down and then back on his tree, de- vouring the nut with his legs well straddled. All around were the homely activities of evening, the water- ing of horses, the care of cattle — pleasant, peaceable things that preceded the peace and repose of the coming nightfall. And sud- denly Stephen longed to share them, an immense need to share them leapt up within her, so that she ached with this urgent long: ing that was somehow a part of her bodily dejection.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  And with that Anna had perforce to be content. Very silently Stephen now went about Morton, and her eyes looked bewildered and deeply unhappy. At night she would lie awake thinking of Martin, missing him, mourning him as though he were dead. But she could not accept this death without question, without feeling that she was in some way blameworthy. What was she, what manner of curious creature, to have been so repelled by a lover like Martin? Yet she had been repelled, and even her pity for the man could not wipe out that stronger feeling. She had driven him away because something within her was intolerant of that new aspect of Martin. Oh, but she mourned his good, honest friendship; he had taken that from her, the thing she most needed—but perhaps after all it had never existed except as a cloak for this other emotion. And then, lying there in the thickening darkness, she would shrink from what might be waiting in the future, for all that had just happened might happen again—there were other men in the world beside Martin. Fool, never to have visualized this thing before, never to have faced the possibility of it; now she understood her resentment of men when their voices grew soft and insinuating. Yes, and now she knew to the full the meaning of fear, and Martin it was, who had taught her its meaning—her friend— the man she had utterly trusted had pulled the scales from her eyes and revealed it. Fear, stark fear, and the shame of such fear—that was the legacy left her by Martin. And yet he had made her so happy at first, she had felt so contented, so natural with him; but that was because they had been like two men, companions, sharing each other’s interests. And at this thought her bitterness would all but flow over; it was cruel, it was cowardly of him to have deceived her, when all the time he had only been waiting for the chance to force this other thing on her. But what was she? Her thoughts slipping back to her childhood, would find many things in her past that perplexed her. She had never been quite like the other small children, she had always been lonely and discontented, she had always been trying to be some one else—that was why she had dressed herself up as young Nelson. Remembering those days she would think of her father, and would wonder if now, as then, he could help her. Supposing she should ask him to explain about Martin? Her father was wise, and had infinite patience—yet somehow she instinctively dreaded to ask him. Alone—it was terrible to feel so much alone—to feel oneself different from other people. At one time she had rather enjoyed this distinction—she had rather enjoyed dressing up as young Nelson. Yet had she enjoyed it? Or had it been done as some sort of inadequate, childish protest?

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Had Emilia's story been much longer protracted, it is like the compassion had by the young ladies on the misfortunes of Madam Beritola would have brought them to tears; but, an end being now made thereof, it pleased the queen that Pamfilo should follow on with his story, and accordingly he, who was very obedient, began thus, "Uneath, charming ladies, is it for us to know that which is meet for us, for that, as may oftentimes have been seen, many, imagining that, were they but rich, they might avail to live without care and secure, have not only with prayers sought riches of God, but have diligently studied to acquire them, grudging no toil and no peril in the quest, and who,--whereas, before they became enriched, they loved their lives,--once having gotten their desire, have found folk to slay them, for greed of so ample an inheritance. Others of low estate, having, through a thousand perilous battles and the blood of their brethren and their friends, mounted to the summit of kingdoms, thinking in the royal estate to enjoy supreme felicity, without the innumerable cares and alarms whereof they see and feel it full, have learned, at the cost of their lives, that poison is drunken at royal tables in cups of gold. Many there be who have with most ardent appetite desired bodily strength and beauty and divers personal adornments and perceived not that they had desired ill till they found these very gifts a cause to them of death or dolorous life. In fine, not to speak particularly of all the objects of human desire, I dare say that there is not one which can, with entire assurance, be chosen by mortal men as secure from the vicissitudes of fortune; wherefore, an we would do aright, needs must we resign ourselves to take and possess that which is appointed us of Him who alone knoweth that which behoveth unto us and is able to give it to us. But for that, whereas men sin in desiring various things, you, gracious ladies, sin, above all, in one, to wit, in wishing to be fair,--insomuch that, not content with the charms vouchsafed you by nature, you still with marvellous art study to augment them,--it pleaseth me to recount to you how ill-fortunedly fair was a Saracen lady, whom it befell, for her beauty, to be in some four years' space nine times wedded anew.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  About the time America learned about the White House taping system. It was laced with some bad stuff. The commodity being traded was wives, the Janey Williamses of New Canaan. The payoff was supposed to be joy, but it was the cheapest approximation of exalted feeling. It was just a demonstration of options, nothing more. From her meditative position on the couch, in her unflattering slacks and Hush Puppies, Elena felt she could judge the motives of New Canaan, Connecticut. Because she had permitted her own options to dwindle. Time sputtered and flickered and consumed the comedy of her efforts. Elena read. She roused herself now and then. For dinner: Green Giant frozen peas in butter sauce, leftover stuffing, and leftover turkey. This parsimonious and homely table awaited her husband and daughter. It was monks who first taught the art of reading in silence. During the Dark Ages. Augustine, perhaps, was first. And silence was a tongue Elena understood. Silence was her idiom for support and caring. Silence was permissive and contemplative and nonconfrontational and there was melody to it. It was both earth and ether. When Paul hinted that he had been experimenting with drugs, Elena said nothing. When Wendy boasted of her first period, Elena said nothing. Later she placed on her daughter’s pillow the box of Kotex, with the instruction circular removed and placed carefully beside it. Silence suited the complexities of these passages—the initiation in yajé, and in the lunar calendar. If you were an American Indian, you went off into the bush and hallucinated on your own. And if you were a Druid girl, a marriage would be prepared for you, and this very effluent would be a condiment at your feast. We would drink your menstrual blood, and later, eat your placenta. Elena said nothing about this or other matters, and not just because she had found in this village of Republicans—Republicans all the way back to Garfield —that she couldn’t articulate her own opinions without appearing foolish, but because she came by this silence through experience. Her Irish forebears went from the kind of trash you eighty-sixed from a riverside saloon to the sorts of people who repealed the Volstead Act. They folded rags-to-riches fabrications so deeply into their recollections that they believed their own public relations. Or that at least was her father’s way. Her father had been a newspaperman, a publisher of cheap tabloid philosophies. He had worked his way through a Midwestern journalism school moonlighting as a soda jerk. He had hopped a freight train east. Started in the mail room. He had married his high-school sweetheart. The strain of bearing up under this tabloid myth led to the mute intolerance of her father’s household.

• From The Incendiaries (2018)

  I quit the Exhibit visits. I received an email from Leigh asking if I’d like to get a bite to eat sometime, but I didn’t know what to write. One day sped past, then several, until I thought it would be more insulting if I wrote, at this late point, than if I didn’t respond at all. The note might have been lost in transit, or she’d written to the wrong Will Kendall. – While I still had Phoebe with me, hot in my arms, singing Ella Fitzgerald back to life as I washed the dishes, I knew what I was losing, and it ached as if she’d already gone. The expected rift came in late March. I was home; she planned to have gimlets with Julian at the Colonial. I’d heard his reproaches tolling from Phoebe’s earpiece when he called. I miss you, angel, he’d said. Bix misses you. He says no one’s asked for his house special in ages, and how could you be unkind to Bix? I was in the kitchen, fixing a salad. I sliced a red onion lengthwise, then into minute squares. I swept the last diced bits off the knife: piled amethysts, I thought, a geode. I had the idea I’d show it to Phoebe. I’d finished most of a bottle of wine. She was in the bedroom, door open, trying to zip up a dress. It was a black shift I liked, and I laughed as I said, I’m coming, I’ll help. She flinched at the sound, but she’d left the door open. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that I’d noticed she was changing. She backed up to the wall, bent elbows slanting above her head. No, I can do it, she said. Let me help, I insisted. I’ll zip the dress. I spun Phoebe to face the wall, lighthearted, but then I saw that, in the space where the knit dress gaped open, she had a back crisscrossed with welts, bruises. In spots, the skin had broken. Some of the marks had partially healed. Others looked fresh, a dull red. Phoebe, I said. What is this? She pulled away from me, flushing. Phoebe, please— It’s nothing. Who did this to you? She walked out of the room, and I followed. We sat at the kitchen table. I asked if I should call the police, if she was in pain. No. Phoebe, what happened? She’d tell me, she said. But first, I had to listen. They’d been holding group penances. In turn, they detailed how they’d failed God, then asked the others to help them with physical notes of what they’d resolved. One night, they sang to God while they knelt on uncooked rice grains, hands up until their arms collapsed. They fasted. The flesh is strong; the mind, frail. We believe with our bodies, she said.

• From The Incendiaries (2018)

  What I’d do without you, I don’t know, honey, she said. She laughed a little, rueful. The exhale rustled the line, and she almost sounded like her old self again. The mother I’d had used to bring kitchen-table bouquets from the garden: buttercups, dahlia. Goldenrod in armfuls, the paint-daub petals trailing, flickering, like tattered flags. Nose dusted with pollen, she sang Donizetti arias in phonetic Italian. When I was an infant, she waltzed me to bel canto until I slept. She’d been ill a long time; still, it wasn’t until last March, in my father’s absence, that she first had to be hospitalized. I returned home from a spring-break mission to Beijing, a trip I’d had planned for months, to find she’d moved into the living room, stationed on an airbed to avoid what she’d shared with him. He’d fled to Florida to live with a girlfriend we hadn’t known existed. I learned this from the note he left; my mother had stopped talking. The cut flowers had wilted. I changed the vases. When she did, at last, get up, she sat gazing into a compact. Once, as I watched, she brushed lipstick on the reflection. But when I was hired at Michelangelo’s, Paul, who owned the place, had indicated I might attain a future promotion. He could use a college kid like me to help snap the whip, like an assistant-managing type, he said. Since then, he hadn’t brought it up. I thought of what I’d spent these past couple of months on clothes. Oxford shirts, marlin-printed shorts. The white-soled boat shoes, out of season until spring. Ribbon belts. In thrift stores, online, in the attempt to look like what I claimed to be, I scavenged polo shirts in pink, azure, and apple-green, the bizarrely colorful regalia of the ruling class. I wore the polos layered; I ridged collars upright, like gills. Meanwhile, my mother bagged groceries in Carmenita. I deposited much of what I made in tips into my mother’s account, helping with basic necessities: rent, medical bills, but each week I still had a little extra, which, if I’d saved, I could have given at once, instead of asking that she wait. – Fifteen minutes before the gates opened at Michelangelo’s, I found Paul. I asked if he’d thought about the promotion he’d said was possible. He stood at the reservations pulpit, writing in his tight script on the back of a menu. Sure, I’ve thought about it, he said, not looking up. His gold pen scratched out a line. Is anything decided? I asked. The pen scraped. His belt-halved gut bulged out, grazing the zinc edge, like an animal about to lunge. It fit his look of menace: if provoked, his flesh might achieve its escape. I glanced past him, trying not to stare. In a torn baseball cap, a man slumped against the other side of the glass. It had started raining. Paul? What’s that? he said. Do I qualify for the job?

• From The Decameron (1353)

  THE SECOND STORY [Day the Fourth] FRA ALBERTO GIVETH A LADY TO BELIEVE THAT THE ANGEL GABRIEL IS ENAMOURED OF HER AND IN HIS SHAPE LIETH WITH HER SUNDRY TIMES; AFTER WHICH, FOR FEAR OF HER KINSMEN, HE CASTETH HIMSELF FORTH OF HER WINDOW INTO THE CANAL AND TAKETH REFUGE IN THE HOUSE OF A POOR MAN, WHO ON THE MORROW CARRIETH HIM, IN THE GUISE OF A WILD MAN OF THE WOODS, TO THE PIAZZA, WHERE, BEING RECOGNIZED, HE IS TAKEN BY HIS BRETHREN AND PUT IN PRISON The story told by Fiammetta had more than once brought the tears to the eyes of the ladies her companions; but, it being now finished, the king with a stern countenance said, "My life would seem to me a little price to give for half the delight that Guiscardo had with Ghismonda, nor should any of you ladies marvel thereat, seeing that every hour of my life I suffer a thousand deaths, nor for all that is a single particle of delight vouchsafed me. But, leaving be my affairs for the present, it is my pleasure that Pampinea follow on the order of the discourse with some story of woeful chances and fortunes in part like to mine own; which if she ensue like as Fiammetta hath begun, I shall doubtless begin to feel some dew fallen upon my fire." Pampinea, hearing the order laid upon her, more by her affection apprehended the mind of the ladies her companions than that of Filostrato by his words,[224] wherefore, being more disposed to give them some diversion than to content the king, farther than in the mere letter of his commandment, she bethought herself to tell a story, that should, without departing from the proposed theme, give occasion for laughter, and accordingly began as follows:

• From The Incendiaries (2018)

  It was late, almost morning. I left the bed when a man behind the partition began yelling. I was still in the previous night’s clothes, though with ankle-length hospital socks covering my feet. Torn tights chafed my crotch. I walked the half-mile home, the sidewalk cold through thin fabric. Mica specks, like felled stars, prickled the stone. But most of it was filth. I avoided broken glass, ripped foil bags. Slicks of fresh dog shit. I picked each step through trash. The sun was rising. I hadn’t been allowed outside, when I was a child, without putting on sun lotion. My mother’s light, cool hands patted protective liquid on my face. She fastened a wide-brim hat beneath my chin, tying the ribbons in a firm knot, loops aligned. Such pains she’d taken, for the little I’d since become. 10.WILLI stayed the night with Phoebe. In the morning, I watched as she slept, netted in white sheets. Nostrils flared with each long inhale. Pearl studs glinted at slim earlobes. Minute, fish-scale veins patterned Phoebe’s eyelids in faint blue. The birthmark speckling a left clavicle, slight indents at both temples—from the start, I wanted Phoebe memorized. In the old-gold light of morning, I had the idea she might have been a wild sea-creature who’d washed onshore, luck’s gift, legs tucked like a mermaid’s tail. I learned to swim before I could walk, she’d said. But I was so involved with the piano, I went three years without using my own pool. It was still early, not quite six. I waited as long as I could; at last, I tried shaking Phoebe awake, but she rolled toward the wall. – I left Platt Hall as a drunk slouched past, the label on his bottle dissolving. I wished he’d solicit cash; in the mood I was in, spilling with goodwill, I’d have relished giving him something. If I’d been riding the bus, I’d have looked around to find a person who could use my seat. Instead, I thought to check my phone, and I saw I’d missed a call. I listened to the message my mother had left: the station-wagon engine had died. In the shop, she’d learned that fixing it would cost hundreds of dollars. While she could enlist a church friend to provide rides to and from work, they lived on opposite sides of town. She needed the engine fixed as soon as possible. When I knew she’d be up, I called. I don’t have the money, not yet, but I’ll figure it out, I promised.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  She found him sitting with the Bible on his knees, peering crossly down at the Scriptures through his glasses. He had taken to reading the Scriptures aloud to himself—a melancholy occupation. He was at this now. As Stephen entered she could hear him mumbling from Revelation: ‘And the heads of the horses were as the heads of lions; and out of their mouths issued fire and smoke and brimstone.’ He looked up, and hastily twitched off his glasses: ‘Miss Stephen!’ ‘Sit still—stop where you are, Williams.’ But Williams had the arrogance of the humble. He was proud of the stern traditions of his service, and his pride forbade him to sit in her presence, in spite of their long and kind years of friendship. Yet when he spoke he must grumble a little, as though she were still the very small child who had swaggered round the stables rubbing her chin, imitating his every expression and gesture. ‘You didn’t ought to have no ’orses, Miss Stephen, the way you runs off and leaves them;’ he grumbled, ‘Raftery’s been off ’is feed these last days. I’ve been talkin’ to that Jim what you sets such store by! Impudent young blight, ’e answered me back like as though I’d no right to express me opinion. But I says to ’im: “You just wait, lad,” I says, “You wait until I gets ’old of Miss Stephen!” ’ For Williams could never keep clear of the stables, and could never refrain from nagging when he got there. Deposed he might be, but not yet defeated even by old age, as grooms knew to their cost. The tap of his heavy oak stick in the yard was enough to send Jim and his underling flying to hide curry-combs and brushes out of sight. Williams needed no glasses when it came to disorder. ‘Be this place ’ere a stable or be it a pigsty, I wonder?’ was now his habitual greeting. His wife came bustling in from the kitchen: ‘Sit down, Miss Stephen,’ and she dusted a chair. Stephen sat down and glanced at the Bible where it lay, still open, on the table. ‘Yes,’ said Williams dourly, as though she had spoken, ‘I’m reduced to readin’ about ’eavenly ’orses. A nice endin’ that for a man like me, what’s been in the service of Sir Philip Gordon, what’s ’ad ’is legs across the best ’unters as ever was seen in this county or any! And I don’t believe in them lion-headed beasts breathin’ fire and brimstone, it’s all agin nature. Whoever it was wrote them Revelations, can’t never have been inside of a stable. I don’t believe in no ’eavenly ’orses neither—there won’t be no ’orses in ’eaven; and a good thing too, judgin’ by the description.’ ‘I’m surprised at you, Arth-thur, bein’ so disrespectful to The Book!’ his wife reproached him gravely. ‘Well, it ain’t no encyclopaedee to the stable, and that’s a sure thing,’ grinned Williams.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  He shut the door, and lit a tiny light in the hanging hurricane lamp. "One time we'll have a long time," he said. He put the blankets down carefully, one folded for her head. Then he sat down a moment on the stool, and drew her to him, holding her close with one arm, feeling for her body with his free hand. She heard the catch of his intaken breath as he found her. Under her frail petticoat she was naked. "Eh! what it is to touch thee!" he said, as his finger caressed the delicate, warm, secret skin of her waist and hips. He put his face down and rubbed his cheek against her belly and against her thighs again and again. And again she wondered a little over the sort of rapture it was to him. She did not understand the beauty he found in her, through touch upon her living secret body, almost the ecstasy of beauty. For passion alone is awake to it. And when passion is dead, or absent, then the magnificent throb of beauty is incomprehensible and even a little despicable; warm, live beauty of contact, so much deeper than the beauty of wisdom. She felt the glide of his cheek on her thighs and belly and buttocks, and the close brushing of his moustache and his soft thick hair, and her knees began to quiver. Far down in her she felt a new stirring, a new nakedness emerging. And she was half afraid. Half she wished he would not caress her so. He was encompassing her somehow. Yet she was waiting, waiting. And when he came into her, with an intensification of relief and consummation, that was pure peace to him, still she was waiting. She felt herself a little left out. And she knew, partly it was her own fault. She willed herself into this separateness. Now perhaps she was condemned to it. She lay still, feeling his motion within her, his deep-sunk intentness, the sudden quiver of him at the springing of his seed, then the slow-subsiding thrust. That thrust of the buttocks, surely it was a little ridiculous. If you were a woman, and apart in all the business, surely that thrusting of the man's buttocks was supremely ridiculous. Surely the man was intensely ridiculous in this posture and this act! But she lay still, without recoil. Even, when he had finished, she did not rouse herself to get a grip on her own satisfaction, as she had done with Michaelis; she lay still, and the tears slowly filled and ran from her eyes. He lay still, too. But he held her close and tried to cover her poor naked legs with his legs, to keep them warm. He lay on her with a close, undoubting warmth. "Are ter cold?" he asked, in a soft, small voice, as if she were close, so close. Whereas she was left out, distant. "No! But I must go," she said gently.