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 140 of 212 · 20 per page

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

  But I also think that the years after my departure from the convent took their toll. At a time when most people are supposed to find a mate, I was engaged in a solitary battle with an undiagnosed illness, and locked into a private hell. If you cannot trust the integrity of your own mind, you cannot fall in love, and neither can anybody fall in love with you. The strange sensation of talking to people at a distance, through a glass screen, or seeing them through the wrong end of a telescope, which dissipated once I was properly medicated, made real contact very difficult indeed. Because I received no adequate help during this time, I turned in upon myself, and this tendency may have become habitual. But was I pushed into solitude, or did I jump? It was my idea to go into a convent, and nobody forced me to stay in the religious life so long. Recently I have started to wonder whether my solitary state may in fact be due to some deeper imperative within myself, which I am only just beginning to understand. During that last summer at Bedford College, I played hard. I taught at the summer school organized by the University of London for graduate students from overseas, and for six weeks I lived in Bloomsbury, in the center of town. I had participated in this school before, but on this last occasion, I was a great hit. My lectures and classes were popular and crowded, and I found that I had acquired a little circle of literary disciples. It seemed ironic that I was being forced to leave the academic world just as I was beginning to feel at home there. By day we worked hard, but every night, students and staff partied. “You’re so different,” one of the administrators said to me at lunch one day. “I wouldn’t have dared to speak to you last year: you were quite unapproachable. What happened?”

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

  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.

• 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 The Argonauts (2015)

  One could argue that Winnicott is speaking metaphorically here—as Michael Snediker has said in a more adult context: “One doesn’t really shatter when one is fucked, despite Bersani’s accounts of it as such.” But while a baby may not die when its holding environment fails, it may indeed die and die and die. The question of what a psyche or a soul can experience depends, in large part, on what you believe it’s made of. Spirit is matter reduced to an extreme thinness: O so thin! In any case, Winnicott notably describes “the primitive agonies” not as lacks or voids, but as substantives: “fruits.” In 1984, George Oppen died of pneumonia with complications from Alzheimer’s. Mary Oppen died a few years later, in 1990, of ovarian cancer. After George’s death, several fragments of writing were found pinned to the wall above his desk. One of these read: Being with Mary: it has been almost too wonderful it is hard to believe During our hard season, I thought a lot about this fragment. At times it filled me with an almost sadistic urge to unearth some kind of evidence that George and Mary had been unhappy, even if at moments—some sign that his writing might have ever come between them, that they didn’t understand each other in some profound way, that they had ever exchanged ugly words, or differed on major decisions, such as whether George should fight in World War II, the efficacy of the Communist Party, whether to stay in exile in Mexico, and so on. This wasn’t schadenfreude. It was hope. I hoped that such things might have happened, and that Oppen, bobbing in the waves of bewilderment and lucidity that characterize a cruel neurological decline, would still be moved to write: Being with Mary: it has been almost too wonderful it is hard to believe And so, shamefully, I looked. I looked for evidence of their unhappiness, all the while repressing the fact that my search reminded me of a particularly dysfunctional moment in Leonard Michaels’s account of his tortured, explosive, and eventually disastrous relationship to his first wife, Sylvia. Upon learning that a friend had an equally horrible relationship with equally horrible fights, Michaels writes: “I was grateful to him, relieved, giddy with pleasure. So others lived this way, too…. Every couple, every marriage, was sick. Such thinking, like bloodletting, purged me. I was miserably normal; I was normally miserable.” He and Sylvia marry; a short, miserable time later, she’s dead from forty-seven Seconals. Of course the Oppens fought and hurt each other sometimes, you said when I told you about my search. They probably just kept it to themselves, out of respect and love for one another. Whatever I was looking for between George and Mary Oppen, I never found it. I did, however, find something I wasn’t expecting. I found it in Mary’s autobiography, Meaning a Life, which she published at the start of George’s mental decline. I found Mary.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  Jewish scholars consider the Pentateuch the most important and truest part of their scriptures; this is correct because it accords with nature, the one true source of truth. What do we see when we look out into space at night? Millions of stars, and stars are suns and suns are centers of violent forces. When an old sun dies it becomes a young planet and that violence is still in it, hence the earthquake and volcano. When life forms appear on it, that violence is in them also; it is in us and it is this that drives us to war and killing. Then we pray to it for peace. If we would have peace we must first learn the cause of war. This is what the honest Jhwhist is trying to tell us, so let us read and learn. 18. And the Lord said unto Joshua, Stretch out the spear that is in thy hand (Moses’ rod) towards Ai; for I will give it into thine hand. . . . 24. And it came to pass, when Israel had made an end of slaying all the inhabitants of Ai in the field, in the wilderness wherein they chased them, and when they were all fallen on the edge of the sword, until they were consumed, that all the Israelites returned unto Ai, and smote it with the edge of the sword. 25. And so it was, that all that fell that day, both of men and women, were twelve thousand, even all the men of Ai. 26. For Joshua drew not his hand back, wherewith he stretched out the spear, until he had utterly destroyed all the inhabitants of Ai. 27. Only the cattle and the spoil of that city Israel took for a prey unto themselves, according unto the word of the Lord which he commanded Joshua (Chap. 8). These are literal words; do the literalists see in them any evidence of divinity, morality, love, and mercy? That they are but symbolic words is proven by our archeologists. According to them, the city of Ai was a ruin long before the Hebrews appeared; indeed, the name in Hebrew, ha’Ai , means “the ruin.” It was destroyed before 2000 B.C., and not rebuilt until some four hundred years after the alleged time of Joshua. Thus the author is not writing history; he is writing theology. In the Book of Numbers these wars are called by their rightful name—”the wars of Jehovah,” that is, the wars of the Creator. We said the Bible is the greatest indictment of God ever written, but this Hebrew Hitler has only gotten started; we should read on until we either blush for shame or else admit that the Bible is a book of mythology. 7. So Joshua ascended from Gilgal, he, and all the people of war with him, and all the mighty men of valour. 8.

• From Another Country (1962)

  He grabbed one of her fingers and held it. Cass turned to Rufus. “Now, you haven’t been working on a novel, why haven’t you come by?” “I’ve been working uptown. You promised to come and hear me. Remember?” “We’ve been terribly broke, Rufus——” “When I’m working in a joint, you haven’t got to worry about being broke, I told you that before.” “He’s a great musician,” Leona said. “I heard him for the first time last night.” Rufus looked annoyed. “That gig ended last night. I ain’t got nothing to do for awhile except take care of my old lady.” And he laughed. Cass and Leona looked briefly at each other and smiled. “How long have you been up here, Leona?” Cass asked. “Oh, just a little over a month.” “Do you like it?” “Oh, I love it. It’s just as different as night from day, I can’t tell you.” Cass looked briefly at Rufus. “That’s wonderful,” she said, gravely. “I’m very glad for you.” “Yes, I can feel that,” said Leona. “You seem to be a very nice woman.” “Thank you,” said Cass, and blushed. “How’re you going to take care of your old lady,” Vivaldo asked, “if you’re not working?” “Oh, I’ve got a couple of record dates coming up; don’t you worry about old Rufus.” Vivaldo sighed. “I’m worried about me. I’m in the wrong profession—or, rather, I’m not. In it, I mean. Nobody wants to hear my story.” Rufus looked at him. “Don’t let me start talking to you about my profession.” “Things are tough all over,” said Vivaldo. Rufus looked out over the sun-filled park. “Nobody ever has to take up a collection to bury managers or agents,” Rufus said. “But they sweeping musicians up off the streets every day.” “Never mind,” said Leona, gently, “they ain’t never going to sweep you up off the streets.” She put her hand on his head and stroked it. He reached up and took her hand away. There was a silence. Then Cass rose. “I hate to break this up, but I must go home. One of my neighbors took the kids to the zoo, but they’re probably getting back by now. I’d better rescue Richard.” “How are your kids, Cass?” Rufus asked. “Much you care. It would serve you right if they’d forgotten all about you. They’re fine. They’ve got much more energy than their parents.” Vivaldo said, “I’m going to walk Cass home. What do you think you’ll be doing later?” He felt a dull fear and a dull resentment, almost as though Vivaldo were deserting him. “Oh, I don’t know. I guess we’ll go along home ——” “I got to go uptown later, Rufus,” said Leona. “I ain’t got nothing to go to work in tomorrow.” Cass held out her hand to Leona. “It was nice meeting you.

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

  I blinked uncertainly. “You still don’t look too good to me. How are you feeling? That was quite a long faint. Better get her to a doctor?” that last, clearly, was addressed to Jane. “Definitely.” Jane sounded uncharacteristically subdued. “Do you think we could phone for a taxi?” I closed my eyes, mentally shaking my head. Sympathy, doctors, taxis—I could not take it all in. I must have tried to protest feebly, but nobody took any notice and I lay there gratefully, thankful that it was over, but feeling hugely tired. As we drove up the Banbury Road toward St. Anne’s and climbed the short flight of stairs to my room in the Gatehouse, Jane kept up a determined flow of chatter. The fright that I had seen in her eyes had gone, and she was now recasting the whole event in her usual ebullient manner. “I always longed to faint at school,” she said cheerfully as she opened the large window overlooking the college lawn. We could see students hurrying past in ones and twos, going about the business of a normal Tuesday morning. “I always thought it would be a sign of such sensitivity and refinement. I tried everything. Put blotting paper in my shoes, held my breath. Nothing happened. Not a hope. I’m just too horribly healthy.” 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.

• 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.

• From Another Country (1962)

  Eric leaned back, held in a kind of peaceful melancholy, comforted by the beat of Bessie’s song, and looked over at Cass. The sun surrounded her golden hair which was piled on top of her head and fell over her brow in girlish, somewhat too artless and incongruous curls. This was meant to soften a face, the principal quality of which had always been a spare, fragile boniness. There was a fine crisscross of wrinkles now around the large eyes; the sun revealed that she was wearing a little too much make-up. This, and something indefinably sorrowful in the line of her mouth and jaw, as she stood silently at the bar, looking down, made Eric feel that Cass was beginning to fade, to become brittle. Something icy had touched her. “Do you want gin or vodka or bourbon or Scotch or beer? or tequila?” She looked up, smiling. Though the smile was genuine, it was weary. It did not contain the mischievous delight that he remembered. And there were tiny lines now around her neck, which he had never noticed before. We’re getting old, he thought, and it damn sure didn’t take long . “I think I’d better stick to whiskey. I get too drunk too fast on gin—and I don’t know what this evening holds.” “Ah,” she said, “farsighted Eric! And what kind of whiskey?” “In Paris, when we order whiskey—which, for a very long time, I didn’t dare to do—we always mean Scotch.” “You loved Paris, didn’t you? You must have, you were gone so long. Tell me about it.” She made two drinks and came and sat beside him. From far away, he heard the muffled cling! of a typewriter bell. It’s a long old road , Bessie sang, but I’m going to find an end . “It doesn’t seem so long,” he said, “now that I’m back.” He felt very shy now, for when Cass said You loved Paris he at once thought, Yves is there. “It’s a great city, Paris, a beautiful city—and—it was very good for me.” “I see that. You seem much happier. There’s a kind of light around you.” She said this very directly, with a rueful, conspiratorial smile: as though she knew the cause of his happiness, and rejoiced for him. He dropped his eyes, but raised them again. “It’s just the sun,” he said, and they both laughed. Then, irrepressibly, “I was very happy there, though.” “Well, you didn’t leave because you weren’t happy there any more?” “No.” And when I get there, I’m going to shake hands with a friend . “A guy I know who thinks he has great psychic powers”—he sipped his whiskey, smiling—“Frenchman, persuaded me that I’d become a great star if I came home and did this play. And I just haven’t got the guts to go against the stars, to say nothing of arguing with a Frenchman. So.” She laughed. “I didn’t know the French went in for things like that.

• From Another Country (1962)

  For the meaning of revelation is that what is revealed is true, and must be borne. But how to bear it? He rose from his seat and paced restlessly into the garden. The kitten lay curled on the stone doorstep, in the last of the sun, asleep. Then he heard Yves’ bicycle bell and, shortly, Yves’ head appeared above the low stone wall. He passed, looking straight ahead, and then Eric heard him in the kitchen, bumping into things and opening and closing the icebox door. Then Yves stood beside him. “Madame Belet will be here in a few moments. She is cooking for us a chicken. And I have bought some whiskey and some cigarettes.” Then he looked at Eric and frowned. “You are mad to be standing here in your bathrobe. The sun is down and it is getting cold. Come in and get dressed, I will make us both a drink.” “What would I do without you?” “I wonder.” Eric followed him into the house. “I also bought some champagne,” Yves said, suddenly, and he turned to face Eric with a small, shy smile, “to celebrate our last night here.” Then he walked into the kitchen. “Get dressed,” he called, “Madame Belet will be here soon.” Eric stepped into the bedroom and began putting on his clothes. “Are we going out after dinner?” “Perhaps. That depends. If we are not too drunk on champagne.” “I’d just as soon stay in, I think.” “Oh, perhaps we must have just one last look at our little seaside town.” “We have to get packed, you know, and clean up this house a little, and try to get some sleep.” “Madame Belet will clean it for us. Anyway, we would never be able to get it done. We can sleep on the train. And we do not have so very much to pack.” Eric heard him washing the glasses. Then he began to whistle a tune which sounded like a free improvisation on Bach. Eric combed his hair, which was too long. He decided that he would get it cut very short before he went back to the States. Eventually, they sat, as they had sat so many evenings, before the window which overlooked the sea. Yves sat on the hassock, the back of his head resting on Eric’s knee. “I will be very sad to leave here,” Yves said, suddenly. “I have never been happier than I have been in this house. ” Eric stroked Yves’ hair and said nothing. He watched the lights that played on the still, black sea, from the sky and the shore. “I have been very happy, too,” he said at last. And then: “I wonder if we will ever be so happy again.” “Yes, why not?

• From Another Country (1962)

  “I mean, right now.” “That’s what I thought you meant.” They both laughed. Yet, it crossed his mind that she meant it. “Anyone I know?” “Are you kidding? Just think of the people you know.” He smiled. “All right. But please don’t do anything silly, Cass.” She looked down. “I don’t think I will,” she murmured. Then, “Let’s get the bill.” They signaled the waiter, and paid him, and walked into the streets again. The sun was going down, but the heat had not lessened. The stone and steel and wood and brick and asphalt which had soaked in the heat all day would be giving it back all night. They walked two blocks, to the corner of Fifth Avenue, in silence; and in this silence something lived which made Vivaldo oddly reluctant to leave Cass alone. The corner on which they stood was absolutely deserted, and there was very little traffic. “Which way are you going?” he asked her. She looked up and down the Avenue—up and down. From the direction of the park there came a green and yellow cab. “I don’t know. But I think I’ll go to that movie.” The cab stopped, several blocks from them, waiting for a red light. Cass abruptly put up her hand. Again, he volunteered. “Would you like me to come with you? I could act as your protection.” She laughed. “No, Vivaldo, thank you. I don’t want to be protected any more.” And the cab swerved toward them. They both watched it approach, it slowed and stopped. He looked at her with his eyebrows very high. “Well—” he said. She opened the door and he held it. “Thank you, Vivaldo,” she said. “Thank you for everything. I’ll be in touch with you in a few days. Or call me, I’ll be home.” “Okay, Cass.” He made a fist and touched her on the chin. “Be good.” “You, too. Good-bye.” She got into the cab and he slammed the door. She leaned forward to the driver, the cab rolled forward, downtown. She turned back to wave at him and the cab turned west. It was like waving good-bye to land: and she could not guess what might have befallen her when, and if, she ever saw land again.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Touch no unclean thing; go out from the midst of it, purify yourselves, you who carry the vessels of YHWH. For you shall not go out in haste, and you shall not go in flight; For YHWH will go before you, and the God of Israel will be your rear guard. The entire flow of thought of Isaiah 40–55 as a whole leaves us in little doubt that this kingdom agenda, this rescue project, this return of YHWH to Zion, will be accomplished through the work, and now specifically the death, of the servant. This is why I said that the question of the “leader” within this picture, and then also the question of the “sacrifice,” are complicated. In Isaiah’s picture, there is no question but that YHWH himself is the “leader.” But the servant’s work is crucial. It is through his suffering and death, described here in terms of sacrifice (53:10), that the sins of the people find atonement and forgiveness. Throughout Isaiah 40–55, this “forgiveness” means, quite explicitly, return from exile; exile had been the punishment for the people’s sins, and their return is the embodiment of their forgiveness. A full picture of the servant appears in the fourth poem, Isaiah 52:13–53:12: See, my servant shall prosper; he shall be exalted and lifted up, and shall be very high. Just as there were many who were astonished at him —so marred was his appearance, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of mortals— so he shall startle many nations; kings shall shut their mouths because of him; for that which had not been told them they shall see, and that which they had not heard they shall contemplate. Who has believed what we have heard? And to whom has the arm of YHWH been revealed? For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account. Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and YHWH has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before it shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth. By a perversion of justice he was taken away, Who could have imagined his future?

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Oddly enough, I didn’t act on this rather crude idea until quite recently, because the thought of vandalizing a trade paperback with pornographic graffiti made me sad: a wheelchair-bound art-history teacher in college once gave an impressive sermon out of the unparalyzed side of his mouth on the viciousness of writing in books one didn’t own, and I took it to heart. A few months ago, however, I tried the idea out one evening at the Waterstone’s bookstore on Exeter. A finely constructed woman of thirty in a black curl-necked cotton sweater with gray sleeves stood in the fiction section and pulled a copy of something called Paradise Postponed by John Mortimer off the shelf. It was a red paperback. I hadn’t read it, though I’d heard of John Mortimer. She glanced at the back, then flipped to the first page, then skipped to somewhere in the middle, where a scene caught her eye. She read for a few seconds, and then she did what I was hoping she would do: she curled the corner of the page under her fingertip so that she would be able to turn to it immediately when she needed to—thus signaling to me that she was definitely going to look at the next page. I snapped my fingers to invoke the Clutch and gently removed the Mortimer novel from her hands and wrote on the page that she would be turning to, in as elegant a cursive as I could muster, I need to pop my nuts on a pair of small sexy tits right this second!! I snapped out of the time-clutch and watched her from a safe distance as she turned the page and read what I had written. She did an almost imperceptible double take, then flipped around in the book to see if there was anything else handwritten. She looked about her, noticed me absorbed in a copy of The Princess of Cleves, and, because (though somewhat rough-hewn) I look “intellectual” (the glasses), she was reassured that whoever had written that desideratum in the book she had picked up had done so a while ago, perhaps months ago, and was in any case no longer in the store. Then she sighed conclusively and put the book back on the shelf and inspected something by Muriel Spark called Loitering with Intent. Titles are so important to lonely browsers. I could of course have written something dirty in that book, too, but I resisted the urge, not only because it would have made her fearful that someone was singling her out somehow, but also because I couldn’t for some reason make myself write nasty things in a book written by a woman. I could deface John Mortimer without compunction, but not so Muriel Spark. I hovered there until the woman in black cotton finally left (with Breakfast at Tiffany’s), and then I bought the Mortimer myself, since I had ruined it. I still have it; I mean to read it someday.