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 141 of 212 · 20 per page

• From Bluets (2009)

  208. Cornell’s diary entry for February 28, 1947: “Resolve this day as before to transcend in my work the overwhelming sense of sadness that has been so binding and wasteful in past.” 209. Duras did not think of alcohol as a false god, but rather as a kind of placeholder, a squatter in the space made by God’s absence. “Alcohol doesn’t console,” she wrote. “All it replaces is the lack of God.” It does not necessarily follow, however, that if and when a substance vacates the spot (renunciation), God rushes in to fill it. For some, the emptiness itself is God; for others, the space must stay empty. “Lots of space, nothing holy”: one Zen master’s definition of enlightenment (Bodhidharma). 210. For Emerson, dreams and drunkenness were but the “semblance and counterfeit” of an “oracular genius.” Therein lies their danger: they mimic—often quite well—the “flames and generosities of the heart.” I suppose he is advocating, in his “sermons,” which steadily displace the God of theology with one of Nature, what we might now term “a natural high.” 211. But are you sure—one would like to ask—that it really is mimicry, fumisterie? —Well, don’t ask, but look. Look for yourself, and ask not what has been real and what has been false, but what has been bitter, and what has been sweet. 212. If I were today on my deathbed, I would name my love of the color blue and making love with you as two of the sweetest sensations I knew on this earth. 213. But are you certain—one would like to ask—that it was sweet? 214.—No, not really, or not always. If I am to enforce a rule of “brutal honesty,” perhaps not even often. 215. It often happens that we treat pain as if it were the only real thing, or at least the most real thing: when it comes round, everything before it, around it, and, perhaps, in front of it, tends to seem fleeting, delusional. Of all the philosophers, Schopenhauer is the most hilarious and direct spokesperson for this idea: “As a rule we find pleasure much less pleasurable, pain much more painful than we expected.” You don’t believe him? He offers this quick test: “Compare the feelings of an animal engaged in eating another with those of the animal being eaten.” 216. Today is the fifth anniversary, the radio says, of the day on which “everything changed.” It says this so often that I turn it off. Everything changed. Everything changed . Well, what changed? What did the blade reveal? For whom did it come? “I grieve that grief can teach me nothing,” wrote Emerson.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  The light filtered through the leaves and was scattered in a greenish haze that shifted gradually to the tender pink of the heather and the purple of wild mint that grew all over the ground in this huge natural palace. But even today the tart scent of mint and the smell of honey and heather still make me feel sick at my stomach; the mere sight of little boats made of cork or of wooden canes such as we used to carve all day long, like invalids or prisoners in institutions, fills me with a sadness that cuts me off from the world. A wave of anguish sometimes comes over me quite suddenly in the course of conversation with someone who is in other respects quite indifferent to me; then I discover an odor, a color, a fragment of some object that has reminded me of those hateful afternoons. I developed the habit of secretly wandering away from my companions and the clearing in the wood. As soon as I no longer heard their voices clearly, I was even more lonely, but at last able to weep over my own loneliness. I wept bitter tears, my breathing interrupted by my gasps as I allowed myself an orgy of pity for myself and my own powerlessness. My Christian companions had at least one event that came to interrupt the monotony of those days — I mean Sunday morning mass. I was surprised to note that I no longer knew the days of the week, though I had been accustomed never to be wrong on this point. Sunday mass brought order into the week of the Christians: as early as Saturday night, they were aroused from their weekday apathy. They had managed to obtain permission, on that day, to remain in the camp in order to brush and press their clothes and take their weekly baths. I envied them their preoccupations, their awareness of the importance of the moment. The next morning, close to the dormitory, we watched the believers gather in a small group. Their hair shiny with lotion, their clean shirts, everything about them conspired to make them at the same time unusually excited and quiet. On their return from the village where they attended mass, well after noon, they would describe to us with interest everything that they had seen. As for us, our Sunday morning was made different only by their gaiety. It was Mimouni who gave me the idea of it, confiding in me his intention of attending mass.

• From Bluets (2009)

  191. On the other hand, it must be admitted that there are aftereffects, impressions that linger long after the external cause has been removed, or has removed itself. “If anyone looks at the sun, he may retain the image in his eyes for several days,” Goethe wrote. “Boyle relates an image of ten years.” And who is to say this afterimage is not equally real? Indigo makes its stain not in the dyeing vat, but after the garment has been removed. It is the oxygen of the air that blues it. 192. Cyanosis: “ a blueness of the skin due to imperfectly oxygenated blood, as from a malformation of the heart.” As in: “His love for me produces a cyanosis” (S. Judd, 1851). 193. I will admit, however, upon considering the matter further, that writing does do something to one’s memory—that at times it can have the effect of an album of childhood photographs, in which each image replaces the memory it aimed to preserve. Perhaps this is why I am avoiding writing about too many specific blue things—I don’t want to displace my memories of them, nor embalm them, nor exalt them. In fact, I think I would like it best if my writing could empty me further of them, so that I might become a better vessel for new blue things. 194. One can wish to be surprised ( état d’attente ), but it is hard, if not impossible, to will being surprised. Perhaps the most one can do is look back and see that surprises have occurred, chances are that they will again. “Though lovers be lost love shall not,” etc. But I am not yet sure how to sever the love from the lover without occasioning some degree of carnage. 195. Does an album of written thoughts perform a similar displacement, or replacement, of the “original” thoughts themselves? (Please don’t start protesting here that there are no thoughts outside of language, which is like telling someone that her colored dreams are, in fact, colorless.) But if writing does displace the idea—if it extrudes it, as it were, like grinding a lump of wet clay through a hole—where does the excess go? “We don’t want to pollute our world with leftover egos” (Chögyam Trungpa). 196. I suppose I am avoiding writing down too many specific memories of you for similar reasons. The most I will say is “the fucking.” Why else suppress the details? Clearly I am not a private person, and quite possibly I am a fool. “Oh, how often have I cursed those foolish pages of mine which made my youthful sufferings public property!” Goethe wrote years after the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther . Sei Sh ō nagon felt similarly: “Whatever people may think of my book,” she wrote after her pillow book gained fame and notoriety, “I still regret that it ever came to light.” 197.

• From Bluets (2009)

  They do not signify romance. They were sent by no one in celebration of nothing. I had known them all along. 226. As I collected blues for this project—in folders, in boxes, in notebooks, in memory—I imagined creating a blue tome, an encyclopedic compendium of blue observations, thoughts, and facts. But as I lay out my collection now, what strikes me most is its anemia —an anemia that seems to stand in direct proportion to my zeal. I thought I had collected enough blue to build a mountain, albeit one of detritus. But it seems to me now as if I have stumbled upon a pile of thin blue gels scattered on the stage long after the show has come and gone; the set, striked. 227. Perhaps this is as it should be. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus—the first and only book of philosophy he published in his lifetime—clocks in at sixty pages, and offers a grand total of seven propositions. “As to the shortness of the book I am awfully sorry for it; but what can I do? ” he wrote to his translator. “If you were to squeeze me like a lemon you would get nothing more out of me.” 228. My injured friend is now able to write letters via voice-recognition software to keep her friends abreast of changes in her condition, of which there have been many. “My life can change, does change,” she asserts—and it has, and does, often in astonishing ways. Nonetheless, near the end of these letters, she usually includes a short paragraph that acknowledges her ongoing physical pain, and her intense grief for all she has lost, a grief she describes as bottomless. “If I did not write of the difficulties under which I labor, I would fear to be misrepresenting the grinding reality of quadriplegia and spinal cord injury,” she says. “So here it is, the paragraph that roundly asserts that I continue to suffer.” 229. I am writing all this down in blue ink, so as to remember that all words, not just some, are written in water. 230. Holed up in the north country for the month of May, a May which saw but four days of sunshine. The rest of the month was solid gray, drizzling or pouring rain, rendering everything green. Rushing and verdant. In short, a nightmare. Each day I took long walks in my yellow poncho, looking for blue, for any blue thing. I found only tarps (always tarps!) pinned over stacks of firewood, a few blue recycling containers kicked over in the streets, a grayish blue mailbox here and there. I came back to my dark chamber each night empty-eyed, empty-handed, as if I had been panning fruitlessly for gold all day in a cold river. Stop working against the world , I counseled myself. Love the one you’re with. Love the color green . But I did not love the green, nor did I want to have to love it or pretend to love it.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Only Kalla, because she was too nervous to stay in bed, got up and went to my father; and when the cough hardened into a threat of convulsions, she would stand beside the bed, motionless and mute as a ghost, her pale delicate face framed by black hair always marvelously supple and wavy. She would stand there and suffer with him. The morning after an attack, my father often rose in a bad temper. His illness was a part of his life and he didn’t seem to try to avoid it absolutely. He would sit cross-legged on the bed and, despite the doctor’s continually repeated warnings, begin to chain-smoke those horrible cigarettes that are full of straw and bits of wood and that filled the flat with an acrid, stinking fog. He smoked, then coughed, then spat into the yellow pot that was always at the foot of his bed. Afterwards, he would moan and beg God to help him out of this miserable life. Finally, he would dress in the suffocating fumes of the bedroom and go off for a day of ten uninterrupted hours of work. The younger children had known my father’s illness from birth and were not greatly surprised by his sufferings. If he had an unspectacular attack, once the surprise passed, they would return to their games; and my father took bitter note of this. I could never get used to his illness and each attack further convinced me of my selfishness. At night, I would bury my head in the pillow, trying to stifle the whistling of his anguished chest, his hoarse groans, his appeals to God. I had learned to gauge the gravity of each attack. When he came home on those murderously damp winter evenings and flung himself gasping and with bulging eyes on the bed, I knew the evening would be unpleasant. He would be unable to speak and would wave his hand desperately to my mother who was hurrying to his help. She filled the little fire-yellowed saucer with medicated powder and threw a lighted match into it. My father bent over the smoke, opened his mouth and gasped. At once, he began to cough with all his body and lungs, and the sweat dripped from his face. Sometimes, the cough dragged on and on and never seemed to stop. Caught in the horrible rhythm of his coughs, he became panicky, tried to break out of it, rose suddenly, dropped back onto the bed, and then continued to gasp and cough until, overcome by his anguish, he would thrust his fingers down his own throat. Then, I would pack my notebooks in a briefcase and run from the house, followed a long way down the street by the odor of Legras powder and the sound of my father’s cough. ~ 4. UNCLE JOSEPH’S DEATH ~

• From Henry and June (1986)

  But I cannot enjoy sexuality for its own sake, independent of my feelings. I am inherently faithful to the man who possesses me. Now it is a whole faithfulness to Henry. I tried to enjoy Hugo today, to please him, and I couldn’t. I had to pretend. If there were no June in the world today, I could know the end of my restlessness. I awoke one morning crying. Henry had said to me, “I really take no pleasure in your body. It isn’t your body I love.” And the sorrowfulness of that moment comes back. Yet, the last time we were together he had said wild things about the beauty of my legs and of my knowing so well how to fuck. Poor woman! Both Hugo and Henry like to watch my face when they make love to me. But now, for Hugo, my face is a mask. Allendy told Hugo at the concert that I was a very interesting subject, that I responded so sensitively and quickly. That I was almost cured. But that evening I again had the sensation of wanting to dazzle Allendy, while concealing some secret part of my real self. There must always be something secret. From Henry I conceal the fact that I rarely get ultimate sexual satisfaction because he likes my legs wide open, and I need to close them. I don’t want to diminish his pleasure. Besides, I get a kind of disseminated pleasure which, even if it is less keen, lasts longer than an orgasm. Henry wrote me a letter after the concert. I put it under my pillow last night: “Anaïs, I was dazzled by your beauty! I lost my head, I felt wretched. I have been blind, blind, I said to myself. You stood there like a Princess. You were the Infanta! You looked thoroughly disappointed in me. What was the matter? Did I look stupid? I probably was. I wanted to get down on my knees and kiss the hem of your dress. So many Anaïses you have shown me—and now this one!—as if to prove your Protean versatility. Do you know what Fraenkel said to me? ‘I never expected to see a woman as beautiful as that. How can a woman of such femininity, such beauty, write a book [on D. H. Lawrence]?’ Oh, that pleased me no end! The little tuft of hair coming up over the crown, the lustrous eyes, the gorgeous shoulder line, and those sleeves I adore, regal, Florentine, diabolistic! I saw nothing below the bosom. I was too excited to stand off and survey you. How much I wanted to whisk you away forever. Eloping with the Infanta—ye gods. Feverishly I sought out the Father. I think I spotted him. His hair was the clue. Strange hair, strange face, strange family. Presentiment of genius. Ah, yes, Anaïs, I am taking everything quietly—because you belong in another world. I see nothing in myself to recommend your interest. Your love ? That

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  After the pogrom, however, as soon as it was again possible to move around, Ben Smaan came to see me. We went for a long walk all around the old ramparts, with me slowing my impatient gait to keep pace with his small unsteady steps. He talked a lot, perhaps to hide his own embarrassment and emotion, and I said almost nothing, not knowing what to say. He had worried about my personal safety but, even more, he admitted, about what I might think, and he now apologized for his doubts. He was sure that I had realized that it had all been cooked up. Yes, I had. It must be explained to all in our respective religious communities. Yes, certainly. (Would mine believe me, I wondered?) It was more than ever necessary to be united. Yes, it was. (I was sick of those nightmarish nights!) He was preparing a petition. Yes, I would sign it. Bissor was dead: what was I to do about this death? Whether it was a miserable European diversionary move or a spontaneous and blind mob action, no amount of research into responsibilities would ever bring him back to life. Ben Smaan was right: one had to educate the mob, unmask those who fooled it, and draw attention to the real problems. But I was tired and the results were too far off. For the moment I stood between two walls: how was I to choose between repulsive hypocritical anti-Semitism, which had probably been the instigator of the massacre, and these murderous explosions which, like letting blood, periodically relieved the pressure of so much accumulated hatred? How vain and futile are all theoretical and philosophical constructions of the mind when compared to the brutal realities of the world of men! The European philosophers build the most rigorous and virtuous moral codes, and their politicians, brought up by these teachers, foment murders as a means of government. After how bitter a struggle had I chosen the West and not the East! And now I was beginning to listen to the reasonings of Jewish nationalists when the war came to fill up our lives and postpone any solution to these problems. ~ 3. THE WAR ~ In order to emerge from my solitude, as I have already said, I tried making advances to the outside world. I did not have to do it for long; suddenly, the world flooded my life and dragged me in its wake with so much violence that I hardly knew what was happening to me. We had become accustomed to the idea of war; for a long time it had been a far-off and inoffensive affair, but then suddenly it was present, exploding between our walls.

• From Bluets (2009)

  It seemed unwise to contemplate this statement any further. 117. “How clearly I have seen my condition, yet how childishly I have acted,” says Goethe’s sorrowful young Werther. “How clearly I still see it, and yet show no sign of improvement.” 118. Not long after that afternoon I came across a photograph of you with this woman. You were wearing the shirt. I went over to the house of my injured friend and told her the story as I moved her legs in and out of the inflatable, thigh-high boots she wears to compress her legs while lying down so as to inhibit the formation of blood clots. How ghastly , she said. 119. My friend was a genius before her accident, and she remains a genius now. The difference is that these days it is nearly impossible to discount her pronouncements. Something about her condition has bestowed upon her the quality of an oracle, perhaps because now she generally stays in one place, and one must go unto her. Eventually you will have to give up this love , she told me one night while I made us dinner. It has a morbid heart. 120. In the end, climactically rebuffed, young Werther shoots himself in the head while wearing a blue coat—a coat which is a replica of the one he was wearing the night he first danced with his beloved. It then takes him all night to die a bloody death that inspired a rash of copycat, blue-coated suicides all over Germany and beyond. Note that here, as elsewhere, seeing clearly seems to take Werther, and us, no further. 121. “Clearness is so eminently one of the characteristics of truth, that often it even passes for truth itself,” wrote Joseph Joubert, the French “man of letters” who recorded countless such fragments in notebooks for forty years in preparation for a monumental work of philosophy that he never wrote. I know all about this passing for truth. At times I think it quite possible that it lies, as if a sleight of hand, at the heart of all my writing. 122. “Truth. To surround it with figures and colors, so that it can be seen,” wrote Joubert, calmly professing a heresy. 123. Whenever I speak of faith, I am not speaking of faith in God. Likewise, when I speak of doubt, I am not talking about doubting God’s existence, or the truth of any gospel. Such terms have never meant very much to me. To contemplate them reminds me of playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey: you get spun around until you wander off, disoriented and blindfolded, walking gingerly with a hand stretched out in front of you, until you either run into a wall (laughter), or a friend gently pushes you back toward the game. 124.

• From Bluets (2009)

  And since no one has yet been able to discern the material of these traces, nor to locate them in the brain, how one thinks of them remains mostly a matter of metaphor: they could be “scribbles,” “holograms,” or “imprints”; they could live in “spirals,” “rooms,” or “storage units.” Personally, when I imagine my mind in the act of remembering, I see Mickey Mouse in Fantasia , roving about in a milky, navy-blue galaxy shot through with twinkling cartoon stars. 203. I remember, in the eighties, when crack first hit the scene, hearing all kinds of horror stories about how if you smoked it even once, the memory of its unbelievable high would live on in your system forever, and you would thus never again be able to be content without it. I have no idea if this is true, but I will admit that it scared me off the drug. In the years since, I have sometimes found myself wondering if the same principle applies in other realms—if seeing a particularly astonishing shade of blue, for example, or letting a particularly potent person inside you, could alter you irrevocably, just to have seen or felt it. In which case, how does one know when, or how, to refuse? How to recover? 204. Lately I have been trying to learn something about “the fundamental impermanence of all things” from my collection of blue amulets, which I have placed on a ledge in my house that is, for a good half of the day, drenched in sunlight. The placement is intentional—I like to see the sun pass through the blue glass, the bottle of blue ink, the translucent blue stones. But the light is clearly destroying some of the objects, or at least bleaching out their blues. Daily I think about moving the most vulnerable objects to a “cool, dark place,” but the truth is that I have little to no instinct for protection. Out of laziness, curiosity, or cruelty—if one can be cruel to objects—I have given them up to their diminishment. 205. One of the most vulnerable items is a scrap of paper that reads: you said you think of blue , written to me by a lover from long ago. Onto this note he pasted a square of ripped blue paper, which he then meticulously stitched back together. The whole apparatus is now falling apart—the stitches peeling off, the words fading. This seems just, as this lover was always breaking things then coming up with ingenious means of rigging them back together. In each place he lived, he built a bed high in the air served by a precarious ladder, then placed precious orchids on wobbly stands near the bottom of the ladder so that often one would knock the flowers over upon one’s descent.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Thanks to the crowd, I could avoid the obligatory return to the house of mourning and escape a new session of condolences and handshaking. It was too late when I got back to school. The sun had gone down and I know the housekeeper wouldn’t like the idea of lighting up the study hall for a single student. Besides, I no longer felt like working. Before returning home, I loitered a while, trying to get rid of my bad mood. But I didn’t succeed, and when I got back to the Passage, I was aggressive, ready to give blow for blow. I’d had enough of these histrionics and was ready to say so. I wouldn’t wait until they begged me to speak; I’d come right out with the statement that I would never again allow myself to be dragged off to such ceremonies. I knew in advance what I might expect to hear: I would not be mourned properly at my own death. I was little tempted by the thought of being mourned in this ridiculous manner and by these people. I didn’t give a damn what would happen to me after I was dead. But at home, no one said anything to me. In silence, we ate our mourning couscous, without meat and badly cooked: my mother had prepared it in a hurry. My father didn’t look up from his plate, and my mother and the children were impressed and respected his silence. A sleepless night and a two-day’s growth of beard increased the tired sadness of his face. Suddenly, to my stupefaction, he began to sob, a man’s sobbing which came from his chest. My mother’s eyes filled with tears and she put her hand on his head. This was the only tender gesture she had permitted herself in front of us. It was wonderful to compare her tears to her spectacular explosions in the room of the deceased. My anger failed me, separated from me like an object, and I was ready to admit my father’s ridiculous anguish: the child who has torn out his Teddy bear’s eye cries with real grief. My father believed in family hierarchies and perhaps suffered really, in spite of the spectacular show and the rigid ceremonial. He had lost his eldest brother, his foster father, the head of his family according to his faith; now, he saw that I, his oldest son, his heir, would not render to him the last honors due, and would let him die alone. I didn’t really understand what dying alone might mean, nor what joy could be derived from the certainty of being buried with all these grotesque and barbaric rites, and of being mourned by one’s unshaven son. But I saw that his fear of dying alone, so often affirmed, was not simulated, that his grief was sincere.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  What difference does it make that you have had this single number on your license since it was assigned to you at age fifteen-and-a-half by the state of California? Wasn’t there always an error on that driver’s license anyway? An error you knew about? Didn’t that license say you were five-foot-two? When you knew perfectly well you were at best—(max height, top height ever, height before you lost a half inch to age)—when you knew perfectly well you were at best five-foot-one-and-three-quarters ? Why did I make so much of the driver’s license? What was that about? Did giving up the California license say that I would never again be fifteen-and-a-half? Would I want to be? Or was the business with the license just one more case of “the apparent inadequacy of the precipitating event”? I put “the apparent inadequacy of the precipitating event” in quotes because it is not my phrase. Karl Menninger used it, in Man Against Himself , by way of describing the tendency to overreact to what might seem ordinary, even predictable, circumstances: a propensity, Dr. Menninger tells us, common among suicides. He cites the young woman who becomes depressed and kills herself after cutting her hair. He mentions the man who kills himself because he has been advised to stop playing golf, the child who commits suicide because his canary died, the woman who kills herself after missing two trains. Notice: not one train, two trains. Think that over. Consider what special circumstances are required before this woman throws it all in. “In these instances,” Dr. Menninger tells us, “the hair, the golf, and the canary had an exaggerated value, so that when they were lost or when there was even a threat that they might be lost, the recoil of severed emotional bonds was fatal.” Yes, clearly, no argument. “The hair, the golf, and the canary” had each been assigned an exaggerated value (as presumably had the second of those two missed trains), but why? Dr. Menninger himself asks this question, although only rhetorically: “But why should such extravagantly exaggerated over-estimations and incorrect evaluations exist?” Did he imagine that he had answered the question simply by raising it? Did he think that all he had to do was formulate the question and then retreat into a cloud of theoretical psychoanalytic references? Could I seriously have construed changing my driver’s license from California to New York as an experience involving “severed emotional bonds”? Did I seriously see it as loss? Did I truly see it as separation? And before we leave this subject of “severed emotional bonds”: The last time I saw the house in Brentwood Park before its title changed hands we stood outside watching the three-level Allied van pull away and turn onto Marlboro Street, everything we then owned, including a Volvo station wagon, already inside and on its way to New York.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I can only say that it was an impersonal sadness, things turning out badly not because of evil or maliciousness but through a sort of inherent fatality. Making even the most cherishable and sacred things seem so illusory, unstable, transitory. If you substituted X for a certain character, it would be just the same. As a matter of fact, perhaps I was substituting myself.” No one can help weeping over the destruction of the “ideal marriage.” But I don’t weep any more. I have exhausted my scruples. Hugo has the most beautiful nature in the world, and I love him, but I also love other men. He lies a yard away from me while I write this, and I feel innocent. I live in his kingdom. Peace. Simplicity. Tonight we were talking about evil, and I realized that he lives in complete security about me. He cannot ever imagine that . . . whereas I can so easily imagine. Is he more innocent than I am? Or does one trust when one’s self is so integral? The more I read Dostoevsky the more I wonder about June and Henry and whether they are imitations. I recognize the same phrases, the same heightened language, almost the same actions. Are they literary ghosts? Do they have souls of their own? I remember a moment when I allowed myself to feel petty resentment for Henry. It was a few days after he had told me about being with the whores. He was to meet me at Fraenkel’s to talk over the possibility of helping him publish his book. I felt very hard and cynical. I resented being looked upon as the wife of a banker who could protect a writer. I resented my tremendous anxiety, my wakeful nights, turning over ways and means of helping Henry. He suddenly seemed to me a parasite, a tremendously voracious egoist. Before he arrived I talked with Fraenkel, told him it was impossible and why. Fraenkel felt so much pity for Henry; I, none. Then Henry himself appeared. He was so carefully dressed for me, showing me his new suit, new hat and shirt. He was carefully shaved. I don’t know why this infuriated me. I did not welcome him very warmly. I went on talking about Fraenkel’s work. Henry felt that something was wrong and asked, “Have I come too early?” Finally he mentioned our going to dinner. I said that I couldn’t go. Hugo had not left for London as I had expected he would. I had to take the seven-thirty train home. I looked at Henry’s face. It gave me pleasure to see he was fearfully disappointed. I left them. But I was very unhappy immediately afterwards. All my tenderness returned. I was afraid I had hurt him. I wrote him a note. The next day Hugo was gone, and I went to him immediately.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  If he began his work with the smallest social nuclei, it proved his patience and skill. But Jesus never fell into the fundamental heresy of later theology; he never viewed the human individual apart from human society; he never forgot the gregarious nature of man. His first appeal was to his nation. When they flocked about him and followed him in the early Galilean days, it looked as if by the sheer power of his spirit he would swing the national soul around to obey him, and he was happy. There must have been at least a possibility of that in his mind, for he counted it as guilt that the people failed to yield to him. He did not merely go through the motions of summoning the nation to fealty, knowing all the while that such a thing lay outside of his real plan. No one will understand the life of Jesus truly unless he has asked himself the question, What would have happened if the people as a whole had accepted the spiritual leadership of Jesus? The rejection of his reign involved the political doom of the Galilean cities and of Jerusalem; would the acceptance of his reign have involved no political consequences? The tone of sadness in his later ministry was not due simply to the approach of his personal death, but to the consciousness that his purpose for his nation had failed. He began then to draw his disciples more closely about him and to create the nucleus of a new nation within the old; it was the best thing that remained for him to do, but he had hoped to do better. He also rose then to the conviction that he would return and accomplish in the future what he had hoped to accomplish during his earthly life. The hope of the Coming and the organization of the Church together enshrine the social element of Christianity; the one postpones it, the other partly realizes it. Both are the results of a faith that rose triumphant over death, and laid the foundations of a new commonwealth of God even before the old had been shaken to ruins. The kingdom of God and the ethics of Jesus All the teaching of Jesus and all his thinking centred about the hope of the kingdom of God. His moral teachings get their real meaning only when viewed from that centre. He was not a Greek philosopher or Hindu pundit teaching the individual the way of emancipation from the world and its passions, but a Hebrew prophet preparing men for the righteous social order. The goodness which he sought to create in men was always the goodness that would enable them to live rightly with their fellow-men and to constitute a true social life. All human goodness must be social goodness. Man is fundamentally gregarious and his morality consists in being a good member of his community.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  [Footnote 1: _i.e._ those not in love.] [Footnote 2: Syn. adventures (_casi_).] _Day the First_ HERE BEGINNETH THE FIRST DAY OF THE DECAMERON WHEREIN (AFTER DEMONSTRATION MADE BY THE AUTHOR OF THE MANNER IN WHICH IT CAME TO PASS THAT THE PERSONS WHO ARE HEREINAFTER PRESENTED FOREGATHERED FOR THE PURPOSE OF DEVISING TOGETHER) UNDER THE GOVERNANCE OF PAMPINEA IS DISCOURSED OF THAT WHICH IS MOST AGREEABLE UNTO EACH As often, most gracious ladies, as, taking thought in myself, I mind me how very pitiful you are all by nature, so often do I recognize that this present work will, to your thinking, have a grievous and a weariful beginning, inasmuch as the dolorous remembrance of the late pestiferous mortality, which it beareth on its forefront, is universally irksome to all who saw or otherwise knew it. But I would not therefore have this affright you from reading further, as if in the reading you were still to fare among sighs and tears. Let this grisly beginning be none other to you than is to wayfarers a rugged and steep mountain, beyond which is situate a most fair and delightful plain, which latter cometh so much the pleasanter to them as the greater was the hardship of the ascent and the descent; for, like as dolour occupieth the extreme of gladness, even so are miseries determined by imminent joyance. This brief annoy (I say brief, inasmuch as it is contained in few pages) is straightway succeeded by the pleasance and delight which I have already promised you and which, belike, were it not aforesaid, might not be looked for from such a beginning. And in truth, could I fairly have availed to bring you to my desire otherwise than by so rugged a path as this will be I had gladly done it; but being in a manner constrained thereto, for that, without this reminiscence of our past miseries, it might not be shown what was the occasion of the coming about of the things that will hereafter be read, I have brought myself to write them.[3] [Footnote 3: _i.e._ the few pages of which he speaks above.]

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  Five minutes later she was gone, after giving him a look, which she believed expressed solicitude only. She had searched in vain for a true sign, for some explanation of so inexplicable a state of affairs. As though the sound of the door shutting had severed his bonds, Cheri stretched himself and found that he felt light, cold, and empt}% He hurried to the window and saw his wife crossing the small strip of garden, her head bowed under the rain. “ She’s got a guilty back,” he pronounced, “ she’s always had a guilty back. From the front, she looks a charming little lady. But her back gives the show away. She’s lost a good half-hour by my having fainted. But ‘back to our muttons’, as my mother would say. When I got married, Lea was fifty-one - at the very least — so Madame Peloux assures me. That would make her fifty-eight now, sixty perhaps. ... The same age as General Courbat? No! That’s too rich a joke! ” He tried his hardest to associate the picture of Lea at sixty with the white bristling moustache and crannied cheeks of General Courbat and his ancient cab-horse stance. “It’s the best joke out! ” The arrival of Madame Peloux found Cheri still given over to his latest pastime, pale, staring out at the drenched garden, and chewing a cigarette that had gone out. He showed no surprise at his mother's entrance. ‘You're certainly up with the lark, my dear mother.' ‘And you’ve got out of bed the wrong side, it would seem,' was her rejoinder. ‘ Pure imagination. There are, at least, extenuating circumstances to account for your activity, I presume?' She raised both eyes and shoulders in the direction of the ceiling. A cheeky little leather sports hat was pulled down like a vizor over her forehead. *My poor child,’ she sighed, ‘if you only knew what I'm engaged on at this moment! If you knew what a gigantic task ...' He took careful stock of the wrinkles on his mother's face, the inverted commas round her mouth. He contemplated the small flabby wavelet of a double chin, the ebb and flow of which now covered, now uncovered, the collar of her mackintosh. He started to weigh up the fluctuating pouches under her eyes, repeating to himself: ‘‘Fifty-eight... Sixty ...” * Do you know the task I’ve set myself? Do youknow?' She waited a moment, opening wider her large eyes outlined by black pencil.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  He gave her a helpless smile, and she noticed how much her son’s face aged as he smiled. “Someone ought constantly to be telling him hard-luck stories,” she said to herself, “or else making him really angry. Gaiety doesn’t improve his looks ...” She blew out a cloud of smoke and in her turn allowed an ambiguous commonplace to escape her. ‘You didn’t notice anything of that before.’ He raised his head sharply. ‘Before? Before what?’ * Before the war, of course.’ ‘Ah, yes he murmured, disappointed. ‘No, before the war, obviously. ... But before the war I didn’t look at things in the same way.’ Why? ’ The simple word struck him dumb. T’ll tell you what it is,’ Charlotte chid him, ‘you’ve turned honest.’ ‘You wouldn’t think of admitting, by any chance, that I’ve simply remained so? ’ ‘No, no, don’t let’s get that wrong.* She was arguing, a flush on her cheeks, with the fervour of a prophetess. ‘Your way of life before the war, after all - I’m putting myself in the position of people who are not exactly broad-minded and who take a superficial view of things, understand! - such a way of life, after all, has a name! ’ ‘If you like,’ Cheri agreed. ‘What of it?’ ‘Well then, that implies a ... a way of looking at things. Your point of view was a gigolo’s.’ * Quite possibly,’ said Cheri, unmoved. ‘Do you see any harm in that? ’ ‘ Certainly not,’ Charlotte protested, with the simplicity of a child. ‘But, you know, there’s a right time for everything.’ ‘Yes ...’ He sighed deeply, looking out towards a sky masked by cloud and rain. * There’s a time to be young, and there’s a time to be less young. There’s a time to be happy ... d’you think it needed you to make me aware of that? ’ She seemed suddenly to be upset, and walked up and down the room, her round behind tightly moulded by her dress, as plump and brisk as a little fat bitch. She came back and planted herself in front of her son. ‘ Well, darling, I’m afraid you’re heading for some act of madness.’ ‘What?’ *Oh! there aren’t so many. A monastery. Or a desert island. Or love.’ Ch4ri smiled in astonishment. ‘Love? You want me ... in love with ...’ He jerked his chin in the direction of Edmee’s boudoir, and Charlotte’s eyes sparkled. ‘Who mentioned her?’ He laughed, and from an instinct of self-preservation became offensive again. ‘ You did, and in a moment you’ll be offering me one of your American pieces.’ She gave a theatrical start. "An American piece? Really? And why not a rubber substitute as provided for sailors into the bargain?’

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I am not happy nor am I greatly unhappy; I have a sad, wistful feeling which I can’t quite explain. I want you. If you desert me now I am lost. You must believe in me no matter how difficult it may seem sometimes. You ask about going to England. Anaïs, what shall I say? What would I like? To go there with you—to be with you always. I am telling you this when June has come to me in her very best guise, when there should be more hope than ever, if I wanted hope. But like you with Hugo, I see it all coming too late. I have passed on. And now, no doubt, I must live some sad beautiful lie with her for a while, and it causes you anguish and that pains me terribly. “And perhaps you will be seeing more in June than ever, which would be right and you may hate or despise me but what can I do? Take June for what she is—she may mean a great deal to you—but don’t let her come between us. What you two have to give each other is none of my affair. I love you, just remember that. And please don’t punish me by avoiding me.” Last night I wept. I wept because the process by which I have become woman was painful. I wept because I was no longer a child with a child’s blind faith. I wept because my eyes were opened to reality—to Henry’s selfishness, June’s love of power, my insatiable creativity which must concern itself with others and cannot be sufficient to itself. I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because from now on I will weep less. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence. So Henry is coming this afternoon, and tomorrow I am going out with June. December I’ve met Henry Miller. He came to lunch with Richard Osborn, a lawyer I had to consult on the contract for my D. H. Lawrence book. When he first stepped out of the car and walked towards the door where I stood waiting, I saw a man I liked. In his writing he is flamboyant, virile, animal, magnificent. He’s a man whom life makes drunk, I thought. He is like me. In the middle of lunch, when we were seriously discussing books, and Richard had sailed off on a long tirade, Henry began to laugh. He said, “I’m not laughing at you, Richard, but I just can’t help myself. I don’t care a bit, not a bit who’s right. I’m too happy. I’m just so happy right this moment with all the colors around me, the wine. The whole moment is so wonderful, so wonderful.”

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  If boarders and roomers are taken in to help in paying the rent, an alien and often a demoralizing element enters the family. Thus the economic situation everywhere saps family life. One family to one house is the only normal condition. When twenty families live in one tenement, twenty souls inhabit one body. That was the condition of the demoniac of Gadara, in whom dwelt a legion. He was crazy. To be a home in the fullest sense, it must be loved with the sense of proprietorship. As cities grow, home ownership declines. A semi-vagrancy from one flat to the next grows up. In the borough of Manhattan only six per cent of the homes are owned by those who live in them; in Philadelphia, a city of small houses, only twenty-two per cent own their homes. Rochester is an almost ideal city for the development of homes, and the popular assumption is that nearly everybody owns his home. Yet the census of 1900 showed that of the 33,964 homes in the city only 12,290 were owned by the tenants, and half of these were mortgaged. The condition of the home determines the condition of woman. If girls are eagerly sought in marriage, they can choose the best. If few men can afford a good home, girls must take what offers or go without. If a man can easily make a living for a family, he can afford to be indifferent to anything but the person of the woman he loves. As the economic pressure tightens and social classes grow more clearly defined, American men, too, will begin to inquire what property comes to them with their bride. We shall have love modified by the “ dot .” Our optimists treat it as a sign of progress that “so many professions are now open to women.” But it is not choice, but grim necessity, that drives woman into new ways of getting bread and clothing. The great majority of girls heartily prefer the independence and the satisfaction of the heart which are offered to a woman only in a comfortable and happy home. Some educated girls think they prefer the practice of a profession because the dream of unusual success lures them; but when they have had a taste of the wearing routine that prevails in most professions, they turn with longing to the thought of a home of their own. Our industrial machine has absorbed the functions which women formerly fulfilled in the home, and has drawn them into its hopper because female labor is unorganized and cheap labor. They are made to compete with the very men who ought to marry them, and thus they further diminish their own chance of marriage. If any one has a sound reason for taking the competitive system by the throat in righteous wrath, it is the unmarried woman and the mother with girls.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Each time I raised my eyes from my notebook, I met my own face in the broken mirror. I can see once more, in the wintry semidarkness, a thin boy with a long neck and hectic black eyes, his hair tousled by his nervous fingers; he had to put two cushions on his low stool in order to reach the high dressing table. I loved to study by myself and to ask the mirror who I was and what my face promised. From having worked before the glass all through my adolescence, much of it has remained vivid in my memory. Night fell early but, for the sake of economy, my mother was always late in lighting the tiny lamp that strained my eyes and made me nearsighted. To this day, I still experience real anguish from that yellow light. When I roam at night in poor neighborhoods and peep indiscreetly through their feebly-lighted windows, I am overcome by the painful memory of a crazily furnished flat with distant corners that the light could never reach. When my father came home, he noisily threw the big store key on the marble-topped dresser. Then he flung himself heavily on the creaking bed. Climbing the stairs had worn him out. He didn’t speak, nor did anyone else dare to speak until his breathing whistled less loudly. Since he never came home for lunch, we managed to forget him during the day; but seeing him each evening like this, glum and broken, was a poignant reminder of how hard his life was. His asthma attacks grew more and more frequent, more and more violent, and the idea of death began to torment him. In silence, we felt guilty as we watched him suffer. He left the house at seven in the morning, winter and summer, and worked without a break until night had fallen. When the days were too short, he managed to work longer by the light of a large oil lamp. The youngest among us always brought my father’s lunch to the shop; we had all had our turn at bringing the meal which not only turned cold on the way but arrived — meat, salad, and bread — jolted into one messy dish. We had often suggested he buy a little stove to heat his meal; but he always refused, rejecting any improvement in his life, as if he were too trapped to hope for any relief. “Rotten day,” he said at last. “Not one serious customer. A dumb Bedouin came in this morning with a head as hard as a log and offered me fifty francs for a two-hundred-franc halter. It made my lungs ache to try to explain that I couldn’t sell it for less than cost price.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  Now at last the weary hum of the hand-spindle and the pounding of the hand-loom could cease. Nature bent her willing neck to the yoke, and the economic production of our race took a leap forward—as when a car has been pushed forward by hand on the level, and now grips the cable and rushes up a steep incline. If some angel with prophetic foresight had witnessed that epoch, would he not have winged his way back to heaven to tell God that human suffering was drawing to its end? Instead of that a long-drawn wail of misery followed wherever the power-machine came. It swept the bread from men’s tables and the pride from their hearts. Hitherto each master of a handicraft, with his family and a few apprentices and journeymen about him, had plied his trade in his home, owner of his simple tools and master of his profits. His workmen ate at his table, married his daughters, and hoped to become masters themselves when their time of education was over. He worked for customers whom he knew, and honest work was good policy. He supplied a definite demand. The rules of his guild and the laws of his city barred out alien or reckless competition which would undermine his trade. So men lived simply and rudely. They had no hope of millions to lure them, nor the fear of poverty to haunt them. They lacked many of the luxuries accessible even to the poor to-day, but they had a large degree of security, independence, and hope. And man liveth not by cake alone. Then arrived the power-machine, and the old economic world tottered and fell like San Francisco in 1906. The machine was too expensive to be set up in the old home workshops and owned by every master. If the guilds had been wise enough to purchase and operate machinery in common, they might have effected a coöperative organization of industry in which all could have shared the increased profits of machine production. As it was, the wealthy and enterprising and ruthless seized the new opening, turned out a rapid flow of products, and of necessity underbid the others in marketing their goods. The old customs and regulations which had forbidden or limited free competition were brushed away. New economic theories were developed which sanctioned what was going on and secured the support of public opinion and legislation for those who were driving the machine through the framework of the social structure. The distress of the displaced workers was terrible. In blind agony they mobbed the factories and destroyed the machines which were destroying them. But the men who owned the machines, owned the law. In England the death penalty was put on the destruction of machinery. Sullenly the old masters had to bow their necks to the yoke. They had to leave their own shops and their old independence and come to the machine for work and bread.