Sadness

Passages

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

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• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  and it shall come to pass when thou shalt have the dominion, that thou shalt break his yoke from off thy neck (Chap. 27). And when will this be, cosmologically? In Evolution. Here consciousness breaks the yoke of matter and eventually gains dominion. Did Jew and Gentile understand their scriptures, this would be the object of their effort today. It is the hold that matter and material things have upon our consciousness that causes all our troubles; therefore it must be broken. This is the work of the remaining half of the Zodiacal Night. In this story, however, we’re still in Involution and on the second plane. The time has come to move on and so— 1. . . . there was a famine in the land, besides the first famine that was in the days of Abraham . . . (Chap. 26). There is a famine on every plane when its work is done. There was one in Abraham’s day; there was one in Isaac’s day; and soon we will find another driving Jacob down to Egypt, earth. Isaac, however, was not allowed to go, only his seed, and so we come to Jacob. JacobWhen Esau finally realized what Jacob had done to him, he determined to kill his brother—the Cain and Abel aspect of this myth—but Rebekah, overhearing the plot, warned Jacob and sent him off to parts unknown. 10. And Jacob went out from Beer-sheba, and went toward Haran. 11. And he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; and he took of the stones of that place, and put them for his pillows, and lay down in that place to sleep. 12. And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it (Chap. 28). Here we have another mystery that is no mystery—Jacob’s ladder. This scala coeli , or ladder of heaven, is the seven-runged ladder of the planetary entity, here involutionary; and the “angels of God” that ascend and descend upon it are the creative forces. This is the involutionary Tower of Babel, which also reached to heaven. Now in spite of the “chosen” their God must have revealed this to the Persians also for they too had their scala coeliy a ladder of seven rungs on which the souls of earth descended and ascended. And the Brahmins had theirs, the sacred Mount Meru, reached by seven steps. Jacob called “the name of that place Beth-el,” “house of God,” and the “house of God” is the earth. And he awakened from his dream and said, “How dreadful is this place! this is none other than the house of God.” Yes, this is El Shaddai’s house and we too said it was a dreadful place. In it we all must suffer and it’s time we learned the reason.

• From Wild (2012)

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

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

  I 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 Another Country (1962)

  And how can you live if you do?” And he stared at Eric, who said nothing, whose face gleamed in the yellow light, as mysteriously impersonal and as fearfully moving as might have been a death mask of Eric as a boy. He realized that they were both beginning to be drunk. “I don’t see how I can live with Ida, and I don’t see how I can live without her. I get through every day on a prayer. Every morning, when I wake up, I’m surprised to find that she’s still beside me.” Eric was watching him, perfectly rigid and still, seeming scarcely to breathe, only his unmoving eyes were alive. “And yet”—he caught his breath—“sometimes I wish she weren’t there, sometimes I wish I’d never met her, sometimes I think I’d go anywhere to get this burden off me. She never lets me forget I’m white, she never lets me forget she’s colored. And I don’t care, I don’t care—did Rufus do that to you? Did he try to make you pay?” Eric dropped his eyes, and his lips tightened. “Ah. He didn’t try. I paid.” He raised his eyes to Vivaldo’s. “But I’m not sad about it any more. If it hadn’t been for Rufus, I would never have had to go away, I would never have been able to deal with Yves.” And then, rising and walking to the window, from which more and more voices rose, “Maybe that’s what love is for.” “Are you sleeping with anyone besides Cass?” Eric turned. “No.” “I’m sorry. I just thought you might be. I’m not sleeping with anyone except Ida.” “We can’t be everywhere at once,” said Eric. They listened to the footfalls and voices in the street: someone was singing, someone called, someone was cursing. Someone ran. Then silence, again. “You know,” said Eric, “it’s true that you can make kids without love. But if you do love the person you make the kids with, it must be something fantastic.” “Ida and I could have great kids,” said Vivaldo. “Do you think you will?” “I don’t know. I’d love to—but”—he fell back on the bed, staring at the ceiling. “I don’t know.” He allowed himself, for a moment, the luxury of dreaming of Ida’s children, though he knew that these children would never be born and that this moment was all he would ever have of them. Nevertheless, he dreamed of a baby boy who had Ida’s mouth and eyes and forehead, his hair, only curlier, his build, their color. What would that color be? From the streets, again, came a cry and a crash and a roar. Eric switched off the night light and opened the blinds and Vivaldo joined him at the window.

• From Wild (2012)

  When I reached the trail on the other side, I felt stupid and weak and sorry for myself, vulnerable in a way I hadn’t felt on the trail before, envious of the couples who had each other, and of Rex and Stacy who had so easily become a hiking pair—when Rex left the trail in Seiad Valley, Stacy would be meeting her friend Dee so they could hike through Oregon together, but I’d forever be alone. And why? What did being alone do? I’m not afraid, I said, calling up my old mantra to calm my mind. But it didn’t feel the same as it usually did to say it. Perhaps because that wasn’t entirely true anymore. Perhaps by now I’d come far enough that I had the guts to be afraid. When I stopped for lunch, I lingered until the others caught up to me. They told me they’d met a backcountry ranger who warned them of a forest fire to the west and north, near Happy Valley. It hadn’t affected the PCT so far, but he’d told them to be on alert. I let them all hike ahead, saying I’d catch up to them by nightfall, and walked alone into the heat of the afternoon. A couple of hours later, I came to a spring in an idyllic meadow and stopped to get water. It was too beautiful a spot to leave, so afterwards I lingered, soaking my feet in the spring until I heard an ever-loudening jangle of bells. I had only just scrambled to my feet when a white llama rounded the bend and came bounding straight up to me with a toothy grin on his face. “Ah!” I yelled, the same as I had when I saw the bear, but I reached for the lead rope that dangled from his halter anyway, an old habit from my childhood with horses. The llama wore a pack that was strung with silver bells, not so unlike the belt on the woman I’d met at Toad Lake. “Easy,” I said to him as I stood, barefoot and stunned, wondering what to do next. He looked stunned too, his expression both comical and stern. It occurred to me that he might bite me, but I had no way to know. I’d never been so close to a llama. I’d never even been far from a llama. I’d had so little experience with llamas that I wasn’t even 100 percent sure that a llama was what he was. He smelled like burlap and morning breath. I pulled him discreetly in the direction of my boots and stuffed my feet into them and then petted his long bristly neck in a vigorous manner that I hoped struck him as commanding. After a few minutes, an old woman with two gray braids down the sides of her head came along.

• From Wild (2012)

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

• From Wild (2012)

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

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

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

• From 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)

  Then she was silent. She sipped her drink nervously and lit a cigarette. “I guess it’s about Richard and me,” she said at last. “I don’t know what’s going to become of us. There doesn’t seem to be anything between us any more.” She spoke in an odd, breathless way, almost like a schoolgirl, and as though she did not believe what she was saying. “Or I guess that’s not right. There’s a hell of a lot between us, there must be. But none of it seem to work. Sometimes—sometimes I think he hates me—for being married, for the children, for the work he does. And other times I know that isn’t true, that can’t be true.” She bit her lower lip and stubbed out her cigarette and tried to laugh. “Poor Vivaldo. I know you’ve got troubles of your own and don’t know what to do about the maunderings of a middle-aged, self-centered matron.” “Now that you mention it,” he said, “I guess you are practically decrepit.” He tried to smile; he did not know what to say. Ida and Ellis, thrust hastily to the back of his mind, were, nevertheless, dimly accomplishing their unspeakable violations of his manhood. “It really just sounds like a kind of summer storm—don’t all married people have them?” “I really don’t know anything about all married people. I’m not sure I know anything about marriage.” She sipped her drink again, saying, irrelevantly, “I wish I could get drunk.” Then she giggled, her proud face suddenly breaking. “I wish I could get drunk and go out and pick up a truck driver or a taxi driver or anybody who’d touch me and make me feel like a woman again.” She hid her face with one bony hand and her tears dripped through her fingers. Keeping her head down, she searched fiercely through the absurd straw handbag and finally came up with a small bit of Kleenex. With this, miraculously, she managed to blow her nose and dry her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I’ve just been sitting around brooding too long.”

• From Dante's Divine Comedy (2001)

  Questions to Consider: 1. How does Dante’s predicament help us to understand how we have gone astray from a path we meant to follow? 2. How does God show grace to Dante in a way that is “tailored” to the pilgrim’s needs? ©2001 The Teaching Company 19 Lecture Six The Never-Ending Storm Scope: In this lecture, we examine the nature of incontinencesubjecting reason to desireby examining lust, the sin explored in Inferno 5. Here, the pilgrim meets many figures but has a sustained encounter with one of them, Francesca da Rimini. Because this is the first sustained encounter that Dante has with a figure of the afterlife, it is a particularly important scene for understanding the nature of hell and the essence of all the sins encountered there. Francesca tells Dante the story of how she was drawn into an illicit relationship with her silent lover Paolo, her husband’s brother. Like all sinners in the Inferno, Francesca puts the blame elsewhere. The pilgrim, who is himself more than a little inclined toward this sin, feels sorry for Francesca. But Dante the writer gives the reader a great many important clues to suggest that this is not the proper response to her narrative. Outline I. If Dante is journeying toward God, why does he need to go to hell? A. He needs to descend in order to ascend. B. He needs to learn the nature of sin from the unrepentant. C. He needs to learn how to overcome these same tendencies in himself. D. The sinners whom he spends the most time with are those who have the most to say to him personally and in terms of his own moral development. E. These sinners help teach the reader about Dante. F. The sinners’ plights and punishments are not arbitrarily imposed; on the contrary, they are freely self-chosen. II. In Canto 5, the circle of the lustful, we have the first sustained encounter between Dante and an unrepentant sinner. A. We are now in hell “without an asterisk.” B. This encounter tells us about the nature of the sin.

• From Another Country (1962)

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

• From Another Country (1962)

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

• From Another Country (1962)

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

• From Another Country (1962)

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

• From The 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.