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)

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

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

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

• From Another Country (1962)

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

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

  I blinked uncertainly. “You still don’t look too good to me. How are you feeling? That was quite a long faint. Better get her to a doctor?” that last, clearly, was addressed to Jane. “Definitely.” Jane sounded uncharacteristically subdued. “Do you think we could phone for a taxi?” I closed my eyes, mentally shaking my head. Sympathy, doctors, taxis—I could not take it all in. I must have tried to protest feebly, but nobody took any notice and I lay there gratefully, thankful that it was over, but feeling hugely tired. As we drove up the Banbury Road toward St. Anne’s and climbed the short flight of stairs to my room in the Gatehouse, Jane kept up a determined flow of chatter. The fright that I had seen in her eyes had gone, and she was now recasting the whole event in her usual ebullient manner. “I always longed to faint at school,” she said cheerfully as she opened the large window overlooking the college lawn. We could see students hurrying past in ones and twos, going about the business of a normal Tuesday morning. “I always thought it would be a sign of such sensitivity and refinement. I tried everything. Put blotting paper in my shoes, held my breath. Nothing happened. Not a hope. I’m just too horribly healthy.” I smiled as Jane glared at herself in the mirror and threw back her long blond hair. It was indeed difficult to imagine her wilting feebly: she was built on too large a scale, was too confident for that. “Have you ever fainted before?” she asked, suddenly serious. I nodded. “It used to happen quite a lot in the convent. It’s all emotional—all in the mind. At least, that’s what the nuns said.” “Don’t tell me! I was at a convent school, remember? And I suppose you have been under a strain, giving up that lovely peaceful life.” I grimaced slightly, amazed as I always was that even people who knew nuns at first hand had such an unrealistically idyllic image of convent life. “Tell me,” Jane said abruptly, “do you feel guilty?” I thought hard for a moment. People often asked me this, because they seemed to associate Catholicism with guilt. “No,” I said at last, “I don’t feel at all guilty. ‘Guilt’ is not the word.” One of the good things that I had learned from my superiors was that guilt could be pure self-indulgence, a wallowing in the ego. Guilt, I was told, usually sprang from misplaced pride; it might simply be chagrin that you were not as wonderful as you hoped. “I feel sad,” I went on, “a failure, in some ways. But not guilty exactly.” “God, you are lucky!” Jane flung herself down in my armchair. “I feel endlessly, endlessly guilty about sleeping with Mark. It means that I can’t go to Mass, Communion, or confession, because I don’t have a ‘firm purpose of amendment,’ as they say.

• From Another Country (1962)

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

• From Another Country (1962)

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

• From Another Country (1962)

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

• From Another Country (1962)

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

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  (14:9) The book then closes with warnings to the nations, if they wage war against Jerusalem, or if they then do not come and take part appropriately in the festivals. But at the center of it all is the renewal of holiness in the Temple itself. “There shall no longer be traders in the house of YHWH of hosts on that day” (14:21) . Putting together this strange, apparently jerky and disjointed set of oracles, we begin to see a pattern emerging. Israel’s exile is to be reversed under the rule of the anointed king, who will end up ruling the whole world. The pagan nations will do their worst, but God himself will come to fight against them, and he will be king over all the earth. Meanwhile, however, Israel’s official rulers and guardians, the “shepherds,” have failed hopelessly in their task. But YHWH ’s own “shepherd” is to be killed and the sheep scattered in order that somehow—the prophet doesn’t explain how—the victory can be won. All of this seems to have helped to shape Jesus’s own sense of vocation. His actions in Jerusalem—riding in on a donkey and then driving the traders out of the Temple—seem to hold together Zechariah 9:9–10 and 14:21. He seems then to have applied the passage about the shepherds both to his own critique of Israel’s leadership and, more strikingly still, to his own forthcoming fate. For our purposes, the main thing to notice here is that Zechariah, like Isaiah and Daniel, envisages the same three lines all converging: the wicked pagan nations who fight against God and his people; the failed Jewish leadership; and God himself coming to do what nobody else can do. These are the three elements that, as seen by Jesus himself, constituted the perfect storm into which he rode, sorrowful but determined, for that final Passover in Jerusalem. I said there were three main scriptural passages that seem to have contributed to Jesus’s sense of vocation as he undertook this final journey. I mentioned then, and now recall, a fourth element we should factor in as well: the Psalms. We should assume that Jesus knew the Psalms as well as anyone and that they formed his natural prayer book and, as such, played a major role in shaping his worldview. And it is in the Psalms that we find, once more, the major themes of YHWH becoming king, installing his Messiah—his “son”!—in Jerusalem, and bidding the surrounding nations pay him homage (e.g., Pss. 2; 72). But it is in the Psalms too that we find, even in a psalm that speaks so powerfully of God’s kingdom coming, the sense of utter desolation, of being abandoned by God to horrible and shameful suffering and death (Ps. 22). These themes come together in many different ways in these ancient poems, and we are on utterly safe ground in assuming that Jesus not only knew them and reflected on them, but made them the very stuff of his vocation.

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

  Yet the location of my new flat showed that I had not really settled for this at all. Highbury, in North London, on the other side of the city, was miles from my new school. There were, I thought, sensible reasons for my choice. Because of my epilepsy, my doctors told me firmly, driving was out of the question. Southeast London is badly served by public transport: Dulwich is not connected to the underground railway, and without a car, life is very difficult there. Most of the new friends I had made during the last few months lived in North London, and, I argued, they were going to be very important to me now. If I could not have a satisfying career, at least I could have a good social life. But the real reason for choosing Highbury was that I did not want to live anywhere near the school. In the evening, as I headed north, my heart became lighter with every mile, and when the bus finally lurched into Rosebury Avenue, passed the Sadler’s Wells Theatre, and began the approach to Islington, I felt a new woman. Conversely, as the bus crept through the morning traffic, passed the Houses of Parliament, and crossed the Thames at Westminster Bridge, I felt gloomier by the minute. In one sense, it was crazy to live so far away from my work. The journey was horrendous. Because the mortgage gobbled up much of my meager salary, I could not afford to travel either by tube or by the overground train, which would have cut the trip in half. Instead, I had to rely on a most unreliable bus that took me to Southeast London by an extraordinarily circuitous route. In the morning, I had to leave the house shortly after 6:30, looking most peculiar in a moth-eaten fur coat, which had once belonged to my grandmother (I could not afford a new winter coat), my face glistening with baby oil to protect my skin from the elements (I could not afford to waste makeup on the other passengers of bus 172). If all went well (and all too often the journey did not go well—the bus would fail to arrive, and once even broke down), I would arrive in Herne Hill at about 8:15, and then had to walk a mile to the school. In the evening, I sometimes had to wait for over an hour for the wretched bus. But I felt that all this was worthwhile. I wanted to put myself at some distance from my new job, because I knew that it was doing me no good at all.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

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

• From The Fermata (1994)

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

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

  It seemed, as I looked at Rebecca, that you could die of “nerves” after all. Rebecca nodded. “We’ve talked about my childhood mostly.” She smiled—a terrible corpselike smile. “It’s interesting. I’d quite forgotten. I was a rather passionate, violent child. Always losing my temper. I used to lock myself up in cupboards and refuse to come out until I had made my point.” “You? Violent?” I was astonished. Where had all that fury gone? That, of course, was another silly question. Whoever heard of a passionate or rebellious nun? And yet, I asked myself suddenly, why not? “Why couldn’t they just work with what we were?” I was thinking aloud, really. “Why try to change us so drastically? With you it was fury and passion; I was always ‘too sensitive.’ ‘What are we going to do about your sensitivity, Sister?’ ” I mimicked the tones of the assistant novice mistress’s exasperated, faintly disgusted tone. “But what’s wrong with passion? What’s wrong with sensitivity? Jesus was a passionate man, wasn’t he? You couldn’t call him insensitive, either. Hardly an example of the stiff upper lip.” “I know.” Rebecca sounded defeated. “But you know, I wanted to change,” she continued dispassionately, as though her former self had no connection with her at all. “I wanted to be another kind of person.” “We wanted to be transformed.” I noted that I too spoke abstractly, as though about somebody else. As though I had already passed away. “But that’s different, surely?” I thought of Jesus on Mount Tabor when, the gospels tell us, his disciples had seen him transfigured: light streamed from his face, his garments had shone white as snow. He had not been diminished but enhanced. His personality and body had remained intact, but transfused with divine power; he had perfected his humanity. “They didn’t have to get rid of us; they could have perfected what we were.” But that hadn’t happened. There was—literally—almost nothing left of Rebecca. A nurse came in with a wheelchair. “Time for your X ray, Sister.” “Can’t you walk?” I asked in dismay as Rebecca pulled on her dressing gown and settled herself uncertainly in the chair. “She’s got to conserve her energy,” the nurse explained matter-of-factly. “We can’t have her burning up all those lovely calories by running up and down stairs, now can we? Every little bit helps.” I hoped it did, but it seemed unlikely. In every sense of the word, Rebecca had been wasted: all that energy and intensity had been quashed, and like me, she was broken, unable to function or even to move freely. “I’ll come again soon,” I promised as the nurse wheeled her away. But of course you have the same illness as Rebecca.” Dr. Piet pushed back his chair from the desk and looked at me, eyebrows raised. This was one of our better sessions, and the panic of my response showed that he had scored a bull’s-eye. “No, we’re different!”

• From Another Country (1962)

  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. She envied Ida. She listened to Vivaldo hum the blues.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  [image file=image_rsrc1BH.jpg] 13I WAS IN A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF PAIN WHEN THINGS ENDED WITH Rhody. I had given her a glimpse of my inner life, and she had unambiguously rejected it. But I realize now, in putting Rhody down on paper, that good, tangible things grew out of our truncated relationship. If I had not seen and acted on that note about men and watches in the back of her copy of the Virago paperback, I would probably not have had the later idea of writing smutty expostulations in paperbacks just before women browsed them, and if I hadn’t thought of that, I probably wouldn’t have conceived of using the Fold as a rotter’s retreat and leaving the outcome where a woman might find it. In a way, Rhody’s spurning the glimpse I had given her of my secret freed me to investigate its potential further. After the time on the Cape, I wrote a little more: one story about a naked woman suspended above one lane of the Callahan tunnel on a black rope trapeze net during rush hour, looking down through its square mesh at the cars filing slowly beneath her and pissing generously on them as their moon-roofs slid open; one story about a man teaching a young woman to touch-type on his antique Oliver No. 9 manual typewriter, holding his hands over her hands and closing his eyes and feeling her fingers sink one by one into the deep counterweighted letters and knowing she was spelling H-I-P-S and being unable to resist putting his hands on her hips, then feeling her fingers type B-R-E-A-S-T-S on the round black cuplike keys and being unable to resist palming her breasts and pulling her back against him; one story about a group of scuba-diving Caribbean tourists corrupting the angelfish with aerosol cans of cheddar cheese, sometimes making cheese hearts in the water that the fish then momentarily echoed as they fed, sometimes squirting it on wet-suited arms or breasts and letting the fish nip it off; one about a woman letting her pet hermit crab walk lightly all over her back while she read Barron’s and dreamed of blue-eyed men with tons of money; one about several caves of stalagmites, each one a different color, that, when broken off and inserted into a vadge, glowed, their stumps releasing bidet-like streams of warm subterranean mineral water.

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

  Visits to the convent parlor were starchy and artificial. Nuns were not allowed to eat with “seculars,” so my parents had had some appalling meals surrounded by a bevy of nuns pouring out tea and making polite conversation, while I went off to eat with the community in the convent refectory. My sister, Lindsey, who was three years younger than I, had hated these visits. As she watched us process into the chapel, genuflecting before the altar with near military precision and kneeling motionless in the pews, the underlying tension, the humorless rigidity, and the fear that somebody might ruin this perfection by making a mistake so petrified her that, to the amusement of some members of the community, she often passed out and had to be carried outside, even though she never fainted anywhere else. My letters were little better. We were never allowed to speak of what happened inside the convent, and since for years I scarcely left the enclosure, I had to confine my remarks to anodyne descriptions of the countryside or reverential accounts of church services. My parents, therefore, had no idea what my life had been like for the last seven years. At a deeper and more worrying level, I found that I simply could not respond to their affection. I shied away from any intimacy, could not bear to be touched or embraced, and could speak to my family only in the rather formal, distant way of nuns. Naturally my parents were hurt; I felt bad about hurting them; and there was an impasse. The training seemed to have worked, after all. My capacity for affection had either atrophied or been so badly damaged that it could not function normally. I felt frozen and could see what people meant when they said that their heart had turned to stone. I could almost feel this new hardness within, like a cold, heavy weight. I had become a person who could not love and who seemed incapable of reaching out to others. Whether I liked it or not, I was now a garden enclosed, a well sealed up. Leaving the religious life in those days was not like changing your job or moving house. Our novitiate had not simply provided us with new professional skills and left our deepest selves untouched. It was a conditioning. For about three years we were wholly isolated from the outside world, and also from the rest of the community. The door of the noviceship was kept permanently locked, and we spoke to the other nuns only on very special feast days. This meant that the noviceship became our whole world. No other existed for us, and the whims and moods of our mistress acquired monumental importance. When we were punished, it seemed a cosmic event; when we were lonely or miserable, there was no possibility of comfort.

• 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 Fermata (1994)

  Rhody comforted him. Lying on the bed with his hands doing unpleasant things with his own chest hair, he began describing the “incredibly vivid” out-of-body experience he had just had of being tied up, staring at the skis. Eventually the two of them tiptoed giggling off to the laundry room to find some rope and the ski boots. I left soon after. Another person I asked, a guy who worked for Boston University, said that, given time-perverter powers, he would wander through women’s locker rooms for a while; then he said, after much hemming and hawing, that he would “probably want to see people I knew.” This was after I had described a hypothetical scene in which someone is watching a rented copy of Metropolitan on his VCR and he really loves it, but he needs to piss extremely bad, and he points the remote at the machine and hits PAUSE, but finds that instead of pausing Metropolitan, Metropolitan continues and the entire rest of the world is in a freeze-frame—so that the remote-owner has however long it will take for the movie to finish playing to run outside into the suspension and pry and peep to his heart’s content. As I mentioned earlier, I have never had any success with remote-control keypads, which is exactly why I used a remote PAUSE button in the scene I offered him—it felt far enough removed from things I had actually done. I asked one or two women as well, and one of them said she would be eager to see her friends having sex. “I’d probably be grossed out, but I’d want to see it anyway.” I felt a little sad that I didn’t have this temptation in common with my respondents.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  This problem of remembering names, which just came up in connection with the MIT woman, is a particularly acute one for the career temp. I may work as many as forty different assignments in a given year—some for a week or two, some for a few days. At each assignment, there are typically three to five names to learn the first day (and occasionally many more); ten or more the second day. Depending on how heavy the phone action is, the number of names I end up finally mastering per job can go considerably over one hundred. Per year, I am being exposed to roughly three thousand names, of which (scaling back again) perhaps five hundred belong to individuals I get to know a little, talk to, work fairly closely with. Over ten years, that makes five thousand personalities, about each one of whom I must develop a little packet of emotion, a liking, a disliking, a theory about their feelings for some colleague, a mental note about their taste in clothes, a memory of how they like things done, whether they are of the opinion that state names ought to be spelled out in full or given the two-letter abbreviation, whether they like the document name or number included on the letter or think that this is a vulgarity, whether they want me to amuse myself when I’ve caught up with my work or prefer that I come bounding into their office asking for more to do. In college I was impressed by how well some very popular professors kept up with the particulars of their students’ lives—but the fact is that I master just as much raw humanity each year as the most hotshot celebrity professor. And the difference is that in my lowly case, all these people, or most of them, continue to work downtown, just as I do. They aren’t going to graduate and go away. What this means, practically speaking, is that every few days I will almost certainly run into someone with whom I have worked closely at some company at some time in the past. And I will want so much to remember his or her name! They usually remember my name, and in some cases I can detect a faint hurt look in their eyes when they perceive, through my joshing and bluster, that I don’t remember theirs, since together we did work very hard and beat impossible deadlines and joke around only six months ago, or a year and a half ago, or five years ago. And—they and I both secretly think—they were higher-ranking than I was, they were salaried, I was a temp, so it is a duty in keeping with my subordinate station to remember their names, while it is only noblesse oblige for them to remember mine.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  So here they have stayed, and it’s been okay, although neither of them love it. Their classmates hadn’t said anything that the two consider blatantly racist (with the exception of a guy who “apologized” to Emmett at a frat party for not having “put watermelon in the punch”), but there had been a steady stream of little things. “Like there is this one girl in my dorm, she always says, ‘I’m not trying to be racist or anything, but . . .’ And I’m just like, ‘Why do you want to preface it that way if you don’t feel as if it’s a problem in the first place?’ Or there’s the idea of ‘I want to play in your hair.’” Xavier scooted back his chair and waved his hands, as if trying to escape. “You’re not going to go play in Timmy’s hair. So why are you playing in my hair? I should have that same personal space as anyone else.” Both guys emphasized, repeatedly, that they didn’t think of their classmates as venal, just ignorant, thoughtless. Still, the comments stung. They also piled up: small slights—microaggressions—have been found to contribute to conditions among African American college students as wide-ranging as anxiety, stress, depression, suicidal thoughts, hair loss, diabetes, and heart disease, as well as to their high dropout rates. And it turns out that black male students who hew to conventional masculinity—the equation of manhood with suppressing emotion—are even more vulnerable to the negative impact of that everyday racism. Emmett, for instance, who was under six feet tall and scrawny, was constantly mistaken for an athlete. “At least Xavier is built,” he said. “Look at me! There’s no reason for me to be confused for an athlete. But I have kids come up to me and swear on their lives that they have seen me on the basketball court. I’m like, ‘Bro, I’ve never even gone to a game.’ But to me, someone thinking I was on the basketball team compared to the guy making that watermelon statement . . . those are two different situations. One is just ignorance, and the other is . . .” He trailed off. Emmett partied less in college than he had in high school—that, he said, was always his plan—but he wasn’t averse to hanging out with white “frat dudes” now and again. He’d even checked out a couple of rush events, but aside from the opportunity to make connections that might lead to career advancement, he didn’t think Greek life was for him. “I was probably one of four black kids out of about seven hundred rushes this semester,” he said. “It was not a good look. They did strive to make it seem friendly. They try to treat you better because—” “They want to color the place up,” Xavier cut in.