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 Memoirs of Fanny Hill (1749)

  The fifty guineas promised me by Mr. H...., at his parting with me, having been duly paid me, all my clothes and moveables chested up, which were at least of two hundred pounds value, I had them conveyed into a coach, where I soon followed them, after taking a civil leave of the landlord and his family, with whom I had never lived in a degree of familiarity enough to regret the removal; but still, the very circumstance of its being a removal, drew tears from me. I left, too, a letter of thanks for Mr. H...., from whom I concluded myself, as I really was, irretrievably separated. My maid I had discharged the day before, not only because I had her of Mr. H...., but that I suspected her of having some how or other been the occasion of his discovering me, in revenge, perhaps, for my not having trusted her with him. We soon got to my lodgings, which, though not so handsomely furnished, nor so showy as those I left, were to the full as convenient, and at half price, though on the first floor. My trunks were safely landed, and stowed in my apartments, where my neighbour, and now gouvernante, Mrs. Cole, was ready with my landlord to receive me, to whom she took care to set me out in the most favourable light, that of one from whom there was the clearest reason to expect the regular payment of his rent: all the cardinal virtues attributed to me, would not have had half the weight of that recommendation alone. I was now settled in lodgings of my own, abandoned to my own conduct, and turned loose upon the town, to sink or swim, as I could manage with the current of it; and what were the consequences, together with the number of adventures which befell me in the exercise of my new profession, will compose the mater of another letter: for surely it is high time to put a period! to this. I am, MADAM, Yours, etc., etc., etc. THE END OF THE FIRST LETTER LETTER THE SECOND Madam, If I have delayed the sequel of my history, it has been purely to allow myself a little breathing time not without some hopes, that, instead of pressing me to a continuation, you would have acquitted me of the task of pursuing a confession, in the course of which my self-esteem has so many wounds to sustain.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  Me cubro los ojos, exasperada. —Está bien —le digo—. Eso es todo para lo que llamé, así que no molestes a papá si ya lo sabe. Los llamaré... más tarde. —Está bien. —Sopla humo—. Bueno, cuídate y llamaré dentro de una semana más o menos. Te invito a cenar o algo así. Mi cuerpo tiembla con una risa amarga que contengo. No es gracioso. Es triste, realmente. Pero cuelga sin esperar a que le diga “adiós”, y dejo escapar un suspiro, lanzando mi teléfono sobre la cama. Ni mi padre ni mi madrastra son malas personas, aunque tampoco ninguno me llamó el día de mi cumpleaños. Nunca fui golpeada, matada de hambre o abusada verbalmente. Solo un poco olvidada, supongo. Lucharon por algo bueno en la vida, por lo que era demasiado pedir que dejaran que la responsabilidad o la preocupación por sus hijos interfirieran con el pequeño placer que lograban reunir con sus noches de cerveza y bingo. Después que Cam se fue y consiguió su propio lugar, no tuve a nadie con quien hablar. No era nadie en ese remolque, y nunca más quería volver a sentirme sola. Recojo mi libreta de la cama y reanudo la tarea de mi clase de verano ese día. Mi libro de texto se abre frente a mí y pulso mi lápiz mecánico para obtener más ventaja. Suena un golpe en la puerta de la habitación, y levanto la cabeza, tensándome. —¿Entre? —digo, pero parece una pregunta. Cole no llamaría. Debe ser su padre. ¿Dejé la ropa en la secadora? ¿La estufa encendida? Repaso mi lista mental de verificación. La puerta se abre, y Pike se queda allí, sosteniendo la perilla, pero se mantiene plantado en el pasillo. —Voy a pedir pizza para la cena —me dice—. ¿Cole estará en casa pronto? Jugueteo con el lápiz en mis manos. —Uno de sus amigos fue promovido en la compañía de cable —le explico—, así que van a tener una fiesta en la granja de su padre. Estoy segura que llegará bastante tarde. Se queda allí un momento, su gran cuerpo llena toda la puerta. Mis ojos siguen moviéndose hacia los tatuajes en sus brazos, así que simplemente miro hacia abajo, pretendiendo estar absorta en mi trabajo. —¿No vas a ir? —presiona.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  Meto la caja en el asiento trasero, sobre otra y el auto es justo lo suficientemente grande para contener todo lo que traje. Todo cabe en dos maletas y tres cajas. El resto está almacenado. Y parece que tampoco voy a ir por ello pronto. La “casa” de mi padre no tiene más sitio para una mesa de dibujo que mi habitación aquí. —Gracias por todo —le digo, sabiendo que sabe exactamente lo que estoy haciendo—. Has sido realmente increíble. —¿Te vas? —Parece confundido. Cierro la puerta del auto y me giro hacia él, mi estómago da un vuelco mientras trago el nudo en mi garganta. —Con Cole fuera y nosotros separados, no es correcto que me quede —digo— . Nunca has tenido la obligación de ayudarme, pero lo hiciste y no puedo agradecértelo lo suficiente. Realmente aprecio todo. —Y luego no puedo evitar forzar una pequeña sonrisa por el bien de ambos—. Especialmente mis cintas de casete. Miro hacia sus ojos preocupados, el verde en los iris parecen oscurecerse y un dolor golpea mi pecho. Me giro, fingiendo asegurarme de que la puerta está cerrada para darme un segundo para recomponerme. —Mi papá me va a dejar quedarme en casa por un tiempo. —Me giro y le digo—: Estaré bien. —Pero... —Oh, olvidé mi bolso. —Paso los dedos por la parte superior de mi cabello y entro rápidamente en la casa, no dejando que termine mientras me alejo. No quiero discutir con él y tengo miedo de que si dice algo más, comenzaré a llorar. No quiero irme, pero sé que ya no tengo derecho a seguir aquí y tal vez irá al bar de vez en cuando para visitarme, ¿cierto? Tal vez lo veré más ahora que lo conozco y lo reconoceré. Por supuesto, también estoy molesta por lo de Cole. He hablado con él prácticamente todos los días durante los tres últimos años. Pero quiero estar lejos de él. Realmente no me gusta dejar a Pike. ¿Quién lo va a hacer conversar con la gente y ahora quién va a ponerle extracto de vainilla y canela que no sabe que le gusta en su café? Pestañeo para alejar el dolor en mis ojos, reprendiéndome. Estará bien. Sobrevivió treinta y ocho años sin mí, ¿cierto?

• From City of Night (1963)

  And thats where Miss Destiny the college co-ed is now, busted! —in the joint — again! —for masquerading —and this is not the first time she gets knocked over so she will be cooling it there for quite a while! And can you imagine the sight? Miss Destiny in bridal drag sitting crying in the paddywagon this is her wedding day? ...” Trudi claims Miss Destiny is living in Beverly Hills with the man who sponsored the wedding (though Trudi didnt go either, afraid theyd raid it, but they didnt, and she says she wishes now she’d been a beautiful bridesmaid like Destiny asked her, and it broke Destiny’s heart when Trudi said no but thats the beads). “And I hear the Destiny looked simply Fabulous in her gown and red hair,” says Trudi, “and, honey, it just goes to show you some more about those goddam beads—here the Destiny meets this rich daddy who wants to see a queen get married in drag to a butch stud-hustler, and the Destiny says does he have a winding staircase? and he does....” Well, anyway, Trudi says, so far as she knows, Miss Destiny is still living in Beverly Hills (Skipper says oh no, Bel Air, if she really made it Big) with the rich daddy and her stud husband. “The rich cholly,” says Skipper knowingly, “I bet he digs Destiny’s stud, not Destiny—but he gets kicks watching them make out, jack. You know, hes queer—” and Skipper goes on to tell me how hes tired of the small hustling and how hes ready to push back into the Bigtime—and Trudi says, “Don’t be nervous, babe, youll shake the beads.” And so, of Miss Destiny’s Wedding there are many versions. No one seems to have gone to it. But everyone has heard about it. Only one thing is certain. Miss Destiny is no longer around. And I wondered if somehow she had escaped her Evil Angel. And again for a period I avoided the park and the bars—and when I came back, Chuck of course was still around. And now we’re sitting in Pershing Square at the same place where I first met Miss Destiny.... (And Jenny Lu is in the park too, as if The Angel had got her number—woe- uh! ... and Holy Moses... and Saint Tex, who outstayed The Word and was reconverted by Saint Thunderbird to California... and the five white angelsisters with Christ still bleeding wax....) Suddenly Chuck said: “Oh, man, did you hear about Miss Destinée?—you remember her, that far-out queen with the redhair? Well, man, some queen was saying how she got this letter from Destinée.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  This activity in our own minds is a pale reflection of the Spirit, the bond of love between Father and Son. As in God, the three different faculties—memory, understanding, and love—constitute “one life, one mind, and one essence” within ourselves. 60 For Augustine, the Platonist, “knowing” was not an activity that he had initiated but something that happened to his mind. Knowledge was not a matter of assessing, defining, and manipulating an external object; the Known drew the thinker into an intimate relationship with itself. 61 In Augustine’s Trinity, knowledge of God was inseparable from love of God. But Augustine did not expect his readers simply to take his word for all this; they too must undertake the introspection and meditation that had led to him to adopt this theology and make it a reality for themselves, otherwise, like any mythos , it would remain incredible. Augustine was a complex man, and neither he nor his theology was flawless. He could be intolerant, misogynist, and depressive— this last tendency exacerbated by the fact that he witnessed the collapse of the western provinces of the Roman Empire, a calamity that was like a huge environmental disaster. A deep sadness pervades Augustine’s later work. When he was ordained bishop of Hippo in 396, he became the subject of a vitriolic campaign of slander, was burdened by the administration of a viciously divided diocese, and was in poor health. That same year Alaric and his Visigoths invaded Greece, the first of the barbarian hordes that would bring the Roman Empire to its knees: in 410 Alaric sacked the city of Rome itself. The fall of Rome plunged Western Europe into a dark age that lasted some seven hundred years, its culture preserved only in isolated monasteries and libraries, bastions of civilization in a sea of barbarism. When Augustine died in 630, the Vandals had besieged Hippo and would burn the town to the ground the following year. This is the context of Augustine’s doctrine of Original Sin, one of his less positive contributions to Western theology. He produced an entirely novel exegesis of the second and third chapters of Genesis, which claimed that the sin of Adam had condemned all his descendants to eternal damnation. Despite the salvation wrought by Christ, humanity was still weakened by what Augustine called “concupiscence,” the irrational desire to take pleasure in beings instead of God itself.

• From City of Night (1963)

  But everyone knew they werent true. Lance propositioning anyone! Thats Ridiculous! Ive known him for years—better than anyone else—and Lance just doesnt proposition anyone. Well, anyway,” he sighed sadly, “he didnt then—but I wouldnt know Now. Everyone changes so.... Look at me.” (Sigh....) “You want? to go? to eat, babe?...” 5 This is the house of Lance O’Hara — the house of Esmeralda Drake the Third .... In the hills, serene. The smile on Lance’s face seems serene too: belying the existence of a ghost, tapping along the house with a cane .... Most of the morning, Lance was on the telephone. “Yes, it’s me—Lance! Im having a party.... As early as you like.... Here, in my house—you know where I live....” And most of the morning, and into the afternoon, the telephone rang as if itself aware of the party. Since yesterday at Arrowhead, Lance had not mentioned Dean—except once, last night, when, in bed with me (as he tried, I knew, to stifle with sex the screaming memories), he had called me by his name. But each time he answers the telephone today, the smile freezes, he closes his eyes, breathes deeply to contain the welling panic. He stands moments over the telephone, his hand uncertainly over the receiver. The “Hello,” coming finally, becomes a wrongly answered question.... Chick, naturally, was the first to come. “Baby, I didnt know you even knew Lance!” he said, winking at me knowingly—and then he swept toward Lance, embracing him with genuine affection. “Lance, baby, oh! I could cry to see you looking so Great. What a grand idea to have a party! Remember the Old Times? Remember when we were dancing in the Movies together?... Party every night. Never went to bed except to party some more....” And now, it seems, they are all here: the handsome masculine ones desired alike by men and women; the gushing swishes, hands aflutter like wings; the few stray women secure among the men who will idolize them but not love them; and as in any group of homosexuals and those lured for whatever reason to them, there is here a mood of superficial good humor, of euphoria bordering on hysteria. So the motley chorus has invaded the stage. But looking at Lance, strangely sparkling now, the Furies are forced to abandon their dour prophecies. Only momentarily. They wait, They know. They have been alerted by life itself. Like criminals returning to the scene of the crime, the whisperers know they have returned to the scene of the beginning of the fall. Jamey burst in, in a very brief striped bikini. “I went to the beach,” he explained breathlessly. “I just heard about the party, and I was told it was going to be very informal—so voilà!” —striking a bathingbeauty pose. He catches sight of Lance and rushes toward him. “Well, Lance, welcome back—it hasnt been the same without you.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  My condition was worsened by the sense that I hadn’t done very well—a sense Cousin Houser reluctantly confirmed. At the close of those difficult days, it was my nightly six-mile run that saved my life. And then it was my brief time with Matthew and Penny that preserved my sanity. I’d always try to find the time and energy to tell Matthew his bedtime story. Thomas Jefferson was toiling to write the Declaration of Independence, you see, struggling to find the words, when little Matt History brought him a new quill pen and the words seemed to magically flow... Matthew almost always laughed at my bedtime stories. He had a liquid laugh, which I loved to hear, because at other times he could be moody, sullen. Cause for concern. He’d been very late learning to talk, and now he was showing a worrisome rebellious streak. I blamed myself. If I were home more, I told myself, he’d be less rebellious. Bowerman spent quite a bit of time with Matthew, and he told me not to worry. I like his spirit, he said. The world needs more rebels. That spring, Penny and I had the added worry of how our little rebel would handle a sibling. She was pregnant again. Secretly, I wondered more about how we were going to handle it. By the end of 1973, I thought, it’s very possible I’ll have two kids and no job. AFTER TURNING OUT the light next to Matthew’s bed, I’d usually go and sit in the living room with Penny. We’d talk about the day. Which meant the looming trial. Growing up, Penny had watched several of her father’s trials, and it gave her an avid fondness for courtroom drama. She never missed a legal show on TV. Perry Mason was her favorite, and I sometimes called her Della Street, after Mason’s intrepid secretary. I kidded her about her enthusiasm, but I also fed off it. The final act of every evening was my phone call to my father. Time for my own bedtime story. By then he’d left the newspaper, and in his retirement he had loads of time to research old cases and precedents, to spin out arguments that might be useful to Cousin Houser. His involvement, plus his sense of fair play, plus his bedrock belief in the rightness of Blue Ribbon’s cause, was restorative. It was always the same. My father would ask about Matthew and Penny, and then I’d ask about Mom, and then he’d tell me what he’d found in the law books. I’d take careful notes on a yellow legal pad. Before signing off he’d always say that he liked our chances. We’re going to win, Buck. That magical pronoun, “we”— he’d always use it, and it would always make me feel better. It’s possible that we were never closer, maybe because our relationship had been reduced to its primal essence.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Released, Sylvia turned to face the jammed bar. Her eyes had misted, whether from the harshness of the burning liquor or from something else. And she held the glass out—high—in a toast to everyone here. I left the bar quickly, infinitely depressed. But in the other crowded bars, or on the streets, or walking through Jackson Square, I was obsessed by Sylvia’s face. And I went back to The Rocking Times. Intermittently, she was surrounded by the people she knew, the people whom, I was certain now, she had needfully searched out. She was laughing raucously; but her face was marked clearly by the impact of the liquor and the years-long, clawing desire to understand what everything in her, ancestrally, demanded she hate. Occasionally, someone would place a hand on her shoulder, cautioning her about the fervid, sudden drinking; someone else would coax her to let him take her home. But she pushed the hand away, rejected each suggestion that she should leave. “No!” she said harshly. “This is it!” Her face clouded, as if she were still sober enough not to be certain whether she wanted to go on. To indicate her instant decision, she gulned another drink. “Gonna sell this bar!” she shouted. “Leave New Orleans—never, never, never come back.” “Not even to see Us?” said Desdemona Duncan sadly. Sylvia raised a wrenched face toward her, touched the queen’s cheek tenderly, and began to cry in drunken, convulsed sobs. She slid off the stool and rushed out into the courtyard. I found her there, hidden in the shadows, sitting on the steps outside leading to the upper part of the building. Jocko sat next to her. The chilly night wind had dried her tears, and her face is glazed and unreal, as if a mask, worn successfully for years, had been washed away. The toughness is all gone, drained by the liquor and the tears. She covered her face, as if to shut out the vision of the bar, her bar. The cold wind brushed past us like the wing of a huge bird. About us in the courtyard, people milled in the light-speckled shadows. And we sat there on the steps with Sylvia—Jocko and I, silently. “Let me take you home, baby,” Jocko said. “Not yet,” she said. “Just stay here—both of you—just for a few minutes—with me.” Now she faced the courtyard, staring, listening raptly to the jumbled conversations, the shrieking of the queens rising above the sounds of the others.... And then Kathy was standing before us, looking down sadly at Sylvia. Sylvia reached for her hand; and Kathy said, “How are you feeling, honey?” “Kathy,” Sylvia stuttered drunkenly, “Kathy—honey—Im sorry.” “Dont be sorry,” Kathy said—and she waited. And I will wonder later if she knew it had to be to her that Sylvia must speak the words she will soon say. “You dont understand,” Sylvia insisted. “I do,” Kathy said.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Now it was beginning to get cooler. In Los Angeles, night comes like a blessing, even after the warmest afternoons. Soon, long shadows will protect the exiles, shelter them soothingly before the concealing night. And as it becomes later and the loneliness and the determination become hungrier, the frenziedness will increase. And even now, it’s beginning. Ollie, Holy Moses, preaching, shouting.... Shrieks of pain, muted pleas to God, going up unheeded or unheard.... The Negro woman has returned: Shes “Comin, Lawd!” again, as if He really gave a damn.... Jenny Lu strums her guitar to emphasize her scarlet past: “Sin!” (Plunk!) “The flesh!” (Plunk!) “Fornication!” (Plunk! Plunk!!) ... Two obvious scores stare at the youngmen. They are of that calculating breed who look at you like merchandise: “How big is it?... How long can I have it?... Youre asking too much—I’ll give you—...” Youngmen along the ledges.... Lonesomeness is alive.... The fixed eyes.... The youngman in the army shirt is still here, still waiting.... An old harpy mutters to no one remembered fragments from the jungle of her spent mind.... And the ghostpale woman is whispering to a ratty-looking teenage boy who smiles incredulously at what shes saying.... A couple of queens, in anticipation of the night, have now bravely stationed themselves along the walk. Catching sight of a cop coming around the corner, they shift their stances quickly to those as masculine as they can muster—but still a parody. But the cop stops short of them, talks gruffly to the youngman in the army shirt... Chuck has been staring steadily into the park which is seething with all the live lonesomeness.... “An here I am,” he echoes himself. “And afterwards?” I realized, startled, that I had spoken—that the question which had finally formed—the question which had been bothering me about Chuck throughout all the time I had known him, which had made his enviable easygoingness incomplete—had sprung involuntarily from my mouth. And having spoken that question, I look at him, and I feel suddenly sad.... Chuck as an old man! ... With the others, even when they spoke about the Bigtime, you could sense their stifling awareness of what their lives were stretching toward: the bandaged streets, the nightly dingy jails, the missions... the forgetfulness-inducing wine.... Life had dealt out their destinies unfairly, and they knew it even while they bragged. But with each frantic step, each futile gesture of revolt, they prepared themselves.... But Chuck? Chuck, sitting on this railing, always smiling—easygoing, easily the most likable.... Chuck. What of him? When he became an old man, would he look as coolly at the world then, still as if it were that wide-stretching uncomplicated plain?—when it lengthened into mutilated scenes of Missions and handouts?... He belongs on the range, I thought—on the frontier which disappeared long ago—existing now, ironically, only on those movie screens that had lured him as a child.... “And afterwards?” I had asked him.

• From Ulysses (Kindle edition — verify full work) (1922)

  The novel begins in the post-World War I moment ("1919") and ends in the civil rights era ("1965"), while alluding through flashback to the antebellum and post-civil rights era."Z In the book's opening scene, the omniscient narrator, or narratorial consciousness, characterizes, in an elegiac voice, the status of the Bottom and the valley town of Medallion, Ohio-marking the Bottom's current constitution postgentrification and industrialization juxtaposed with its previous historical composition: its cultural insularity and genesis rooted in "[a] joke. A nigger joke." The Bottom's founding is based on a racialism, a racist history, and narrowly defined constructions of race (its name deriving from a joke played on an enslaved black man by "a good white farmer"), yet the Bottom transcends this irony in its progress. Conversely, however, it is practically defeated by its inability to continually evolve, and by a relatively stymied organic growth, and is eventually crippled by and victim to gentrification and industrialization: a reverse enactment, a reenactment of sorts, of the initial joke. Whereas the Bottom's genealogy is rooted, paradoxically, in the race-specific joke accounting for its existence, the community's partial, if not eventual demise, is at the hands of both the nondescript "they"-euphemistic white referents-and the black residents themselves (as evidenced in the tragic National Suicide Day march and mass deaths). Sula, as a product of this environment, is both informed by as well as cultivated within this communal context, yet is neither defined nor entirely restricted by it. She flouts the community's history and communal sanctions governing race, gender, and sexuality unapologetically with her deliberate transgressive behavior and subversion (and cultivation of an existence outside the strictures) of the classical black female script. Whereas most of the novel's other characters, in their affinity to racial/communal sanctions, embrace conformity and gender-specific regulations, Sula does not. Not only does she explore the "choices [...] available to women outside their own society's approval," but she experiences "the risks of individualism in a determinedly individualistic, yet racially uniform and socially static, community."13 In her deliberate nonconformity to bourgeois conventionality and sociocommunal circumscriptions for women, Sula subverts the script, while simultaneously destabilizing a fixed categorical blackness predicated on particular deployments of racialized and gendered (black female) respectability and performance. In her "alterity," she embodies other paradigms of black womanhood and black identity generally." "Something Else to Be": Sula and Transgressive Behavior

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  People congratulated me on that ad as if we’d achieved something earth-shattering. I’d shrug. I wasn’t being modest. I still didn’t believe in the power of advertising. At all. A product, I thought, speaks for itself, or it doesn’t. In the end, it’s only quality that counts. I couldn’t imagine that any ad campaign would ever prove me wrong or change my mind. Our advertising people, of course, told me I was wrong, wrong, a thousand percent wrong. But again and again I’d ask them: Can you say definitively that people are buying Nikes because of your ad? Can you show it to me in black-and-white numbers? Silence. No, they’d say... we can’t say that definitively. So then it’s a little hard to get enthused, I’d say—isn’t it? Silence. I OFTEN WISHED I had more time to kick back and debate the niceties of advertising. Our semidaily crises were always bigger and more pressing than what slogan to print under a picture of our shoes. In the second half of 1977 the crisis was our debenture holders. They were suddenly clamoring for a way to cash in. By far the best way for them to do so would be a public offering, which, we tried to explain to them, was not an option. They didn’t want to hear that. I turned once more to Chuck Robinson. He’d served with distinction as lieutenant commander on a battleship in World War II. He’d built Saudi Arabia’s first steel mill. He’d helped negotiate the grain deal with the Soviets. Chuck knew business cold, better than anyone I’d ever met, and I’d been wanting his advice for quite some time. But over the last few years he’d been the number two man under Henry Kissinger at the State Department, and thereby “off-limits” to me, according to Jaqua. Now, with Jimmy Carter newly elected, Chuck was on Wall Street and available once again for consultations. I invited him out to Oregon. I’ll never forget his first day in our office. I caught him up on the developments of the last few years and thanked him for his invaluable counsel about Japanese trading companies. Then I showed him our financial statements. He flipped through them, started to laugh. He couldn’t stop laughing. “Compositionally,” he said, “you are a Japanese trading company—90 percent debt!” “I know.” “You can’t live like this,” he said. “Well... I guess that’s why you’re here.” As the first order of business, I invited him to be on our board of directors. To my surprise, he agreed. Then I asked his opinion about going public. He said going public wasn’t an option. It was mandatory. I needed to solve this cash flow problem, he said, attack it, wrestle it to the ground, or else I could lose the company. Hearing his assessment was frightening, but necessary. For the first time ever I saw going public as inevitable, and I couldn’t help it, the realization made me sad.

• From City of Night (1963)

  But, usually, especially in the moments of needed respite from the compulsive fury of those days, as the city went through that period of initiation before Mardi Oras, I would return to The Rocking Times. And it was mainly to be with Sylvia that I went there. In the world of her bar, she treated each member on his own respective level. With the queens, she discussed their drag costumes for Mardi Gras, assuring them that such and such a color would be just right. With the masculine homosexuals—neither scores, hustlers, nor queens—she listened attentively as they confided to her their broken love affairs. With the hustlers, she often spoke roughly, using their own expressions.... And on all, at least verbally, she imposed her rigid, though largely unobserved, rules. Yet there were those other times when she would merely stare gloomily before her, as if she had shut her ears. At such times, within me, she augmented the churning unfocused guilt. Still, I sought her out. And when she wasnt at the bar—which was rare—I would feel acutely disappointed, personally cheated—almost angry at her as if she had stood me up. Today shes talking to Sonny—the blond youngman who had been wounded in the fight that afternoon before the Bourbon House. Only minutes earlier, he had walked in Proudly, Cockily—like a big-game hunter with a lion’s head—with two impressively suited scores. “Be cool,” I heard Sylvia warning him. “Those two are here every year. I see them pick up a green kid like you, each Mardi Gras—” Sonny winced noticeably at her designation of him. “—and they tell him theyre going to take him to Europe, and after Mardi Gras, they split—alone. Youll never see them again.” Sonny nodded impatiently. It is difficult for him to believe that he can be taken. Sylvia watched him with an ambiguous look as he returned to the two well-dressed scores, who have been staring resentfully at Sylvia as if aware that shes been warning Sonny about them. As usual, Sylvia is drinking Seven-Up. It was all I had ever seen her drink. Occasionally, though, I had noticed her stare longingly at the varicolored bottles of liquor behind the bar, then turn from them as if they threatened her in some powerful way. The quavering, sensual voice of Elvis Presley is coming from the juke-box in lonesome, sad, sustained, orgasmic moans: The bell-hop’s tears keep flowing, The desk clerk’s dressed in black. ... Sylvia studied two youngmen who had just walked into the bar. “Two more new ones,” she sighed. “Each year—new hustlers, new queens, new—...” she hesitated, “—new gay boys just out for kicks—and the ones that keep coming back.” And the juke-box sang lugubriously: Just take a walk down lonely street To Heartbreak Hotel.... “Kathy just passed out on the steps of the Maison Blanche!” a queen blurted at Sylvia. “Whos with her?”

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Because they had received a Catholic education, their minds were filled with Christian symbols and doctrines, so inevitably, as the years passed, their faith was neither authentically Jewish nor truly Christian. 4 Others, as we shall see, would become the first atheists and freethinkers in modern Europe. Deprived of the observances that made the Torah a living reality, Marrano religion became distorted. In the Portuguese universities, the Marranos had studied logic, physics, medicine, and mathematics, but they had no expertise in the more intuitive disciplines of Jewish practice. Relying perforce on reason alone, their theology bore no relation to traditional Judaism. 5 Their God was the First Cause of all being, who did not intervene directly in human affairs; there was no need for the Torah, because the laws of nature were accessible to everybody. This is the kind of God that, left to itself, human reason tends to create, but in the past Jews had found the rational God of the philosophers religiously empty. Like many modern people—and for many of the same reasons—some of the Marranos would find this God alien and incredible. The Jews who migrated to the Ottoman Empire had an entirely different experience. Their exile, a spiritual as well as a physical dislocation, had inflicted a deep psychic wound; everything seemed to be in the wrong place. 6 Some Spanish Jews settled in Safed in Palestine, where they met Isaac Luria (1534–72), a frail northern European Jew who had developed a form of Kabbalah that spoke directly to their predicament. Kabbalists had always felt at liberty to interpret the first chapters of Genesis allegorically, transforming them into an esoteric account of the inner life of God. In this tradition, Luria had created an entirely new creation myth that bore no resemblance to the orderly cosmogony of Genesis and that began with an act of kenosis . Because God was omnipresent, there was no space for the world, no place where God was not. So En Sof, the inscrutable and unknowable Godhead, as it were, shrank into itself in a voluntary zimzum (“withdrawal”), a self-diminishment that made itself less. The creation continued in a series of cosmic accidents, primal explosions, and false starts, which seemed a more accurate depiction of the arbitrary world that Jews now inhabited. Sparks of divine light had fallen into the Godless abyss created by zimzum . Everything was exiled from its rightful place, and the Shekhinah wandered through the world, yearning to be reunited with the Godhead. 7 Nobody understood this strange story literally; like any creation myth, it was primarily therapeutic, speaking figuratively of a timeless rather than a historical reality. It became authoritative because it was such a telling description of the exiles’ experience, at the same time showing them that their tragedy was not unique but was in tune with fundamental laws of existence.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  The British writer I. F. Clarke has shown that between 1871 and 1914, it was unusual to find a single year in which a novel or story looking forward to a terrifying future war did not appear in some European country. 92 The “next great war” loomed as a fearful but unavoidable ordeal, from which the nation would emerge with renewed strength and vigor. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the British poet and novelist Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) poignantly expressed the modern predicament. In “The Darkling Thrush,” dated December 31, 1900, he expressed the bleak desolation of the human spirit excluded from traditional ways of arriving at a sense of life’s meaning. He described the “sharp features” of the wintry landscape as “the century’s corpse;” it seemed to Hardy that “every spirit upon earth seemed fervourless as I.” Suddenly, an aged thrush—”frail, gaunt and small”—began to sing, flinging his soul upon the growing gloom. As he listened to this “full hearted evensong,” Hardy could only reflect, with a calm, sad acceptance: So little cause for carolings Of such ecstatic sound Was written on terrestrial things Afar or nigh around , That I could think there trembl’d through His happy good-night air Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew And I was unaware. 93 Science and Religion I t is often said that the modern period began in the year 1492, when Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic in the hope of finding a new sea route to India and discovered the Americas instead. This voyage would have been impossible without such scientific discoveries as the magnetic compass and the latest insights in astronomy. The people of Western Europe were on the brink of a new world that would give them unprecedented control over their environment, and Christian Spain was in the vanguard of this change. Columbus’s patrons were the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, whose marriage had united the Iberian kingdoms of Aragon and Castile. Spain was in the process of becoming a modern, centralized state. This was an age of transition. Columbus himself was certainly conversant with the new scientific ideas that were eagerly discussed in the Spanish universities, but he was still rooted in the older religious universe. A devout Christian, he had been born into a family of converted Jews and retained an interest in the Kabbalah, the mystical tradition of Judaism. He also regarded himself as a latter-day Crusader: once he reached India, he intended to establish a military base for the recovery of Jerusalem. 1 The people of Europe had started their journey to modernity, but the traditional myths of religion still gave meaning to their rational and scientific explorations. On January 2, 1492, Columbus had been present at the conquest of Granada, the last Muslim stronghold in Europe, by the armies of Ferdinand and Isabella.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  SALES HAD BEEN climbing geometrically, year after year, ever since the first few hundred pairs I sold out of my Valiant. But as we closed out 1977… sales were going berserk. Nearly $70 million. So Penny and I decided to buy a bigger house. It was a strange thing to do, in the midst of an apocalyptic fight with the government. But I liked the idea of acting as if things were going to work out. Fortune favors the brave, that sort of thing. I also liked the idea of a change of scenery. Maybe, I thought, it will initiate a change of luck. We were sad to leave the old house, of course. Both boys had taken their first steps there, and Matthew had lived for that swimming pool. He was never so at peace as when frolicking in the water. I recall Penny shaking her head and saying, “One thing’s for certain. That boy will never drown.” But both boys were getting so big, they desperately needed more room, and the new place had plenty. It sat on five acres high above Hillsboro, and every room felt spacious and airy. From the first night we knew we’d found our home. There was even a built-in niche for my recliner. To honor our new address, our new start, I tried to keep a new schedule. Unless I was out of town, I tried to attend all the youth basketball games, and youth soccer games, and Little League games. I spent whole weekends teaching Matthew to swing a bat, though both of us wondered why. He refused to keep his back foot still. He refused to listen. He argued with me constantly. The ball’s moving, he said, why shouldn’t I? Because it’s harder to hit that way. That was never a good enough reason for him. Matthew was more than a rebel. He was, I discovered, more than a contrarian. He positively couldn’t abide authority, and he perceived authority lurking in every shadow. Any opposition to his will was oppression and thus a call to arms. In soccer, for instance, he played like an anarchist. He didn’t compete against the opponent so much as against the rules—the structure. If the other team’s best player was coming toward him on a breakaway, Matthew would forget the game, forget the ball, and just go for the kid’s shins. Down went the kid, out came the parents, and pandemonium would ensue. During one Matthew-sparked melee, I looked at him and realized he didn’t want to be there any more than I did. He didn’t like soccer. For that matter, he didn’t care for sports. He was playing, and I was watching him play, out of some sense of obligation.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  That night at Islington he had learned the truth at last - had heard that drunken man’s shout, seen Kitty’s terrible, terrified response, and understood. He had driven her home - I did not know what had passed between them then, for neither of them seemed at all inclined to discuss any part of that dreadful evening - he had driven her home, but that tender gesture of his, to place his cloak about her trembling shoulders and see her safely to her door, had been his last. Now he could not be easy with her - perhaps because he knew for sure that he had lost her; more probably, because the idea of our love he found distasteful. And so he stayed away.Had we remained very long at Mrs Dendy’s house, I think our friends there would have noticed Walter’s absence, and quizzed us over it; but at the end of September came the biggest change of all. We said good-bye to our landlady and Ginevra Road, and moved.We had talked vaguely of moving since the start of our fame; but we had always put the crucial moment off - it seemed foolish to leave a place in which we had been, and were still, so happy. Mrs Dendy’s had become our home. It was the house in which we had first kissed, first declared our love; it was, I thought, our honeymoon house - and for all that it was so cramped and plain, for all that our costumes now took up more space in the bedroom than our bed, I was terribly loath to leave it.But Kitty said it looked queer, us still sharing a room, and a bed, when we had the money to live somewhere ten times the size; and she had a house agent look about for rooms for us, somewhere more seemly.It was to Stamford Hill that we moved, in the end - Stamford Hill, far across the river, in a bit of London I hardly knew (and thought, privately, a little dull). We had a farewell supper at Ginevra Road, with everyone saying how sorry they were to see us go - Mrs Dendy herself even wept a little, and said her house would never be the same.

• From Educated (2018)

  There were Tyler and Stefanie. They had decided to homeschool their seven children, and from what I’d seen, the children were being educated to a very high standard. Luke came in next, with a brood so numerous I lost count. He saw me and crossed the room, and we made small talk for several minutes, neither of us acknowledging that we hadn’t seen each other in half a decade, neither of us alluding to why. Do you believe what Dad says about me? I wanted to ask. Do you believe I’m dangerous? But I didn’t. Luke worked for my parents, and without an education, he needed that job to support his family. Forcing him to take a side would only end in heartache. Richard, who was finishing a PhD in chemistry, had come down from Oregon with Kami and their children. He smiled at me from the back of the chapel. A few months before, Richard had written to me. He’d said he was sorry for believing Dad, that he wished he’d done more to help me when I needed it, and that from then on, I could count on his support. We were family, he said. Audrey and Benjamin chose a bench near the back. Audrey had arrived early, when the chapel was empty. She had grabbed my arm and whispered that my refusing to see our father was a grave sin. “He is a great man,” she said. “For the rest of your life you will regret not humbling yourself and following his counsel.” These were the first words my sister had said to me in years, and I had no response to them. Shawn arrived a few minutes before the service, with Emily and Peter and a little girl I had never met. It was the first time I had been in a room with him since the night he’d killed Diego. I was tense, but there was no need. He did not look at me once during the service. My oldest brother, Tony, sat with my parents, his five children fanning out in the pew. Tony had a GED and had built a successful trucking company in Las Vegas, but it hadn’t survived the recession. Now he worked for my parents, as did Shawn and Luke and their wives, as well as Audrey and her husband, Benjamin. Now I thought about it, I realized that all my siblings, except Richard and Tyler, were economically dependent on my parents. My family was splitting down the middle—the three who had left the mountain, and the four who had stayed. The three with doctorates, and the four without high school diplomas. A chasm had appeared, and was growing. —A YEAR WOULD PASS before I would return to Idaho. A few hours before my flight from London, I wrote to my mother—as I always did, as I always will do—to ask if she would see me. Again, her response was swift.

• From Educated (2018)

  —BUCK’S PEAK LOOKED THE way it always did at Christmas—a snowy spire, adorned with evergreens—and my eyes, increasingly accustomed to brick and concrete, were nearly blinded by the scale and clarity of it. Richard was in the forklift as I drove up the hill, moving a stack of purlins for the shop Dad was building in Franklin, near town. Richard was twenty-two, and one of the smartest people I knew, but he lacked a high school diploma. As I passed him in the drive, it occurred to me that he’d probably be driving that forklift for the rest of his life. I’d been home for only a few minutes when Tyler called. “I’m just checking in,” he said. “To see if Richard is studying for the ACT.” “He’s gonna take it?” “I don’t know,” Tyler said. “Maybe. Dad and I have been working on him.” “Dad?” Tyler laughed. “Yeah, Dad. He wants Richard to go to college.” I thought Tyler was joking until an hour later when we sat down to dinner. We’d only just started eating when Dad, his mouth full of potatoes, said, “Richard, I’ll give you next week off, paid, if you’ll use it to study them books.” I waited for an explanation. It was not long in coming. “Richard is a genius,” Dad told me a moment later, winking. “He’s five times smarter than that Einstein was. He can disprove all them socialist theories and godless speculations. He’s gonna get down there and blow up the whole damn system.” Dad continued with his raptures, oblivious to the effect he was having on his listeners. Shawn slumped on a bench, his back against the wall, his face tilted toward the floor. To look at him was to imagine a man cut from stone, so heavy did he seem, so void of motion. Richard was the miracle son, the gift from God, the Einstein to disprove Einstein. Richard would move the world. Shawn would not. He’d lost too much of his mind when he’d fallen off that pallet. One of my father’s sons would be driving the forklift for the rest of his life, but it wouldn’t be Richard. Richard looked even more miserable than Shawn. His shoulders hunched and his neck sank into them, as if he were compressing under the weight of Dad’s praise. After Dad went to bed, Richard told me that he’d taken a practice test for the ACT. He’d scored so low, he wouldn’t tell me the number. “Apparently I’m Einstein,” Richard said, his head in his hands. “What do I do? Dad is saying I’m going to blow this thing out of the water, and I’m not even sure I can pass.” Every night was the same. Through dinner, Dad would list all the false theories of science that his genius son would disprove; then after dinner, I would tell Richard about college, about classes, books, professors, things I knew would appeal to his innate need to learn.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  He’d come home from work strangely disheartened one winter evening. We asked him what was wrong. ‘Did you see the sky today?’ he said. He’d been walking through a London park on his way back from a press-call. It was deserted but for a small boy playing by a frozen boating lake. ‘I said, “Look up, look at that. Remember you saw that. You’ll never see it again.”’ Above them both was a vast tracery of ice-rings and sun-dogs in a wintry, hazy sky. A 22° halo, a circumzenithal arc and an upper tangent arc, the sun’s light refracting and cutting the heavens into a complicated geometry of ice and air and fire. But the boy didn’t seem interested at all. Dad was baffled. ‘Maybe he thought you were one of those strange men,’ we sniggered, rolling our eyes, and he looked embarrassed and faintly cross. But he was so very sad about the boy who didn’t see. Now that Dad was gone I was starting to see how mortality was bound up in things like that cold, arc-lit sky. How the world is full of signs and wonders that come, and go, and if you are lucky you might see them. Once, twice. Perhaps never again. The albums on my mother’s shelves are full of family photographs. But also other things. A starling with a crooked beak. A day of hoarfrost and smoke. A cherry tree thick with blossom. Thunderclouds, lightning strikes, comets and eclipses: celestial events terrifying in their blind distances but reassuring you, too, that the world is for ever, though you are only a blink in its course. Henri Cartier-Bresson called the taking of a good photograph a decisive moment. ‘Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera,’ he said. ‘The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone for ever.’ I thought of one of these moments as I sat there waiting for the hawk to eat from my hand. It was a black-and-white photograph my father had taken many years ago of an elderly street-cleaner with a white goatee beard, wrinkled socks and down-at-heel shoes. Crumpled work trousers, work gloves, a woollen beret. The camera is low, on the pavement: Dad must have crouched in the road to take it. The man is bending down, his besom of birch twigs propped against his side. He has taken off one of his gloves, and between the thumb and first finger of his bare right hand he is offering a crumb of bread to a sparrow on the kerbstone. The sparrow is caught midhop exactly at the moment it takes the crumb from his fingers. And the expression on the man’s face is suffused with joy. He is wearing the face of an angel.

• From City of Night (1963)

  She told him dont bother getting a room, give the extra bread to her, honey, and: “I know a swinging head in an apartment house right around here,” Darling Dolly told the score, who was pretty juiced anyhow. So they go up to the head, and the score is thinking this is really getting Saturday-night kicks: gone sex! with a cute queen! in a head! And she took off his pants cooing and his shorts cooing and ran out with both pants and shorts—and wallet “And look!” she said now, pulling out the wallet, which was green, green like a tree. “So Ive got to go to your pad in case he comes back looking for me.” “Without pants?” Destiny asked, and adds: “And why my pad? why not yours?” Darling Dolly explains it’s too far and too early. Miss Destiny tilted her head, consulting her gay fairy. “Miss Thing says dont give you the key,” Miss Destiny said, “but then Miss Thing aint nevuh been busted—so here—” Darling Dolly dashed out with the key. Miss Destiny sighed Darling Dolly was positively Too Much, and I noticed Chuck going out, widehat over his eyes, with the flashy fruit... Lola is still sitting very much alone glowering at her madeup face in the mirror behind the bar.... And Miss Destiny continues typically as if nothing had interrupted her story: “And then, before I knew it, Duke was dead.... He was a truckdriver, and sometimes we were so poor we couldnt even make it: I had to hustle in drag in order to keep us going—of course, he didnt know this—” And then remembering The Wealth and the country estate: “Well, you see his family disinherited him, they couldnt stand me.” And then remembering the way his family Idolized her: “Well, you see they loved me at first, until they Found Out—” (Now Duke the Aristocrat is Duke the Truckdriver, disinherited but oh so in love with Miss Destiny, and on a cold murky damp foggy day his truck turns over on the highway, the brakes screech shrilly, the wheels are turning round, round, round.... The sirens wail: Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-uh.