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 Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  From a very early date, prophets and poets helped people to contemplate the tragedy of life and face up to the damage they did to others. In ancient Sumeria the Atrahasis could not find a solution to the social injustice on which their civilization depended, but this popular tale made people aware of it. Gilgamesh had to come face-to-face with the horror of death, which drained warfare of spurious glamour and nobility. The Prophets of Israel compelled rulers to take responsibility for the suffering they inflicted on the poor and lambasted them for their war crimes. The Priestly authors of the Hebrew Bible lived in a violent society and could not abjure warfare but believed that warriors were contaminated by their violence, even if the campaign had been endorsed by God. That was why David was not allowed to build Yahweh’s temple. The Aryans loved warfare and revered their warriors; fighting and raiding were essential to the pastoral economy; but the warrior always carried a taint. Chinese strategists admitted that the military way of life was a “way of deception” and must be segregated from civilian life. They drew attention to the uncomfortable fact that even an idealistic state nurtured at its heart an institution dedicated to killing, lying, and treachery. In the West secularism is now a part of our identity. It has been beneficial—not least because an intimate association with government can badly compromise a faith tradition. But it has had its own violence. Revolutionary France was secularized by coercion, extortion, and bloodshed; for the first time it mobilized the whole of society for war; and its secularism seemed propelled by an aggression toward religion that is still shared by many Europeans today. The United States did not stigmatize faith in the same way, and religion has flourished there. There was an aggression in early modern thought, which failed to apply the concept of human rights to the indigenous peoples of the Americas or to African slaves. In the developing world secularization has been experienced as lethal, hostile, and invasive. There have been massacres in sacred shrines; clerics have been tortured, imprisoned, and assassinated; madrassa students shot down and humiliated; and the clerical establishment systematically deprived of resources, dignity, and status.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  I’d done so under his close instruction for quarters as a kid. I knew his height and weight (six feet even, one hundred and sixty-five pounds), and how he liked his steak (burnt black, with salt and black pepper and Worcestershire). But for the life of me, the contents of his skull that afternoon were closed to me. He was unknown to me, and unknowable, though I sensed inside him during that time a darkness so large and terrible that perhaps his last gift to me was trying to shield me from it, and his last failure was that he couldn’t entirely do so. “I’m going out to check on my truck,” he said, and drew up to full height before shoving through the glass. He walked on the path of square stones heading out to the garage. The white stones made a chessboard diagonal through the red gravel. Daddy was careful to set his black shoe dead center each one. I watched the triangle of his khaki back grow smaller till he disappeared through the door. By the time Daddy’s stroke slumped him onto the Legion bar a few weeks later, so his beer dregs rivered down the goldspeckled Formica, he was a gargoyle of himself. For nearly a decade he’d sat on that oxblood-covered bar stool as if skewered to earth by it. It was just one in a line of such stools, like dots in an ellipsis heading off toward oblivion, each occupied by a veteran of some other war. At the hospital, I stepped on the black rubber pad that swung open the magic doors. The lobby was deserted. I’d volunteered as a candy striper in that hospital a few bleak Sundays during the oil boom. Back then, babies were getting born by the fistfuls, and old people were sicker than ever. You couldn’t find a seat in the lobby not crawled over by some saggy-diapered toddler. Ten years later, the place was a wasteland. I passed rows of darkened Coke machines, empty nursing stations, vast wards with beds stripped to mattress ticking. A lone janitor outside intensive care was shoving one of those rotating waxers around with an attention I thought of as Zen-like. Mother sat in a plastic peach-colored tub chair outside Daddy’s room boldly smoking a long brown More cigarette beside a No Smoking sign. “I told them to go ahead and arrest me,” she said. Lecia rolled her eyes at this. My sister was heading home to fix supper for her husband and four stepkids. She had car keys in her hand and a list of things I had to know. Daddy couldn’t talk, wasn’t continent, and might or might not understand what you said to him. “Maybe you can get him eating,” she said. “He’s pretty much turned up his nose at everything they’ve brought.” People tend to say how small a sick man looks in a hospital bed. But Daddy looked bigger than ever, even in the oxygen tent.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  These were sublime scenes worthily described by an eyewitness, and represented by the art of a painter.1257 On the 19th of May, two days before the pentecostal communion, Calvin invited the ministers of Geneva to his house and caused himself to be carried from his bed-chamber into the adjoining dining-room. Here he said to the company: "This is the last time I shall meet you at table,"—words that made a sad impression on them. He then offered up a prayer, took a little food, and conversed as cheerfully as was possible under the circumstances. Before the repast was quite finished he had himself carried back to his bed-room, and on taking leave said, with a smiling countenance: "This wall will not hinder my being present with you in spirit, though absent in body." From that time he never rose from his bed, but he continued to dictate to his secretary. Farel, then in his eightieth year, came all the way from Neuchâtel to bid him farewell, although Calvin had written to him not to put himself to that trouble. He desired to die in his place. Ten days after Calvin’s death, he wrote to Fabri (June 6, 1564): "Oh, why was not I taken away in his place, while he might have been spared for many years of health to the service of the Church of our Lord Jesus Christ! Thanks be to Him who gave me the exceeding grace to meet this man and to hold him against his will in Geneva, where he has labored and accomplished more than tongue can tell. In the name of God, I then pressed him and pressed him again to take upon himself a burden which appeared to him harder than death, so that he at times asked me for God’s sake to have pity on him and to allow him to serve God in a manner which suited his nature. But when he recognized the will of God, he sacrificed his own will and accomplished more than was expected from him, and surpassed not only others, but even himself. Oh, what a glorious course has he happily finished! Calvin spent his last days in almost continual prayer, and in ejaculating comforting sentences of Scripture, mostly from the Psalms. He suffered at times excruciating pains. He was often heard to exclaim: "I mourn as a dove" (Isa. 38:14); "I was dumb, I opened not my mouth; because thou didst it" (Ps. 39:9); "Thou bruisest me, O Lord, but it is enough for me that it is thy hand." His voice was broken by asthma, but his eyes remained bright, and his mind clear and strong to the last. He admitted all who wished to see him, but requested that they should rather pray for him than speak to him.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  ‘Tom, you know that, and I know that, but the state of Texas has a different idea.’” “They can scare you out on them roads,” Cooter says. “I got behind me an old fellow the other day going to Central Mall—“Ben fires him a look that would melt rubber, so Cooter puts a lid on it. “Mr. Bishop took Poppa’s license. You think that bothered Poppa?” He gazes from man to man, as if they question him. “Hell, that little square of paper didn’t mean him nothing. Not if he took it in his mind to get somewheres. Beaver finally had to come out one Sunday and have his boy take the tires off the Jeep. ‘Miz Karr,’ he said. ‘You need to go to the store or something, we’ll come up here and get you. But I can’t cut that old man loose on them roads.’” “How long he stay that ways?” Shug asks. He tips the bottle of whiskey into his paper cup. Everybody else does the same. Usually, Daddy likes questions, unless they’re meant to hurry him, the way Shug’s is now. Daddy takes a cracker from my army of saltines and I get to work on a new one to fill in the spot. He uses the chewing time for them to stop their bottles shifting around. If the Liars’ Club men start a silence contest, Daddy will always hold the last silence in the deck. “I guess it wagged on a year or so,” he finally says. “Sometimes he knowed me. Sometimes not. “That whole time he got so he’d climb up on things. Get up on the barn or shed. Whatever he could lean a ladder to. Said he wanted to get closer to the Lord. And he was a fool to sleepwalk. I’d hear him bumping around in the middle of the night. ‘Pete!’ Momma’d call me. ‘Pete, there he goes again. You go catch him.’” The high voice he uses for his Momma voice doesn’t sound like he’s mocking her, like some fellows do when they talk like women. It sounds real. It has that determined, old-lady tremble to it. “He’d run just as straight up Highway 60 in his drawers, fast as he could go. And me flapping behind him in mine. First thing he’d do when he got up was to put his hat on. It was a tan-colored Stetson with a short brim. Many’s the night I followed that hat bobbing up the road in front of me.” Daddy can see he’s losing them, so he puts the story into high gear. “Had it on the day he died.” “Now that’s something,” Cooter says, “to hang yourself wearing a hat.” Cooter thinks he’s found some kind of secret in the story. “That’s not the point, Cooter,” Shug says. They sull up at each other a second—Cooter and Shug—like there might be words between them. Ben sees the mean looks they swap.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  At this period crucial to the virtue of the two maidens, they were in one day made bereft of everything: a frightful bankruptcy precipitated their father into circumstances so cruel that he perished of grief. One month later, his wife followed him into the grave. Two distant and heartless relatives deliberated what should be done with the young orphans; a hundred crowns apiece was their share of a legacy mostly swallowed up by creditors. No one caring to be burdened with them, the convent's door was opened, their dowry was put into their hands, and they were left at liberty to become what they wished. Madame de Lorsange, at the time called Juliette, whose mind and character were to all intents and purposes as completely formed then as at thirty, the age she had attained at the opening of the tale we are about to relate, seemed nothing but overjoyed to be put at large; she gave not a moment's thought to the cruel events which had broken her chains. As for Justine, aged as we have remarked, twelve, hers was of a pensive and melancholy character, which made her far more keenly appreciate all the horrors of her situation. Full of tenderness, endowed with a surprising sensibility instead of with her sister's art and finesse, she was ruled by an ingenuousness, a candor that were to cause her to tumble into not a few pitfalls. To so many qualities this girl joined a sweet countenance, absolutely unlike that with which Nature had embellished Juliette; for all the artifice, wiles, coquetry one noticed in the features of the one, there were proportionate amounts of modesty, decency, and timidity to be admired in the other; a virginal air, large blue eyes very soulful and appealing, a dazzling fair skin, a supple and resilient body, a touching voice, teeth of ivory and the loveliest blond hair, there you have a sketch of this charming creature whose naive graces and delicate traits are beyond our power to describe. They were given twenty-four hours to leave the convent; into their hands, together with their five score crowns, was thrown the responsibility to provide for themselves as they saw fit.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  A thousand pardons, Madame, said this unlucky girl, terminating her adventures at this point; a thousand times over I ask to be forgiven for having sullied your spirit with such a host of obscenities, for having, in a word, so long abused your patience. I have, perhaps, offended Heaven with impure recitals, I have laid open my old wounds, I have disturbed your ease and rest; farewell, Madame, Godspeed; the Star rises above the horizon, I hear my guards summon me to come, let me run on to meet my destiny, I fear it no more, 'twill abridge my torment: this last mortal instant is dreaded only by the favored being whose days have passed unclouded; but the wretched creature who has breathed naught but the venomous effluvia of reptiles, whose tottering feet have trod only upon nettles, who has never beheld the torch of dawn save with feelings like unto those of the lost traveler who, trembling, perceives the thunderbolt's forked track; she from whom cruel accident has snatched away parents, all kin, friends, fortune, protection, aid; she who in all this world has nothing more than tears to quench her thirst and for sustenance her tribulations; she, I say, undismayed sees death advance, she even yearns for it as for a safe haven, a port wherein tranquillity will be born again unto her when she is clasped to the breast of a God too just to permit that innocence, defiled and ground under the heel on earth, may not find recompense for so many evils in another world. The honest Monsieur de Corville had not heard this tale without profound emotion; as for Madame de Lorsange in whom, as we have said, the monstrous errors of her youth had not by any means extinguished sensibility, as for Madame de Lorsange, she was ready to swoon. "Mademoiselle," said she to Justine, "it is difficult to listen to you without taking the keenest interest in you; but, and I must avow it! an inexplicable sentiment, one far more tender than this I describe, draws me invincibly toward you and does make of your ills my very own. You have disguised your name, you have concealed your birth, I beg you to disclose your secret to me; think not that it is a vain curiosity which bids me speak thus to you... Great God! may what I suspect be true?... O Therese! were you Justine?... were it that you would be my sister !" "Justine ! Madame ! 'tis a strange name." "She would have been your age -" "Juliette! is it you I hear?" cried the unhappy prisoner, casting herself into Madame de Lorsange's arms; "... you... my sister!... ah, I shall die far less miserable, for I have been able to embrace you again!..." And the two sisters, clasped in each other's arms, were prevented by their sobs from hearing one another, and found expression in naught but tears.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  Beth wondered why whoever had started to remove it hadn’t finished, and who had painted it to start with. She must have loved him , she thought. The root of the man’s cock, thick and downward-curving, was visible above a fan of delicate petals caught against his inner left thigh, a few tumbling over his quadricep and into the empty space of the whitewashed ceiling. It was too honest a painting to have drawn on some random subject. The slight swell of his belly, the pits in his cheeks, the wedge of tight, dark curls above his prick. She touched him. Fucked him. She could hear Fran and Robbie talking outside in the hall, their voices faint. Conspiratorial. Beth traced with a mental finger the high ridge of one cheekbone, the tight curls of his beard. Was he here, when the world ended, or did the painter bring him in her memory? Everything hurt. It hurt so much, and she didn’t know how long they’d let her sleep or if anyone would come when she needed to shit or puke her guts out or if she got thirsty and wanted water. She didn’t know if tomorrow they’d throw her out to rot with the people at the gate in their canvas shantytown, or put her to work monogramming Widdel’s towels. Why the fuck are we here? Running from the TERFs? These people won’t protect us. She wondered, as sleep stole up on her, if the man on the ceiling had been alone, when he changed, or if someone had been with him. “We’ve had sooooo many problems with our E supply,” said Sophie, drifting aimlessly along one of the theater’s workstations. Her slender fingers brushed against the casing of a frictionless centrifuge in which empty test tubes bobbed. “Can you make enough for—I think it’s, like, seventy? I mean obviously not just you; we’ll figure out an assistant so you don’t have to do it all on your own. Maybe someone from the camp, to clean at least.” “Seventy-six,” said Doe, who sat swinging her feet on the counter’s end beside the bulky industrial freezer. She was sucking on a bright red Popsicle, the first Indi had seen in years. Behind her the sheer concrete walls rose to a wrought-iron balustrade fronting steep, tightly packed tiers of seating. Bizarre, for a clinic, but then the whole bunker was surprising—too ornate, too big, too sprawling. It didn’t feel at all like a little folly two billionaires had bought to hedge their bets against the end of the world. Maybe they were just stupid. Overbought and overplanned. “That’s not a problem,” said Indi. Her knees ached and a hot, tight knot of pain was growing in the small of her back, but if she sat now they would remember her like that forever: weak.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  Somebody dying sucks quite a bit of attention-voltage from grown-ups in a family, but believe me, for a kid it’s like watching paint dry. Truly, I could not gin up much enthusiasm for it. Maybe some kids can; maybe there are Christian children reared with deep saintly streaks who read Scripture to their rotting grandparents in the early dusk. I did not. She lasted too long and made my mother cry too much. Besides, we hadn’t known her that well before she got sick. I had inherited her name, Mary. Except for our one trip to Lubbock, she had been little more than that name carefully executed in Venus pencil on a series of construction-paper cards. One of these was red and heart-shaped, pasted onto a lacy paper doily. It got saved in Daddy’s gold cigar box, for some reason. The envelope has M. D. Anderson Hospital (which is now the Houston Medical Center) for an address. The heart opens up to this odd message: “Dear Grandma, I hope you are getting better. There was a man in a car wreck who died three feet tall. Here is the man.” Then there’s a horizontal stick figure with X’s for eyes next to a bubble-shaped car with what looks like a Band-Aid on it. I guess that was my studied approximation of death, at the time. Still, no matter how bland a gaze you try to put on remembering an ugly illness, to protect yourself from the sheer tedium of it, if you spend any time at all speaking about it to some nodding psychiatrist, you will eventually stumble into a deep silence. And from that silence in your skull there will develop—almost chemically, like film paper doused in that magic solution—a snapshot of cold horror. So just when I’d started to believe that the terse chronology of Grandma’s cancer that I’d prattled off all my life held all the truth, some windowshade in the experience flew up to show me what suffering really is. It’s not the old man with arthritic fingers you glimpsed trying to open one of those little black, click-open purses for soda change at the Coke machine. It isn’t even the toddler you once passed in a yard behind a chain-link fence, tethered to a clothesline like a dog in midday heat. Those are only rumors of suffering. Real suffering has a face and a smell. It lasts in its most intense form no matter what you drape over it. And it knows your name. The doctors piped mustard gas through Grandma’s leg to try to stop the spread of her melanoma, and the result was suffering of the caliber I mention. Today it’s hard to imagine a treatment more medieval.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  ‘Yes—come close. Closer . . . closer, sweetheart. . . .’ 2Shaken and very greatly humbled, Mary had let Stephen go from her to Morton. She had not been deceived by Stephen’s glib words, and had now no illusions regarding Anna Gordon. Lady Anna, suspecting the truth about them, had not wished to meet her. It was all quite clear, cruelly clear if it came to that matter—but these thoughts she had mercifully hidden from Stephen. She had seen Stephen off at the station with a smile: ‘I’ll write every day. Do put on your coat, darling; you don’t want to arrive at Morton with a chill. And mind you wire when you get to Dover.’ Yet now as she sat in the empty study, she must bury her face and cry a little because she was here and Stephen in England . . . and then of course, this was their first real parting. David sat watching with luminous eyes in which were reflected her secret troubles; then he got up and planted a paw on the book, for he thought it high time to have done with this reading. He lacked the language that Raftery had known—the language of many small sounds and small movements—a clumsy and inarticulate fellow he was, but unrestrainedly loving. He nearly broke his own heart between love and the deep gratitude which he felt for Mary. At the moment he wanted to lay back his ears and howl with despair to see her unhappy. He wanted to make an enormous noise, the kind of noise wild folk make in the jungle—lions and tigers and other wild folk that David had heard about from his mother—his mother had been in Africa once a long time ago, with an old French colonel. But instead he abruptly licked Mary’s cheek—it tasted peculiar, he thought, like sea water. ‘Do you want a walk, David?’ she asked him gently. And as well as he could, David nodded his head by wagging his tail which was shaped like a sickle. Then he capered, thumping the ground with his paws; after which he barked twice in an effort to amuse her, for such things had seemed funny to her in the past, although now she appeared not to notice his capers. However, she had put on her hat and coat; so, still barking, he followed her through the courtyard. They wandered along the Quai Voltaire, Mary pausing to look at the misty river. ‘Shall I dive in and bring you a rat?’ inquired David by lunging wildly backwards and forwards. She shook her head. ‘Do stop, David; be good!’ Then she sighed again and stared at the river; so David stared too, but he stared at Mary.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  PREFACEWish for a Better WorldIn November 2007, I heard that I had won a prize. Each year TED (the acronym for Technology, Entertainment, Design), a private nonprofit organization best known for its superb conferences on “ideas worth spreading,” gives awards to people whom they think have made a difference but who, with their help, could make even more of an impact. Other winners have included former U.S. president Bill Clinton, the scientist E. O. Wilson, and the British chef Jamie Oliver. The recipient is given $100,000 and, more importantly, is granted a wish for a better world. I knew immediately what I wanted. One of the chief tasks of our time must surely be to build a global community in which all peoples can live together in mutual respect; yet religion, which should be making a major contribution, is seen as part of the problem. All faiths insist that compassion is the test of true spirituality and that it brings us into relation with the transcendence we call God, Brahman, Nirvana, or Dao. Each has formulated its own version of what is sometimes called the Golden Rule, “Do not treat others as you would not like them to treat you,” or in its positive form, “Always treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself.” Further, they all insist that you cannot confine your benevolence to your own group; you must have concern for everybody—even your enemies. Yet sadly we hear little about compassion these days. I have lost count of the number of times I have jumped into a London taxi and, when the cabbie asks how I make a living, have been informed categorically that religion has been the cause of all the major wars in history. In fact, the causes of conflict are usually greed, envy, and ambition, but in an effort to sanitize them, these self-serving emotions have often been cloaked in religious rhetoric. There has been much flagrant abuse of religion in recent years. Terrorists have used their faith to justify atrocities that violate its most sacred values. In the Roman Catholic Church, popes and bishops have ignored the suffering of countless women and children by turning a blind eye to the sexual abuse committed by their priests. Some religious leaders seem to behave like secular politicians, singing the praises of their own denomination and decrying their rivals with scant regard for charity. In their public pronouncements, they rarely speak of compassion but focus instead on such secondary matters as sexual practices, the ordination of women, or abstruse doctrinal definitions, implying that a correct stance on these issues—rather than the Golden Rule—is the criterion of true faith.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  I have a picture of June at Dino’s from around that time, before the bar and the booths were built. A square of white light falls from the high windows, and June sits on the floor where it lands, perched on the edge of a two-by-four, with the doll she calls Big Baby. She’s wearing a pair of grape-purple Puma high-tops with Velcro straps, and she’s looking somewhere above the camera, eyebrows a little up, mouth pursed, like she’s about to say something. She looks like a doll herself. The photo was taken by a friend who’d been visiting town with her husband. A few weeks later, my friend called with unexpected news: she and her husband had separated. When I look at the photo now, in one of the albums I keep for June, it too seems like a picture of a marriage that’s ending. 9We went to see family for Christmas, and when we got home, rather than thrill as I usually did at being back in our own bed, I felt like I had disappeared en route. Everything and everyone seemed far away. It had been seven months since jury duty, and I had never lost count. I felt worse, not better. To hide from the shame—or was it to escape everything else? To give in to the fantasies?—I tunneled under, sunk even further into my head. I told no one what I was thinking. A friend was having a big birthday at the end of January, and he invited a bunch of us to a rental cabin in the snow. Brandon took the weekend off, and to celebrate the occasion, we bought new winter gloves, hats, and snow pants. For June, I brought along a brand-new copy of Candy Land, my favorite board game as a child. I had grand visions of us playing it, visions that evaporated as soon as I set it up, when I remembered it’s an instant nap for anyone over age ten and June was enraged that it had rules. Instead, we rented cross-country skis. The first afternoon, even June made it a few yards. Then a friend took her back to the cabin, and the two of us got to ski on our own for a while, on a path through the woods. I hadn’t been on skis since I was a kid, and I’d forgotten how quiet it was, the smooth and efficient swish of polyethylene through groomed tracks. We’d needed this, to move together through the cold winter air. Our noses ran, and we licked our lips and wiped them on our sleeves. In the cabin, the heat vent was too close to the bed. I couldn’t sleep, so I watched my husband and our child, these people I called mine, sweat sticking their twin hair to their twin faces. I put on my headlamp and boots and shuffled to the outhouse. Orion glittered above the tree line.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  I thought of those parachute games children play—the one where you raise your arms to lift the parachute high, as high as it’ll go, and then you quickly step under it and plop down along the edge, trapping the air inside. For a moment the parachute billows above your head like a circus tent. It feels like magic, like time stops. And then, of course, the parachute starts to deflate. Our marriage was like that: the way it was built, we couldn’t inhabit it. It was a structure that didn’t give shelter. This sky falls if we stop holding it up. I don’t think we’ve been happy for a while now, I said. This isn’t only about my sexuality. I watched a wall go up in front of his face. That’s not true, he said. I know what is true for me, I said. We marched around and around the parachute, sizing it up. You’re trying to rewrite history, he said. No, I’m not saying our marriage has been bad, I said. On the whole, it’s been good. Our truths can be different and still valid, I said. I don’t think we want the same things. I want what matters to me to matter to you, and you’re allowed to want the same for yourself. We haven’t been able to do that for each other. Now you’re just being mean, he said. Why are you so mean? I wanted to feel that he was present. I wanted a partner in the everyday muck of domestic life, of parenting, of being a family. It was never about whether he worked nights or whether he remembered to take out the garbage; it was about feeling that he was with me, no matter where he was. I think I’ve been lonely for a long time, I said. Have you been lonely too? I would have done anything for you, he said. I would have given up anything. I would have sold the businesses, moved anywhere, bought a vacation house, anything. I would have done anything to make you happy. Do you really think I could have taken you up on that? I asked. That I could have asked you to leave the restaurants, to choose a new career? Those were offers I could never cash in. Why not? Because you love your work. Your work is you. Maybe you would have given it up for me, but I would never have asked you for it. But I would have! His voice was tight. I would have done it! I don’t want to argue anymore, I said. My eyes stung. Please stop trying to make me stay. Please stop trying to work it out. Please—just let me go. He watched me cry. Maybe this is dumb, he said, but do you want me to let you go in, like, two months, or do you want me to let you go right now? I sob-laughed: I want you to let me go right now.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  Her body ached. Her bones felt as though they were burning from the inside out. And then it passed, and they hadn’t talked about it since. It was just part of living now, like getting your appendix out. Except if you got appendicitis now you’d just die in agony unless you were lucky enough to know a surgeon who’d survived T-Day and wouldn’t harvest your blood and sell it to bunker brats for their vampire facials. Not that it had been better when she’d been uninsured and living over Indi’s garage. She ran her tongue carefully over her broken tooth, feeling the ragged flesh around it and the sharp, uneven fragments of its cracked surface. I wonder if there are any dentists left on the East Coast. I wonder if there’s any novocaine, or laughing gas. “There’s a dentist in Seabrook,” said Beth, apparently reading Fran’s mind. The bandage Fran had taped over the other girl’s wounded cheek was crusty with dried blood. “We could trade with him, maybe. We have weed. You think he has weed?” Fran absently transferred her wad of licorice root to the right side of her mouth. Only her absolute certainty that if a man got wind of them she wouldn’t be good for much more than lying down and rolling over on her back to die kept the scream of pain bottled inside her throat. She was on her knees without knowing how she’d got there, duffel lying nearby and hands clasped over her mouth as white-hot barbs of misery crawled down through her jaw. She heaved and puked up bile and blood, both black in the darkness, onto the cracked pavement. Beth, kneeling beside her, rubbed her back as she retched again. “Or I guess we could do it here.” Beth walked her to a rusted-out minivan abandoned on the highway’s shoulder just south of a cut where exposed faces of granite flanked the highway, seams of quartz catching the starlight. They sat on the car’s moth-eaten floor carpeting, dangling their feet in the grass pushing its way up through the pavement, and ate cold balls from the foam case in the duffel. Fran chewed the raw, springy flesh gingerly. She scratched her own in sympathy as she choked down the best source of estrogen five years of reckless experimentation and desperate medical-library raids had been able to turn up. She could practically hear Indi’s voice as she ate. Just pretend it’s one of those fancy chocolates with the gold foil. You know. A Ferrero Rocher. She couldn’t remember what Ferrero Rochers tasted like, and the pungent, gamey stink of the testicle coated her tongue like oil. How many of these things had she choked down since the last of the estradiol had oxidized? Hundreds, probably. She’d eaten more balls than she’d ever sucked cocks. The thought made her unexpectedly blue. Or maybe it was just the humidity. Sweating always made her sad.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  “Why, the doctors, the pontiffs of science. Who pervert young people by laying down such rules of hygiene? Who pervert women by devising and teaching them ways by which not to have children? “Yes: if only a hundredth of the efforts spent in curing diseases were spent in curing debauchery, disease would long ago have ceased to exist, whereas now all efforts are employed, not in extirpating debauchery, but in favoring it, by assuring the harmlessness of the consequences. Besides, it is not a question of that. It is a question of this frightful thing that has happened to me, as it happens to nine-tenths, if not more, not only of the men of our society, but of all societies, even peasants,—this frightful thing that I had fallen, and not because I was subjected to the natural seduction of a certain woman. No, no woman seduced me. I fell because the surroundings in which I found myself saw in this degrading thing only a legitimate function, useful to the health; because others saw in it simply a natural amusement, not only excusable, but even innocent in a young man. I did not understand that it was a fall, and I began to give myself to those pleasures (partly from desire and partly from necessity) which I was led to believe were characteristic of my age, just as I had begun to drink and smoke. “And yet there was in this first fall something peculiar and touching. I remember that straightway I was filled with such a profound sadness that I had a desire to weep, to weep over the loss forever of my relations with woman. Yes, my relations with woman were lost forever. Pure relations with women, from that time forward, I could no longer have. I had become what is called a voluptuary; and to be a voluptuary is a physical condition like the condition of a victim of the morphine habit, of a drunkard, and of a smoker. “Just as the victim of the morphine habit, the drunkard, the smoker, is no longer a normal man, so the man who has known several women for his pleasure is no longer normal? He is abnormal forever. He is a voluptuary. Just as the drunkard and the victim of the morphine habit may be recognized by their face and manner, so we may recognize a voluptuary. He may repress himself and struggle, but nevermore will he enjoy simple, pure, and fraternal relations toward woman. By his way of glancing at a young woman one may at once recognize a voluptuary; and I became a voluptuary, and I have remained one.” CHAPTER VI. “Yes, so it is; and that went farther and farther with all sorts of variations. My God! when I remember all my cowardly acts and bad deeds, I am frightened. And I remember that ‘me’ who, during that period, was still the butt of his comrades’ ridicule on account of his innocence.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Gogol, the Russian Molière, says—where? well, somewhere—“the real comic muse is the one under whose laughing mask tears roll down.” A wonderful saying. So I have a very curious feeling as I am writing all this down. The atmosphere seems filled with a stimulating fragrance of flowers, which overcomes me and gives me a headache. The smoke of the fireplace curls and condenses into figures, small gray-bearded kokolds that mockingly point their finger at me. Chubby- cheeked cupids ride on the arms of my chair and on my knees. I have to smile involuntarily, even laugh aloud, as I am writing down my adventures. Yet I am not writing with ordinary ink, but with red blood that drips from my heart. All its wounds long scarred over have opened and it throbs and hurts, and now and then a tear falls on the paper. The days creep along sluggishly in the little Carpathian health-resort. You see no one, and no one sees you. It is boring enough to write idyls. I would have leisure here to supply a whole gallery of paintings, furnish a theater with new pieces for an entire season, a dozen virtuosos with concertos, trios, and duos, but—what am I saying—the upshot of it all is that I don’t do much more than to stretch the canvas, smooth the bow, line the scores. For I am—no false modesty, Friend Severin; you can lie to others, but you don’t quite succeed any longer in lying to yourself—I am nothing but a dilettante, a dilettante in painting, in poetry, in music, and several other of the so-called unprofitable arts, which, however, at present secure for their masters the income of a cabinet minister, or even that of a minor potentate. Above all else I am a dilettante in life. Up to the present I have lived as I have painted and written poetry. I never got far beyond the preparation, the plan, the first act, the first stanza. There are people like that who begin everything, and never finish anything. I am such a one. But what am I saying? To the business in hand. I lie in my window, and the miserable little town, which fills me with despondency, really seems infinitely full of poetry. How wonderful the outlook upon the blue wall of high mountains interwoven with golden sunlight; mountain-torrents weave through them like ribbons of silver! How clear and blue the heavens into which snowcapped crags project; how green and fresh the forested slopes; the meadows on which small herds graze, down to the yellow billows of grain where reapers stand and bend over and rise up again.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  This is why the novel concentrates on rehabilitating Constance Chatterley through the phallic ministrations of the god Pan, incarnated in Mellors. In the novel’s early chapters we are instructed that her only meaningful existence is sexual and has been distorted by education and the indecent liberties of the modem woman. Married to an impotent husband, Connie mopes through some hundred and thirty pages of unfulfilled femininity. Neither a wife nor a mother, yearning for a child, her “womb” contracting at certain stated intervals, she seeks her fleeting youth in unsatisfactory trips to the mirror, and endless visits to some hen pheasants, whose “pondering female blood” rebukes “the agony of her own female forlornness”20 while affording her some solace by being “the only things in the world that warmed her heart.”21 In the presence of these formidable creatures she “feels herself on the brink of fainting all the time,”22 and the sight of a pheasant chick breaking its shell reduces her to hysterical weeping. In the best tradition of sentimental narrative we first see “a tear fall on her wrist,” followed by the information that “she was crying blindly in all the anguish of her generation’s forlornness…her heart was broken and nothing mattered any more.”23 Thereupon Mellors intervenes out of pity (“compassion flamed in his bowels for her”) and he invites her into the hut for a bit of what she needs. He is characteristically peremptory in administering it: “You lie there,” he orders. She accedes with a “queer obedience”24-Lawrence never uses the word female in the novel without prefacing it with the adjectives “weird” or “queer:” this is presumably done to persuade the reader that woman is a dim prehistoric creature operating out of primeval impulse. Mellors concedes one kiss on the navel and then gets to business: And he had to come into her at once, to enter the peace on earth of that soft, quiescent body. It was the moment of pure peace for him, the entry into the body of a woman. She lay still, in a kind of sleep, always in a kind of sleep. The activity, the orgasm was all his, all his; she could strive for herself no more.25 Of course Mellors is irreproachably competent and sexuality comes naturally to him. But the female, though she is pure nature to whom civilized thought or activity were a travesty, must somehow be taught. Constance has had the purpose of her existence ably demonstrated for her, but her conversion must take a bit longer: Her tormented modem-woman’s brain still had no rest. Was it real? And she knew, if she gave herself to the man, it was real. But if she kept herself for herself, it was nothing. She was old; millions of years old, she felt. And at last, she could bear the burden of herself no more. She was to be had for the taking. To be had for the taking.26

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  He is a weird old coot, but most of the kids dig him because he doesn’t ask too much of us. I mean, how can you expect your students to work hard if you show up in your pajamas and slippers? And yeah, I know it’s weird, but the tribe actually houses all of the teachers in one-bedroom cottages and musty, old trailer houses behind the school. You can’t teach at our school if you don’t live in the compound. It was like some kind of prison-work farm for our liberal, white, vegetarian do-gooders and conservative, white missionary saviors. Some of our teachers make us eat birdseed so we’ll feel closer to the earth, and other teachers hate birds because they are supposedly minions of the Devil. It is like being taught by Jekyll and Hyde. But Mr. P isn’t a Democratic-, Republican-, Christian-, or Devil-worshipping freak. He is just sleepy. But some folks are absolutely convinced he is, like, this Sicilian accountant who testified against the Mafia, and had to be hidden by that secret Witness Relocation Program. It makes some goofy sort of sense, I suppose. If the government wants to hide somebody, there’s probably no place more isolated than my reservation, which is located approximately one million miles north of Important and two billion miles west of Happy. But jeez, I think people pay way too much attention to The Sopranos. Mostly, I just think Mr. P is a lonely old man who used to be a lonely young man. And for some reason I don’t understand, lonely white people love to hang around lonelier Indians. “All right, kids, let’s get cracking,” Mr. P said as he passed out the geometry books. “How about we do something strange and start on page one?” I grabbed my book and opened it up. I wanted to smell it. Heck, I wanted to kiss it. Yes, kiss it. That’s right, I am a book kisser. Maybe that’s kind of perverted or maybe it’s just romantic and highly intelligent. But my lips and I stopped short when I saw this written on the inside front cover: THIS BOOK BELONGS TO AGNES ADAMS Okay, now you’re probably asking yourself, “Who is Agnes Adams?” Well, let me tell you. Agnes Adams is my mother. MY MOTHER! And Adams is her maiden name. So that means my mother was born an Adams and she was still an Adams when she wrote her name in that book. And she was thirty when she gave birth to me. Yep, so that means I was staring at a geometry book that was at least thirty years older than I was. I couldn’t believe it. How horrible is that? My school and my tribe are so poor and sad that we have to study from the same dang books our parents studied from. That is absolutely the saddest thing in the world.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Among Sacher-Masoch’s works, Venus in Furs is one of the most typical and outstanding. In spite of melodramatic elements and other literary faults, it is unquestionably a sincere work, written without any idea of titillating morbid fancies. One feels that in the hero many subjective elements have been incorporated, which are a disadvantage to the work from the point of view of literature, but on the other hand raise the book beyond the sphere of art, pure and simple, and make it one of those appalling human documents which belong, part to science and part to psychology. It is the confession of a deeply unhappy man who could not master his personal tragedy of existence, and so sought to unburden his soul in writing down the things he felt and experienced. The reader who will approach the book from this angle and who will honestly put aside moral prejudices and prepossessions will come away from the perusal of this book with a deeper understanding of this poor miserable soul of ours and a light will be cast into dark places that lie latent in all of us. Sacher-Masoch’s works have held an established position in European letters for something like half a century, and the author himself was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honor by the French Government in 1883, on the occasion of his literary jubilee. When several years ago cheap reprints were brought out on the Continent and attempts were made by various guardians of morality—they exist in all countries—to have them suppressed, the judicial decisions were invariably against the plaintiff and in favor of the publisher. Are Americans children that they must be protected from books which any European school-boy can purchase whenever he wishes? However, such seems to be the case, and this translation, which has long been in preparation, consequently appears in a limited edition printed for subscribers only. In another connection Herbert Spencer once used these words: “The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.” They have a very pointed application in the case of a work like Venus in Furs. F. S. Atlantic City April, 1921 VENUS IN FURS “But the Almighty Lord hath struck him, and hath delivered him into the hands of a woman.” —The Vulgate, Judith, xvi. 7. My company was charming. Opposite me by the massive Renaissance fireplace sat Venus; she was not a casual woman of the half-world, who under this pseudonym wages war against the enemy sex, like Mademoiselle Cleopatra, but the real, true goddess of love. She sat in an armchair and had kindled a crackling fire, whose reflection ran in red flames over her pale face with its white eyes, and from time to time over her feet when she sought to warm them.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  And that made me cry. Man, I’ve always cried too easily. I cry when I’m happy or sad. I cry when I’m angry. I cry because I’m crying. It’s weak. It’s the opposite of warrior. “Quit crying,” Rowdy said. “I can’t help it,” I said. “I love her more than I’ve ever loved anybody.” Yeah, I was quite the dramatic twelve-year-old. “Please,” Rowdy said. “Stop that bawling, okay?” “Okay, okay,” I said. “I’m sorry.” I wiped my face with one of my pillows and threw it across the room. “Jesus, you’re a wimp,” Rowdy said. “Just don’t tell anybody I cried about Dawn,” I said. “Have I ever told anybody your secrets?” Rowdy asked. “No.” “Okay, then, I won’t tell anybody you cried over a dumb girl.” And he didn’t tell anybody. Rowdy was my secret-keeper. Halloween [image file=image_rsrc4RJ.jpg] At school today, I went dressed as a homeless dude. It was a pretty easy costume for me. There’s not much difference between my good and bad clothes, so I pretty much look half-homeless anyway. And Penelope went dressed as a homeless woman. Of course, she was the most beautiful homeless woman who ever lived. We made a cute couple. Of course, we weren’t a couple at all, but I still found the need to comment on our common taste. “Hey,” I said. “We have the same costume.” I thought she was just going to sniff at me again, but she almost smiled. “You have a good costume,” Penelope said. “You look really homeless.” “Thank you,” I said. “You look really cute.” “I’m not trying to be cute,” she said. “I’m wearing this to protest the treatment of homeless people in this country. I’m going to ask for only spare change tonight, instead of candy, and I’m going to give it all to the homeless.” I didn’t understand how wearing a Halloween costume could become a political statement, but I admired her commitment. I wanted her to admire my commitment, too. So I lied. “Well,” I said. “I’m wearing this to protest the treatment of homeless Native Americans in this country.” “Oh,” she said. “I guess that’s pretty cool.” “Yeah, that spare change thing is a good idea. I think I might do that, too.” Of course, after school, I’d be trick-or-treating on the rez, so I wouldn’t collect as much spare change as Penelope would in Reardan. “Hey,” I said. “Why don’t we pool our money tomorrow and send it together? We’d be able to give twice as much.” Penelope stared at me. She studied me. I think she was trying to figure out if I was serious. “Are you for real?” she asked. “Yes,” I said. “Well, okay,” she said. “It’s a deal.” “Cool, cool, cool,” I said. So, later that night, I went out trick-or-treating on the rez. It was a pretty stupid idea, I guess. I was probably too old to be trick-or-treating, even if I was asking for spare change for the homeless.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  We played Almira Coulee-Hartline, this tiny farm-town team, and they beat us when this kid named Keith hit a crazy half-court shot at the buzzer. It was a big upset. We all cried in the locker room for hours. Coach cried, too. I guess that’s the only time that men and boys get to cry and not get punched in the face. Rowdy and I Have a Long and Serious Discussion About Basketball [image file=image_rsrc4RJ.jpg] A few days after basketball season ended, I e-mailed Rowdy and told him I was sorry that we beat them so bad and that their season went to hell after that. “We’ll kick your asses next year,” Rowdy wrote back. “And you’ll cry like the little faggot you are.” “I might be a faggot,” I wrote back, “but I’m the faggot who beat you.” “Ha-ha,” Rowdy wrote. Now that might just sound like a series of homophobic insults, but I think it was also a little bit friendly, and it was the first time that Rowdy had talked to me since I left the rez. I was a happy faggot! Because Russian Guys Are Not Always Geniuses [image file=image_rsrc4RJ.jpg] After my grandmother died, I felt like crawling into the coffin with her. After my dad’s best friend got shot in the face, I wondered if I was destined to get shot in the face, too. Considering how many young Spokanes have died in car wrecks, I’m pretty sure it’s my destiny to die in a wreck, too. Jeez, I’ve been to so many funerals in my short life. I’m fourteen years old and I’ve been to forty-two funerals. That’s really the biggest difference between Indians and white people. A few of my white classmates have been to a grandparent’s funeral. And a few have lost an uncle or aunt. And one guy’s brother died of leukemia when he was in third grade. But there’s nobody who has been to more than five funerals. All my white friends can count their deaths on one hand. I can count my fingers, toes, arms, legs, eyes, ears, nose, penis, butt cheeks, and nipples, and still not get close to my deaths. And you know what the worst part is? The unhappy part? About 90 percent of the deaths have been because of alcohol. Gordy gave me this book by a Russian dude named Tolstoy, who wrote: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Well, I hate to argue with a Russian genius, but Tolstoy didn’t know Indians. And he didn’t know that all Indian families are unhappy for the same exact reason: the fricking booze. Yep, so let me pour a drink for Tolstoy and let him think hard about the true definition of unhappy families. So, okay, you’re probably thinking I’m being extra bitter. And I would have to agree with you. I am being extra bitter. So let me tell you why.