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 Crazy Brave (2012)

  blond woman on his arm. They were kissing and laughing. We could see my mother doze as the television screen blurred, and then the baby awakened and she went to him, changed his diaper, and held him close to her neck as she turned on the light in the kitchen to make his bottle. This was the first time we had come to this place together. I knew then that it would be a very long time before I would see the old man again, and I felt sad. We watched the story below us as it unwound through time and space, unraveling like my mother’s spools of threads when she accidentally dropped them. But I would not recall any of it for years. When I returned to my body at dawn, my father showed up at home with smeared lipstick on his white shirt and the terrible anger of a trapped cat inside him. I watched the moon from a distance. It was a slender knife in the winter sky. I hoped the old man couldn’t see me sitting drunk here, beneath his home in the moon. I had to keep from staring at the new student, Lupita. Her perfect skin was café au lait, and her black eyes were elegant like a cat’s. She announced that the first thing she had done when she arrived at school was check out the male population and she was going to give a report. We laughed and leaned forward to listen. “What’s the name of that Sioux guy who paints large canvases with the geometric designs? With the nice smile and perfect back, always running touchdowns between classes?” “John Her Many Horses,” we chimed. Every girl on campus had noticed him. “Now that morsel over there . . .” She motioned to Herbie Nez. He was Navajo and as slim as a girl. “He’s much too pretty. I could eat him up in one bite,” she teased. Herbie’s hearing was like a finely cut crystal and tuned into everything, even the songs and cries of spirits who hung around the school. He could hear the cries of children dragged in the early years to the school against their will. Herbie looked over at us and batted his eyelashes. We all laughed together and downed the next round. Then suddenly our party was over. The dorm

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  ‘I speak French,’ she broke out, ‘I speak French like a native; I can read and write French as well as Mademoiselle does.’ ‘And beyond that you know very little,’ he informed her; ‘it’s not enough, Stephen, believe me.’ There ensued a long silence, she tapping her leg with her whip, he speculating about her. Then he said, but quite gently: ‘I’ve considered this thing—I’ve considered this matter of your education. I want you to have the same education, the same advantages as I’d give to my son—that is as far as possible—’ he added, looking away from Stephen. ‘But I’m not your son, Father,’ she said very slowly, and even as she said it her heart felt heavy—heavy and sad as it had not done for years, not since she was quite a small child. And at this he looked back at her with love in his eyes, love and something that seemed like compassion; and their looks met and mingled and held for a moment, speechless yet somehow expressing their hearts. Her own eyes clouded and she stared at her boots, ashamed of the tears that she felt might flow over. He saw this and went on speaking more quickly, as though anxious to cover her confusion.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘But never mind about all that. Wrongs committed in the distant past are far easier to condemn than to rectify. At all events, the fact is that he abandoned me when I was still a tiny child in Palermo, where I eventually grew up, and my mother, being a wealthy woman, married me off to a worthy nobleman from Girgenti, who out of affection for my mother and myself came to live in Palermo. Being a staunch supporter of the Guelphs, he began to intrigue on behalf of King Charles of Naples. But before the plot could be sprung, it reached the ears of King Frederick,2 and we had to flee from Sicily just as I was about to become the greatest lady in the island. Of our huge store of possessions, we took away only those few things we were able to carry with us, and leaving behind our lands and palaces, we came as refugees to this country, where we found King Charles so well-disposed towards us that he made good some of the losses we had suffered on his account. He gave us estates and houses, and as you will see for yourself, he makes generous and regular provision for my husband, or in other words your brother- in-law. And that, my dear sweet brother, is how I came to be in Naples, where, thanks more to God than to yourself, I have met you at last.’ And having said all this, sobbing with affection, she embraced him a second time and kissed him once again on the forehead. She had told her tale very glibly and with great self-assurance, neither stammering at any point nor swallowing any of her words. For his part, Andreuccio remembered that his father really had been in Palermo, and he knew from his own experience how lightly young men are apt to regard the love of a woman. So what with her tears of affection, her fond embraces and her chaste kisses, he was more than satisfied that she was telling the truth. And when she had finished, he replied: ‘I beg you not to take my amazement too much to heart, madam, for to tell you the truth I have never had the slightest knowledge of your existence. For some reason or other, my father never spoke of you and your mother, or if he did I never came to hear of it. But I am all the more delighted to find my sister in Naples, because I was feeling rather lonely here and the discovery was so unexpected. I myself am merely a small trader, but I know of no man, however exalted his station, who would not be equally delighted upon finding such a sister. There is one thing, though, that I would like you to explain: how did you know I was here?’ To which she replied:

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Meanwhile Rinuccio, woeful and cursing his ill fortune, for all that returned not home, but, as soon as the watch had departed the neighbourhood, he came back whereas he had dropped Alessandro and groped about, to see if he could find him again, so he might make an end of his service; but, finding him not and concluding that the police had carried him off, he returned to his own house, woebegone, whilst Alessandro, unknowing what else to do, made off home on like wise, chagrined at such a misadventure and without having recognized him who had borne him thither. On the morrow, Scannadio's tomb being found open and his body not to be seen, for that Alessandro had rolled it to the bottom of the vault, all Pistoia was busy with various conjectures anent the matter, and the simpler sort concluded that he had been carried off by the devils. Nevertheless, each of the two lovers signified to the lady that which he had done and what had befallen and excusing himself withal for not having full accomplished her commandment, claimed her favour and her love; but she, making believe to credit neither of this, rid herself of them with a curt response to the effect that she would never consent to do aught for them, since they had not done that which she had required of them." THE SECOND STORY [Day the Ninth] AN ABBESS, ARISING IN HASTE AND IN THE DARK TO FIND ONE OF HER NUNS, WHO HAD BEEN DENOUNCED TO HER, IN BED WITH HER LOVER AND THINKING TO COVER HER HEAD WITH HER COIF, DONNETH INSTEAD THEREOF THE BREECHES OF A PRIEST WHO IS ABED WITH HER; THE WHICH THE ACCUSED NUN OBSERVING AND MAKING HER AWARE THEREOF, SHE IS ACQUITTED AND HATH LEISURE TO BE WITH HER LOVER Filomena was now silent and the lady's address in ridding herself of those whom she chose not to love having been commended of all, whilst, on the other hand, the presumptuous hardihood of the two gallants was held of them to be not love, but madness, the queen said gaily to Elisa, "Elisa, follow on." Accordingly, she promptly began, "Adroitly, indeed, dearest ladies, did Madam Francesca contrive to rid herself of her annoy, as hath been told; but a young nun, fortune aiding her, delivered herself with an apt speech from an imminent peril. As you know, there be many very dull folk, who set up for teachers and censors of others, but whom, as you may apprehend from my story, fortune bytimes deservedly putteth to shame, as befell the abbess, under whose governance was the nun of whom I have to tell.

• From Trash (1988)

  The woman, Arlene told us, was drunk more often than sober. Still, her troubles were the making of Arlene, who not only got paid good money, she no longer had to spend her nights dodging Jack’s curses or sudden drunken slaps. “I’m getting out of here, and I’m never coming back,” she told me the first morning of that week. By the end of the week, she had done it, though the apartment was half a mile up the highway, and even smaller than Jo’s. I saw it only once, a place devoid of furniture or grace, but built like a fortress. “Mine,” Arlene had said, a world of rage compressed into the word. Lying on the old narrow Hollywood bed again, I remembered the look on Arlene’s face. It was identical to the expression I had seen on Jo when I was packing my boxes to drive to Louisville. “We’ll never see your ass again,” Jo had said. Her mouth pulled down in a mock frown, then crooked up into a grin. “Not in this lifetime.” All these years later I could look back and it was exactly as if I were watching a movie of it, a scene that closed in on Jo’s black eyes and the bitter pleasure she took in saying “your ass.” I know my mouth had twisted to match hers. We had thought ourselves free, finally away and gone. But none of it had come out the way we had thought it would. I hadn’t lasted two years in Louisville, and Arlene had never gotten more than three miles from the Frito Lay plant. Twenty years after we had left so fierce and proud, we were all right back where we had started, yoked to each other and the same old drama. “Take me shopping,” Mama begged me every afternoon, as if no time at all had passed. I had looked at her neck and seen how gray and sweaty the skin had gone and known in that moment that the chemo had not worked out as we hoped. “Tomorrow,” I had promised Mama, and talked her into lying down early. Then gone back to curl up in bed and pretend to read so that I could be left alone. Every night for the two weeks I stayed there I would listen to Jack’s hacking through the bedroom wall. Every time he coughed, my back pulled tight. I tried to shut him out, listening past him for Mama lying on the couch in the living room. She talked to herself once she thought we were asleep. It sounded as if she were retelling stories. Little snatches would drift down the hall. “Oh James, God that James . . .” Her voice went soft. I listened to unintelligible whispers till she said, “When Arlene was born . . .” Then she faded out again.

• From Trash (1988)

  I shook my head, gently stroking Mama’s cool clammy skin. There was nothing I could say to Jo. We always wanted somebody to do something and no one ever did, but what had we ever asked anyone to do? I watched Jo rub her neck and thought about the pins that held her elbow and shoulder together. There was my shattered coccyx and broken collarbones, and Arlene’s insomnia. At thirty, Arlene had a little girl’s shadowed frightened face and the omnipresent stink of whiskey on her skin. I had been eight when Mama married Jack, Jo five, but Arlene had been still a baby, less than a year old and fragile as a sparrow in the air. “What is it you want to do? Talk? Huh?” Jo rolled her shoulders back and rubbed her upper arms. “Want to talk about what a tower of strength Mama was? Or why she had to be?” My shrug was automatic, inconsequential. A flush spread up from Jo’s cleavage. It made the skin of her neck look rough and pebbly. Deep lines scored the corners of her eyes and curved back from her mouth. In the last few years, Jo had become scary thin. The skin that always pulled tight on her bones seemed to have grown loose. Now it wrinkled and hung. I looked away, surprised and angry. Neither of us had expected to live long enough to get old. For all that we fight, Jo is the one I get along with, and I always try to stay with her when I visit. Arlene and I barely speak, though we talk to each other more easily than she and Jo. There have been years I don’t think the two of them have spoken half a dozen words. In the ten weeks since Mama’s collapse, their conversations have been hurt-filled bursts of whispered recrimination. At first, I stayed with Arlene and that seemed to help, but when Jo and I insisted that Mama had to check in to MacArthur, Arlene blew up and told me to go ahead and move over to Jo’s place. “You and Jo—you think you know it all,” Arlene said when she was dropping me off at Jo’s. “But she’s my mama too, and I know something. I know she’s not ready to give up and die.” “We’re not giving up. We’re putting Mama where she can get the best care.” “Two miles from Jo’s place and forty from mine.” Arlene had shaken her head. “All the way across town from Jack and her stuff. I know what you are doing.” “Arlene . . .” “Don’t. Just don’t.” She popped the clutch on her VW bug and backed up before I could get the door closed. “Someday you’re gonna be sorry. That’s the one thing I am sure of, you’re gonna be sorry for all you’ve done.”

• From The Decameron (1353)

  This brief unpleasantness (I call it brief, inasmuch as it is contained within few words) is quickly followed by the sweetness and the pleasure which I have already promised you, and which, unless you were told in advance, you would not perhaps be expecting to find after such a beginning as this. Believe me, if I could decently have taken you whither I desire by some other route, rather than along a path so difficult as this, I would gladly have done so. But since it is impossible without this memoir to show the origin of the events you will read about later, I really have no alternative but to address myself to its composition. I say, then, that the sum of thirteen hundred and forty-eight years had elapsed since the fruitful Incarnation of the Son of God, when the noble city of Florence, which for its great beauty excels all others in Italy, was visited by the deadly pestilence.2 Some say that it descended upon the human race through the influence of the heavenly bodies, others that it was a punishment signifying God’s righteous anger at our iniquitous way of life. But whatever its cause, it had originated some years earlier in the East, where it had claimed countless lives before it unhappily spread westward, growing in strength as it swept relentlessly on from one place to the next.

• From Trash (1988)

  Like Paula, everybody begins first by talking about how healthy they are and how pitiful the poor alcoholic is. It reminds me too much of the prayer meetings I hated so as a child. How could you ever know if you were in a state of grace or not, and why did the people who were so sure of themselves always seem to be hiding something? What I love about Margaret is that she’s never sure of much of anything. “What do you think? Do you think I’m an alcoholic?” Margaret asked me the last time we went out to dinner together. “Lee wants me to talk to my therapist about how much I drink.” I’d shrugged. “Is it getting in the way of anything you want to do?” That was a silly question, since obviously drinking is getting in the way of her and Lee living happily ever after, which is the one thing Margaret is absolutely sure she wants to do. “Well . . .” She’d hesitated, then shrugged. “No more than working for a living and taking care of my mother.” Margaret works as the head teller at a midtown bank, a job that’s a little like living on the firing line in a small-arms tournament. She spends her weekends picking up after her mother, a beautiful but prematurely senile woman whose four married children have left her to Margaret to nurse and protect. “Mama shit on that blue chintz couch again last week, and you know how embarrassing that is for her. Took me three hours to get it even half clean. I’m thinking I may have to re-cover it, but then I suppose she’ll just have another accident. The doctor said I should have the furniture covered in plastic, that it’s just gonna get worse, but damn, I can’t do that to her. It took her so long to get some nice things, and she loves them so.” I didn’t tell her what I thought, that mostly Mama didn’t notice much of what she sat on anymore. It’s taken Margaret years to be able to afford to buy her mother the things they both always wanted, and it would break Margaret’s heart to give any of it up. Instead I’d changed the subject with a story about my mama’s attempts to get flowers to grow in her swampy yard. Margaret and I both know that some time in the next year she’s gonna have to give up and put her mama in a hospital of some kind. It’s one of the things neither of us discusses with Paula.

• From Trash (1988)

  Her kidneys are the worst of it, so that sometimes when she leans over to take a shot at the pool hall, her face will screw up and she’ll stand back quickly, and curse. “Hurts like a motherfucker,” she says. But she won’t stop drinking. “Got to drink to ease the pain,” she laughs. I don’t argue with her, not about her drinking anyway. We got enough to argue about without that. “You been seeing Cass awhile,” Anna said to me the other night. “Must be time she got fed up with me, then.” I kept my face turned away, picked up Ghost Dance and hugged her to my neck. “Well, if you going to go on the way you been, I expect it is.” Anna’s voice was low and sad. I watched her eyes track over to the pictures on her wall—old lovers and lost friends, she’d called it one night, her wall of grief. “I expect it is.” On the hill above the science building, the dogwood trees are in bloom. My legs shake when I stop and bend over. I hold my balance and stretch out slowly, feeling the sweat running down my back. My thighs tremble and my throat still aches. When I look over at the science building’s huge mirrored front, I can see myself reflected in the glass, my hair swinging in the sunlight, the wet grass shining under my shoes. I look tiny and hard, like a nail sticking up out of the ground. “Tena-kata-sho,” I say out loud and face punch up into my reflected image. The adrenaline comes even though all I have to trigger it is my own frustration. The sensei at the school I’ve been going to these past few months is a returned vet and a part-time cop who keeps switching back and forth, talking now in fortune-cookie Confucianism and then with macho insistence. Once every few weeks he loses control and really pops one of the boys. He doesn’t know how to deal with the women at all, and we all know he’d be happier if we weren’t in the class. The six of us who have remained ignore everything except the skills he has to teach us. For all of us, it is the discipline that matters, making ourselves over into what we most want to be, becoming strong for ourselves. We strip off our sex with our jewelry, sometimes so thoroughly that he forgets to treat us like the fragile incompetents he believes us to be. Last week he lost patience with me the way he does with the boys, grabbed me by the arm and shook me. “You’re behaving like a passenger here, going through the motions. You’re not thinking about what you’re doing. You’re not in control. Come on. Get into your body. Feel it, feel what you’re doing. Push those muscles, feel ’em.” The muscles of the mind, I’d thought.

• From Trash (1988)

  Sometimes she doesn’t bother to roll over or get up, lies in bed for a day, her face set and angry so the girls know to stay away. Gets up thinner but quiet. Goes back to work as the crossing guard at Greenville South-East, the only work she’s had since Robert died. “You ever read that Flannery O’Connor? I got the book from Macon a few years back. Heard she’d had the lupus, thought it might be in there, but God knows it an’t. You read that crazy woman? Made me think people’re worse than I thought, and I thought bad enough. But the worst was some of it made me laugh and then made me ’shamed. Thinking, what kind of woman laughs at such troubles? Babies drowning themselves for Jesus, preachers and old ladies that get their whole families shot dead ’cause they forgot the right highway.” Flat, flat, her hand, her face, the sunlight on the porch. Temple’s memory of a boy dead now twenty-five years. “I’d hate to think it was the lupus.” “Get her to think of something else,” Mama asked me. “People say she’s going crazy out on that old porch all the time.” Nobody really knows Temple. The women smile about her, say, “Lord God, but she loved that man.” Everybody says it’s a pity, how she sits, how she doesn’t get on with her life, take another husband, have another child, plant zinnias or baby’s breath and go on. Go on. I sit on Temple’s porch and drink coffee, drink tea when the morning heats up, talk to her of New York and California, of cities she’s never seen. I watch how she laughs, her red hair swinging from side to side, bringing the gray and white to the surface, bringing out the shadows and wrinkles under her eyes. “How can you live in a city? All those pictures like to make my heart hurt. I could smell it—hot concrete, tar, and piss. No green for miles. No color a’tall. Lord, where’s the life in it? ” I tell her about the color of night, the lights on the bridges, the hot shine in the women’s eyes, the cold glare of metal moving fast. I tell her about the cold winter light shining on flat stacks of slate, hanging over the New Jersey highways, the cars growling rock music out their vents—how tight the people wear their clothes, how tall the buildings, how sweet the dawn after you do not sleep for days.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  In this way, their love continued to prosper, much to their common enjoyment and pleasure. They did everything they could to keep the affair a secret, but one night, as Lisabetta was making her way to Lorenzo’s sleeping-quarters, she was observed, without knowing it, by her eldest brother. The discovery greatly distressed him, but being a young man of some intelligence, and not wishing to do anything that would bring discredit upon his family, he neither spoke nor made a move, but spent the whole of the night applying his mind to various sides of the matter. Next morning he described to his brothers what he had seen of Lisabetta and Lorenzo the night before, and the three of them talked the thing over at considerable length. Being determined that the affair should leave no stain upon the reputation either of themselves or of their sister, he decided that they must pass it over in silence and pretend to have neither seen nor heard anything until such time as it was safe and convenient for them to rid themselves of this ignominy before it got out of hand. Abiding by this decision, the three brothers jested and chatted with Lorenzo in their usual manner, until one day they pretended they were all going off on a pleasure-trip to the country, and took Lorenzo with them. They bided their time, and on reaching a very remote and lonely spot, they took Lorenzo off his guard, murdered him, and buried his corpse. No one had witnessed the deed, and on their return to Messina they put it about that they had sent Lorenzo away on a trading assignment, being all the more readily believed as they had done this so often before. Lorenzo’s continued absence weighed heavily upon Lisabetta, who kept asking her brothers, in anxious tones, what had become of him, and eventually her questioning became so persistent that one of her brothers rounded on her, and said: ‘What is the meaning of this? What business do you have with Lorenzo, that you should be asking so many questions about him? If you go on pestering us, we shall give you the answer you deserve.’ From then on, the young woman, who was sad and miserable and full of strange forebodings, refrained from asking questions. But at night she would repeatedly utter his name in a heart-rending voice and beseech him to come to her, and from time to time she would burst into tears because of his failure to return. Nothing would restore her spirits, and meanwhile she simply went on waiting. One night, however, after crying so much over Lorenzo’s absence that she eventually cried herself off to sleep, he appeared to her in a dream, pallid-looking and all dishevelled, his clothes tattered and decaying, and it seemed to her that he said:

• From The Decameron (1353)

  In view of what she had been through, the lady gave no further thought to her lover, and from then on she wisely refrained from playing any more tricks or falling deeply in love with anyone. As for the scholar, when he heard that the maid had broken her thigh, he deemed his revenge sufficient, and went happily about his business and said no more about it. This, then, was the foolish young lady’s reward for supposing it was no more difficult to trifle with a scholar than with any other man, being unaware that scholars – not all of them, mind you, but the majority at any rate – know where the devil keeps his tail. I advise you therefore to think twice, ladies, before you play such tricks, especially when you have a scholar to deal with. EIGHTH STORYA story concerning two close friends, of whom the first goes to bed with the wife of the second. The second man finds out, and compels his wife to lock the first man in a chest, on which he makes love to his friend’s wife whilst he is trapped inside. Grievous and painful as the recital of Elena’s woes had been to the ladies, their compassion was restrained by the knowledge that she had partially brought them upon herself, though at the same time they considered the scholar to have been excessively severe and relentless, not to say downright cruel. However, now that Pampinea had come to the end of her story, the queen called next upon Fiammetta, who, all eager to obey, began as follows: Charming ladies, since you appear to have been somewhat stricken by the harshness of the offended scholar, I consider this a suitable moment at which to soothe your outraged feelings with something a little more entertaining; and I therefore propose to tell you a brief story about a young man who took a more charitable view of an injury he received, and devised a more harmless way of avenging himself. You will thereby be enabled to apprehend, that when a man seeks to avenge an injury, it should be quite sufficient for him to render an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, without wanting to inflict a punishment out of all proportion to the original offence. You are to know, then, that there once lived in Siena (or so I have heard) two highly prosperous young men of good plebeian families, of whom the first was called Spinelloccio Tavena and the second was called Zeppa di Mino,1 and they lived next door to one another in the district of Camollia. They always went about together, and to all outward appearances were as deeply attached to one another as if they were brothers. And both were married to very beautiful women.

• From Trash (1988)

  “The only magic we have is what we make in ourselves, the muscles we build up on the inside, and the sense of belief we create from nothing. I used to watch my mama hold off terror with only the edges of her own eyes for a shield, and I still don’t know how she did it. But I am her daughter and have as much muscle in me as she ever did. It’s just that some days I am not strong enough. I stretch myself out a little, and then my own fear pulls me back in. The shaking starts inside. Then I have to stretch myself again. Waxing and waning through my life, maybe I’m building up layers of strength inside. Maybe.” Last night, late, Liz called, asked me to please go out with her for a beer—meet her at the Overpass and talk to her for a few hours. She needed someone to listen to her. Jackie never did anymore, she said. But when we sat down she acted like a stranger, like someone who had come in from out of town and really couldn’t stay long. She was smoking again, Pall Malls out of a hard pack, and lighting them with wooden kitchen matches from a small box. Her red hair looked faded, its dark shine had gone dull and even the blue of her eyes had faded to gray. “It’s wearing me down,” she kept saying. “It’s just fucking wearing me down.” I ordered her a beer and me a glass of wine. When she kept licking her lips and lighting cigarettes one after the other, I started telling her stories. I found myself describing Judy’s hip-grinding routine and the way my new girlfriend Cass would spit in her hand and slide her pool cue up and down while other women took their shots—making both acts equally hilarious and revealing. “Bitches,” Liz pronounced them both. “Like you and me, honey. We’re all pretty bitchy when it comes down to it.” I rubbed my hands in the wine that had trailed down the lip of my glass. “Naw.” She’d downed her beer and signaled for another one. “You and me, we’re the ones they fuck with. We’re something else, taking their shit all the time, their goddamn shit all the time.” I’d sipped my wine and rubbed my neck. “You and Jackie fighting then?” “How’d you guess?” In the dim bar’s lighting, her pale eyes looked charcoal, and she had no smile at all. She was wearing the collar of her dark plaid shirt turned up high against the fringe of her short-cropped hair and she kept pushing up at the back of her head until the hair was standing up stiff and spiky. She looked like one of those desperate women sketched out on the cover of an old Ann Bannon novel, lips and eyes swollen and dark, features all raw and flushed.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘Charming ladies, ever since I was able to distinguish good from evil, it has been my unhappy lot, owing to the beauty of one of your number, to find myself perpetually enslaved to Love. I have humbly and obediently followed all of his rules to the very best of my ability, only to find that I have invariably been forsaken to make way for another. Things have gone from bad to worse for me, and I do not suppose they will improve to my dying day. I therefore decree that the subject of our discussions for the morrow should be none other than the one which applies most closely to myself, namely, those whose love ended unhappily. For my part, I expect my own love to have a thoroughly unhappy ending, nor was it for any other reason that I was given (by one who knew what he was talking about) the name by which you address me.’1 And having uttered these words, he rose to his feet and dismissed them all till suppertime. The garden was so lovely and delectable, that none of them chose to stray beyond its confines in search of greater pleasure in other parts. On the contrary, once the sun was now much cooler and no longer made hunting a chore, some of the ladies set off in pursuit of the hares and roebucks and other animals in the garden, that had been startling them by leaping a hundred times or more into their midst as they sat and talked. Dioneo and Fiammetta began to sing a song about Messer Guiglielmo and the Lady of Vergiú,2 whilst Filomena and Panfilo settled down to a game of chess. So intently were they all engaged upon their several activities, that the time passed by unnoticed, and when the hour of supper came, it caught them unawares. The tables were then placed round the edge of the beautiful fountain, and there, to their immense delight, they supped in the cool of the evening. No sooner had the tables been removed than Filostrato, wishing to follow the same path that the ladies crowned before him had taken, called upon Lauretta to dance and sing them a song. ‘My lord,’ she said, ‘the only songs I know are the ones I have composed myself, and of those I remember, none is especially apt for so merry a gathering as this. But if you would like me to sing you one, I will gladly oblige.’ ‘Nothing of yours could be other than pleasing and beautiful,’ replied the king. ‘Sing it, therefore, exactly as you wrote it.’ And so, in mellifluous but somewhat plaintive tones, Lauretta began as follows, and the other ladies repeated the refrain after each verse: ‘None has need for lamentation More than have I Who, alas, all sick for love In vain do sigh. ‘He who moves the stars and heavens3 Decreed me at my birth Light, lovely, graceful, fair to see, To show men here on earth

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  known as the Glenn Pool. It was the largest oil field in the Southwest. The family lands were part of this oil find. The family became wealthy. My father’s mother, Naomi Harjo, and my aunt Lois Harjo were well educated and received their BFA degrees in art at Oklahoma City University. My aunt Lois Harjo told me that family once owned much of the town of Okmulgee. My grandmother Naomi died of tuberculosis when my father was a small child. My father had to cross a gulf of sadness left by her absence to find a place for my mother, and then me and the rest of his children. His mother was unreachable except by memory. In the end, we must each tend to our own gulfs of sadness, though others can assist us with kindness, food, good words, and music. Our human tendency is to fill these holes with distractions like shopping and fast romance, or with drugs and alcohol. My father’s father, Allen W. Foster, married the caretaker of his children. My father gained stepbrothers and a half-sister. He grew up in a house that became known as the Foster Estate, though it was on his mother’s Creek land. When I was growing up, my father received enough in oil royalties to support his love for fine cars. I remember him taking apart and putting back together his black Cadillac and his Ford pickup. When my father passed from this world, the oil royalties were divided among his children. By the mid-eighties my brothers, sister, and I were each receiving about thirty dollars a month. Then the oil company stopped the payments. Stories can be very demanding and need care and assistance. The family oil story has a spirit and it wants my attention. As I continued the journey to enter this realm, I watched my mother and father meet at Casa Loma Dance Hall. My mother was beautiful and magnetic. She was that mix of Cherokee and European that dazzles. She was meticulous in her dress. Her journey to Tulsa took determination on her part. She had to oppose her father, a man who favored her over her six brothers, and set her mother against her. She left her sharecropper family shack with her best friend, Elvira Guerra. They headed to Tulsa with money they made from picking crops. She set herself to mate for life. My father was ephemeral. He was about ten percent body. The other ninety

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Some sign of that eternal grace That shines for ever in His face. But I went all unprized Because of men’s unknowing And mortal imperfection Spurned and despised! ‘One man once loved me dearly. In his embrace He held me, and in all his thoughts I held high place. My eyes with love inflamed him And all my time I spent, Which flew by all so lightly, In tender blandishment. But now I am forsaken; From me, alas, he’s taken. ‘And now there came before me A youth all proud and vain Though noble reputation Gave him a valiant name. He took me, and false fancies, Alas for me! Made him a jealous gaoler: Gone liberty! And I, who came to earth To bring mankind delight Learned to despair, almost, Gone all my mirth! ‘I curse my wretched fate When I agreed To change to wedding clothes From widow’s weeds. Though they were dark, perhaps, My life was fair; but now I live a weary life, With far less honour, too. Oh cursed wedding-tie! Before I took those vows That brought me to this pass Would God had let me die! ‘Oh, sweetest love, with whom I once was so content! From where you stand, with Him To whom our souls are sent, Ah, spare some pity for me For I cannot remove Your memory which burns me With all the pain of love! Ah, pray that I may soon return To those sweet climes for which I yearn!’ Here Lauretta ended her song, to which all had listened raptly and construed in different ways. There were those who took it, in the Milanese fashion,4 to imply that a good fat pig was better than a comely wench. But others gave it a loftier, more subtle and truer meaning, which this is not the moment to expound. The king then called for lighted torches to be set at regular intervals amongst the lawns and flowerbeds, and at his behest, Lauretta’s song was followed by many others until every star that had risen was beginning its descent, when, thinking it time for them all to retire, he bade them goodnight and sent them away to their various rooms. Here ends the Third Day of the Decameron [image file=image_rsrc82M.jpg] FOURTH DAYHere begins the Fourth Day, wherein, under the rule of Filo-strato, the discussion turns upon those whose love ended unhappily.

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

  The triumph of the re-action against the rebellious peasants forced him to flee to Zuerich (December, 1525). He had a public disputation with Zwingli, who had himself formerly leaned to the view that it would be better to put off baptism to riper years of responsibility, though he never condemned infant-baptism. He retracted under pressure and protest, and was dismissed with some aid. He went to Nikolsburg in Moravia, published a number of books in German, having brought a printing-press with him from Switzerland, and gathered the Baptist "Brethren" into congregations. But when Moravia, after the death of Louis of Hungary, fell into the possession of King Ferdinand of Austria, Huebmaier was arrested with his wife, sent to Vienna, charged with complicity in the Peasants’ War, and burned to death, March 10, 1528. He died with serene courage and pious resignation. His wife, who had strengthened him in his faith, was drowned three days later in the Danube. Zwingli, after his quarrel with Huebmaier, speaks unfavorably of his character; Vadian of St. Gall, and Bullinger, give him credit for great eloquence and learning, but charge him with a restless spirit of innovation. He was an advocate of the voluntary principle. and a martyr of religious freedom. Heretics, he maintained, are those only who wickedly oppose the Holy Sciptures, and should be won by instruction and persuasion. To use force is to deny Christ, who came to save, not to destroy. A few months before Huebmaier’s death, Luther wrote, rather hastily, a tract against the Anabaptists (January or February, 1528), in the shape of a letter to two unnamed ministers in Catholic territory.820 "I know well enough," he begins, "that Balthasar Huebmör quotes me among others by name, in his blasphemous book on Re-baptism, as if I were of his foolish mind. But I take comfort in the fact that neither friend nor foe will believe such a lie, since I have sufficiently in my sermons shown my faith in infant-baptism." He expressed his dissent from the harsh and cruel treatment of the Anabaptists, and maintained that they ought to be resisted only by the Word of God and arguments, not by fire and sword, unless they preach insurrection and resist the civil magistrate.821 At the same time he ungenerously depreciated the constancy of their martyrs, and compared them to the Jewish martyrs at the destruction of Jerusalem, and the Donatist martyrs.822 He thought it served the papists right, to be troubled with such sectaries of the Devil in punishment for not tolerating the gospel. He then proceeds to refute their objections to infant-baptism.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  He still had over a mile to go when night came on with a vengeance, and when he finally arrived it was so late that the gates were locked, the drawbridges were up, and he was unable to gain admittance. Feeling depressed and miserable, he looked round with tears in his eyes to see whether there was a place where he would at least find some protection from the snow, and he happened to catch sight of a house that jutted out appreciably from the top of the castle walls, so he decided to go and take refuge beneath it till daybreak. When he reached the spot, he discovered there was a postern underneath the overhang, and although the door was locked, at its base he heaped a quantity of straw which was lying nearby, and settled down upon it. He was thoroughly fed up, and complained at regular intervals to Saint Julian, saying that this was no way to treat one of his faithful devotees. Saint Julian had not lost sight of him, however, and before very long he was to see that Rinaldo was comfortably settled. In the castle there was a widow, lovelier of body than any other woman in the world, with whom the Marquis Azzo was madly in love. He had set her up there as his mistress, and she was living in the very house beneath which Rinaldo had taken refuge. As it happened, the Marquis had arrived at the castle on that very day with the intention of spending the night with her, and had made secret arrangements to have a sumptuous supper prepared, and to take a bath in the lady’s house beforehand. Everything was ready, and she was only waiting for the Marquis to turn up, when a servant happened to arrive at the gate, bringing the Marquis a message requiring him to leave immediately. So he sent word to the lady that he would not be coming, then hastily mounted his horse and rode away. The lady, feeling rather disconsolate and not knowing what to do with herself, decided she would have the bath which had been prepared for the Marquis, after which she would sup and go to bed. And so into the bath she went. As she lay there in the bath, which was near the postern on the other side of which our unfortunate hero had taken shelter, she could hear the wails and moans being uttered by Rinaldo, who sounded from the way his teeth were chattering as if he had been turned into a stork.3 She therefore summoned her maid, and said: ‘Go upstairs, look over the wall, and see who it is on the other side of this door. Find out who he is and what he is doing there.’

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Finally, as dusk was falling and there was still no sign of Pietro, she stumbled upon a narrow path, along which her nag proceeded to trot, and after riding along it for over two miles, she saw a cottage ahead of her in the distance, to which she made her way as speedily as possible, there to find a kindly man of very ancient appearance, with a wife little younger than himself. On seeing that she was by herself, they exclaimed: ‘Alas, child, whatever are you doing in these parts, all alone, at this hour?’ Through her tears, the girl told them that she had lost her companion in the forest, and asked them how far it was to Anagni. ‘This road doesn’t lead to Anagni, my child,’ the good man replied. ‘It’s a dozen miles or so from here to Anagni.’ Whereupon Agnolella said: ‘Then is there a house nearby where I could spend the night?’ ‘None that you could reach before dark,’ he answered. To which the girl said: ‘For the love of God, would you be so kind, since I cannot go elsewhere, to let me stay here for the night?’ ‘Young woman,’ he replied, ‘we should be happy for you to spend the night with us, but at the same time we must warn you that these parts are infested, day and night, by bands of cut-throats who fight among themselves and every so often wreak damage and hardship upon us. If we had the misfortune to be invaded by one of these bands whilst you were here, on seeing what a pretty young woman you are they would affront and manhandle you, and we could not lift a finger to help. We want you to know about this so that if such a thing were to happen, you would harbour no resentment against us.’ The old man’s words filled the girl with alarm, but seeing that the hour was so late, she replied: ‘God willing, we shall all be spared from any such calamity, but even if such a fate were to befall me, it is a much lesser evil to be misused by men than to be torn to pieces by wild beasts in the forest.’ And so saying, she dismounted and went inside the poor man’s dwelling, where she supped frugally with them on what little food they had in the house, after which, still fully clothed, she settled down exhausted with the others on their tiny little bed. And there she lay, sobbing the whole night long and bewailing the misfortunes of herself and Pietro, to whom she could only suppose that the worst must have happened.

• From Trash (1988)

  Maybe.” Last night, late, Liz called, asked me to please go out with her for a beer—meet her at the Overpass and talk to her for a few hours. She needed someone to listen to her. Jackie never did anymore, she said. But when we sat down she acted like a stranger, like someone who had come in from out of town and really couldn’t stay long. She was smoking again, Pall Malls out of a hard pack, and lighting them with wooden kitchen matches from a small box. Her red hair looked faded, its dark shine had gone dull and even the blue of her eyes had faded to gray. “It’s wearing me down,” she kept saying. “It’s just fucking wearing me down.” I ordered her a beer and me a glass of wine. When she kept licking her lips and lighting cigarettes one after the other, I started telling her stories. I found myself describing Judy’s hip-grinding routine and the way my new girlfriend Cass would spit in her hand and slide her pool cue up and down while other women took their shots—making both acts equally hilarious and revealing. “Bitches,” Liz pronounced them both. “Like you and me, honey. We’re all pretty bitchy when it comes down to it.” I rubbed my hands in the wine that had trailed down the lip of my glass. “Naw.” She’d downed her beer and signaled for another one. “You and me, we’re the ones they fuck with. We’re something else, taking their shit all the time, their goddamn shit all the time.” I’d sipped my wine and rubbed my neck. “You and Jackie fighting then?” “How’d you guess?” In the dim bar’s lighting, her pale eyes looked charcoal, and she had no smile at all. She was wearing the collar of her dark plaid shirt turned up high against the fringe of her short-cropped hair and she kept pushing up at the back of her head until the hair was standing up stiff and spiky. She looked like one of those desperate women sketched out on the cover of an old Ann Bannon novel, lips and eyes swollen and dark, features all raw and flushed. “I should have known better, I really should have, you know?” She poured beer down her throat with a quick dramatic gesture, a Bette Davis move from a great thirties movie. So quick and sudden she moved, it seemed as if the beer never even touched her tongue, as if her thirst were all for the feel of it hitting her stomach, and not to ease the bitterness in her mouth. “I an’t no kid.