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 Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  A huge untreated source of such neglect comes from depression, which is estimated to affect 10–12 percent of postpartum moms, yet is similarly harmful when it plagues fathers or other infant caregivers. Widely viewed as a disorder of the positive emotional system, depression smothers the sparks of positivity and positivity resonance like a heavy, wet blanket thrown over a waning campfire. It flattens people’s emotional experiences. Do you know the feeling of the lead apron the dental assistant drapes over you before an X-ray? Well, imagine all your clothes were made of that leaded material. How sluggish would that make you? How unmotivated to move? Your biggest wish when feeling depressed can be just to curl up alone in your bed. Sleep may be the only relief in sight. Now imagine caring for a newborn in this depressed state. Sure, you’d muster up the energy to change diapers and provide necessary feedings. But studies show that what a depressed caregiver does not do well is synchronize. Depression itself slows down your body movements and speech output. For the infant in your care, this translates into less behavioral contingency between the two of you, and less predictability. When synchrony does emerge, odds are it’s laced not with positivity, but negativity—be it anger or indifference. Depression, then, not only impairs your ability to experience and express your own positive emotions but also impairs your ability to connect with the preverbal being in your care. With the two key scaffolds of positivity and connection missing, positivity resonance—so badly needed for both of you—simply can’t emerge. The damages done to the developing child have been duly cataloged by developmental scientists. The list includes long-lasting deficits that can derail kids well into adolescence and beyond, first, in their use of symbols and other early forms of cognitive reasoning that undergird successful academic performance, and next, in their abilities to take other people’s perspectives and empathize, skills vital to developing supportive social relationships. More generally, behavioral synchrony between infant and caregiver sets the stage for children’s development of self-regulation, which gives them tools for controlling and channeling their emotions, attention, and behaviors, tools vital to success in all domains of life.

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

  torii gate with you... She always wrote back right away. She always expressed her undying love. THAT CHRISTMAS, 1964, she returned. This time I picked her up at the airport. On the way to my house she told me that there had been a terrible row before she got on the plane. Her parents forbade her to come. They didn’t approve of me. “My father screamed,” she said. “What did he scream?” I asked. She imitated his voice. “You can’t meet a guy on Mount Fuji who’s going to amount to anything.” I winced. I knew I had two strikes against me, but I didn’t realize climbing Mount Fuji was one of them. What was so bad about climbing Mount Fuji? “How did you get away?” I asked. “My brother. He snuck me out of the house early this morning and drove me to the airport.” I wondered if she really loved me, or just saw me as a chance to rebel. DURING THE DAY, while I was busy working on Blue Ribbon stuff, Sarah would hang out with my mother. At night she and I would go downtown for dinner and drinks. On the weekend we skied Mount Hood. When it was time for her to return home, I was bereft again.Dear Sarah, I miss you. I love you. She wrote back right away. She missed me, too. She loved me, too. Then, with the winter rains, there was a slight cooling in her letters. They were less effusive. Or so I thought. Maybe it’s just my imagination, I told myself. But I had to know. I phoned her. It wasn’t my imagination. She said she’d given it a lot of thought and she wasn’t sure we were right for each other. She wasn’t sure I was sophisticated enough for her. “Sophisticated,” that was the word she used. Before I could protest, before I could negotiate, she hung up. I took out a piece of paper and typed her a long letter, begging her to reconsider. She wrote back right away. No sale. THE NEW SHIPMENT of shoes arrived from Onitsuka. I could hardly bring myself to care. I spent weeks in a fog. I hid in the basement. I hid in the servants’ quarters. I lay on my bed and stared at my blue ribbons. Though I didn’t tell them, my family knew. They didn’t ask for details. They didn’t need them, or want them. Except my sister Jeanne. While I was out one day she went into the servants’ quarters and into my desk and found Sarah’s letters. Later, when I came home and went down to the basement, Jeanne came and found me. She sat on the floor beside me and said she’d read the letters, all of them, carefully, concluding with the final rejection. I looked away. “You’re better off without her,” Jeanne said. My eyes filled with tears. I nodded thanks. Not knowing what to say, I asked Jeanne if she’d like to do some part-time work for Blue Ribbon. I was pretty far behind, and I could sure use some help. “Since you’re so interested in mail,” I said hoarsely, “maybe you’d enjoy doing some secretarial work. Dollar and a half an hour?” She chuckled. And thus my sister became the first-ever employee of Blue Ribbon.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Staring after Jocko, Sylvia said: “That guy’s made it on his muscles long after most of them would be through. He was an acrobat—once. Like everything else, the circus folded. Now he comes here each year to join another kind of circus.... He was the best hustler in New Orleans,” she said, almost proudly, “and he had iron rules he stuck by—thats why everyone liked him: never clipped anyone, treated everyone straight.... Now—well—maybe it’s changed.” Abruptly, as if to stop the wondering about why Jocko had to leave Miami, she said: “After Mardi Gras, this city clamps up. It dies, as if it’s seen too much during the Carnival, and then you can almost feel Lent in the air. You breathe it. It takes over the city. New Orleans goes into mourning. Thats when the plainclothesmen haunt the bars again for vagrants,” she warned. “And thats when Jocko leaves—at midnight. The next Mardi Gras, hes back.... And yet, each year since Ive been here, I wonder if that will be the last one—if he’ll never show up again....” As if now on an invisible trapeze, I thought suddenly. “In a few years he’ll be old,” Sylvia said, “and hes the kind that should stay Young. No brains. Just goodlooks—and an instinctive understanding of so many things. I guess no one can blame him for anything,” she said, as if to herself. “Something—something tossed him out!” she said fiercely. An intense silence. Then: “Maybe it would have been better for him if he’d fallen off the damn trapeze,” she said brutally. I looked at her, at the harsh, saddened face, and I realized how violently, at that moment, she hated the world of this bar she owned. As if she had materialized from the very smoke that clouded the bar, the most beautiful queen I have ever seen appeared. If it hadnt been for her clothes—maleclothes worn to imitate a woman’s—I would have thought her a real woman; and as a woman, she would have been one of the most beautiful, too. In her 20s, with a pale perfectly featured face—the face any woman would have envied on another—she had dark-lidded eyes and long, blond, almost-golden hair, which now is tightly bunched in back to conceal its length. She is lithe, slender. There is a ghostquality about her, perhaps because of the way even the feeble light plays on her hair, so that, appearing almost translucent, she seems incandescent. She surveyed the bar slowly, as if for the first time, with a smile which is unbearably, wistfully sad. In this bar of very real faces—the studied toughness of the malehustlers, the sedulous (but largely unsuccessful to practiced eyes) madeup attempts at femininity of the queens—this youngman, this queen, standing in the midst of it, appears as unreal as an angel: a monument to the utter perversity of her violated sex.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Winters in El Paso for me later would never again seem as bitter cold as they were then. Then I thought of El Paso as the coldest place in the world. We had an old iron stove with a round belly which heated up the whole house; and when we opened the small door to feed it more coal or wood, the glowing pieces inside created a miniature of Hell: the cinders crushed against the edges, smoking.... The metal flues that carried the smoke from the stove to the chimney collapsed occasionally and filled the house with soot. This happened especially during the windy days, and the wind would whoosh grimespecked down the chimney. At night my mother piled coats on us to keep us warm. Later, I would be sent out to ask one of our neighbors for a dime—“until my father comes home from work.” Being the youngest and most soulful looking in the family, then, I was the one who went.... Around that time my father plunged into my life with a vengeance. To expiate some guilt now for what I’ll tell you about him later, I’ll say that that strange, moody, angry man—my father—had once experienced a flashy grandeur in music. At the age of eight he had played a piano concert before the President of Mexico. Years later, still a youngman, he directed a symphony orchestra. Unaccountably, since I never really knew that man, he sank quickly lower and lower, and when I came along, when he was almost 50 years old, he found himself Trapped in the memories of that grandeur and in the reality of a series of jobs teaching music to sadly untalented children; selling pianos, sheet music—and soon even that bastard relationship to the world of music he loved was gone, and he became a caretaker for public parks. Then he worked in a hospital cleaning out trash. ( I remember him, already a defeated old man, getting up before dawn to face the unmusical reality of soiled bloody dressings.) He would cling to stacks and stacks of symphonic music which he had played, orchestrated—still working on them at night, drumming his fingers on the table feverishly: stacks of music now piled in the narrow hallway in that house, completely unwanted by anyone but himself, gathering dust which annoyed us, so that we wanted to put them outside in the leaky aluminum garage: but he clung to those precious dust-piling manuscripts—and to newspaper clippings of his once-glory—clung to them like a dream, now a nightmare.... And somehow I became the reluctant inheritor of his hatred for the world that had coldly knocked him down without even glancing back.

• From City of Night (1963)

  “Im sure, in part, it’s all of these—but not exclusively,” Jeremy went on. “It sounds too much like a defense.... It could be, rather,” he continued slowly, “that theyre resigned to finding nothing but a momentary sex experience. Maybe it isnt that they dont want something more; maybe theyve just given up on finding anything beyond sex, and theyre even afraid to ask, ‘Can I see you again?’ Theyll look for someone else rather than possibly hearing the answer ‘No’—an answer just as frightened perhaps as their own question. So they resign themselves to the brief contacts. Now they look for the people who ‘dont care’.... And the reasons of the people on your side are just as mysterious as those of the ones who pay you... like me,” he added, and went on: “How much of it, for you, is being a part of this alluring defiant world without really joining it?—so you can say (and Im talking about ‘you’ only generally—Im actually talking about many people)—so you can say, ‘I do it only for the money involved’; or: ‘I dont do anything back in bed myself; my masculinity is still intact—and in the meantime I can go with as many men as I—... need ... to’?” Ordinarily, those words would have resounded as the score’s attempt to compensate for his previously indicated desire by questioning the very masculinity which had originally attracted him. Yet, coming from this man—somehow—perhaps because of the fact that hes paid me without that payment having been asked for or agreed upon—his words dont really register as the ordinary put-down after the battlefield of one-sided sex has been cleared by the leveling orgasms. For that reason, those words are doubly disturbing. And it was what Barbara had implied—and the memory of her saddens me beyond the fact that I had liked her so much: that she had tried to prove with me what she had told herself that I, and others, were trying to prove with her.... Yes, it was at least in part a mutual fear that had brought us together. Once again my thoughts had veered into a dangerous territory. To stop their direction—astonishing myself, yet responding commandingly to the burgeoning rashness, I reached impulsively for Jeremy’s hand and placed it on my leg. He left it there, without comment, almost as if he were unaware of my having done it. Or is he too pretending? Has he understood what my motion with his hand is meant to convey, what I was trying to indicate to him—that, at least in that direction, it was I who could make the rules. But he had understood: Whatever pang of victory I might have felt by executing that gesture, he erased swiftly by saying: “Wouldnt your masculinity be compromised much less if you tested your being ‘wanted’ with women instead of men?”

• From The Case for God (2009)

  In the past, theologians found that extended dialogue with atheists helped them to refine their own ideas. An informed atheistic critique should be welcomed, because it can draw our attention to inadequate or idolatrous theological thinking. The written discussion of the atheistic philosopher J. J. C. Smart and his theist colleague J. J. Haldane is a model of courtesy, intellectual acumen, and integrity and shows how valuable such a debate can be—not least in making it clear that it is impossible to settle either the existence or nonexistence of God by rational arguments alone.2 A scientific critique of conventional “beliefs” can also be helpful in revealing the limitations of the literalistic mind-set that is currently blocking understanding. Instead of arguing that an ancient mythos is factual, perhaps it would be better to study the original meaning of the ancient cosmologies and apply it analogically to our own situation. Instead of clinging to a literal reading of the first chapter of Genesis, it could be helpful to face up to the implications of the Darwinian vision of nature “red in tooth and claw.” This could become a meditation on the inescapable suffering of life, make us aware of the inadequacy of any neat theological solution, and give us a new appreciation of the First Noble Truth of Buddhism, “Existence is suffering (dukkha)”—an insight that in nearly all faiths is indispensable for enlightenment.

• From City of Night (1963)

  And still I was sober—despite the maryjane, the pills, the beer, the whiskey; still alertly conscious, feeling at times a parodoxically turbulent calmness, perhaps like the stillness of a stormcloud waiting for a bolt of lightning to release the pent-up rain. Torrents of expectation and alarm rage inside me at the prospect of Mardi Gras, now only two days away. The queens would be bitchy like petulant children to each other that day in the bars because the vice patrol had made them cut their hair, they looked so much like women and thats against the law If Youre Not—and so, Dejectedly, with short hair, they must face The World; and feeling their female stances somewhat compromised—unfairly—by that short, short hair, theyre arguing rhetorically over which queen would have which of us at her pad that night. Betti (who was Benny in Nebraska) said I was her new husband, and Vicki and Salli (Victor and Steve, respectively, in Atlanta) grabbed Sonny and Jocko and said: “Well, honey, these are our husbands.” And as the queens began to dish each other, myself and the two other “husbands” felt ourselves so Goddamned absurdly Masculine—because, remember, queens always say they want Men—and we kept on studiedly digging a cute young girl nearby—because youre supposed to want real girls only... for “love.” But, oh, oh, soon Sonny has drifted away, looking for the two momentarily lost scores hes been going around with; and Jocko left—and Im standing outside on the street. I saw a tiny rag-doll Miss Ange waving at me asking was I looking for A Pad To Sleep? She had short hair. And I began to laugh so uncontrollably, right there on the street, that she swished away in understandable indignation. Suddenly I felt vastly repentant—and very, very sad. Very sad, sitting in the Coffee House at the French Market, sitting thinking strangely obsessively of the lady-tourists dragging their husbands depressingly along Royal Street (Roo Rowyall), hunting for gay antiques and pralines that are Clean, and feeling, myself, Hugely Bitter that they wouldnt give a royal damn if they knew that only minutes earlier the plainclothes had warned me—as they were warning all the others on the streets (the jails being crowded)—if I was still in town, theyd bust me for novisiblelegalmeansofsupport. Sunday. The parades canceled. It snowed today in New Orleans for the first time in more than 20 years, I wrote my mother. A little boy—his features Youngly real in the icy white glare—rushed excitedly into the street from somewhere to gather the mysterious snow, his face turned questioningly to the Sky. And the snow fell in white plumes. Like a million tiny diamonds it covered the cemetery in back of the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe. And everyone, even Us, looked pink and real in the white light. And if it had snowed longer, it might have killed some of the cockroaches. For a few hours, this rotten city was purified. Someone even threw a snowball!

• From City of Night (1963)

  There is a consuming franticness about Skipper which seizes you the moment he begins to talk—the words coming often in gasps—his eyes burning—at times as if about to explode with intensity, at times on the brink of closing, giving up. Constantly, he flexes his body, looking down at it, studying it, as if to make sure it is still intact.... He hangs around in one place only a few minutes; if he doesnt score immediately, he’ll leave, go to another bar; come back—and when he is sitting down, he constantly drums his fingers to the frenzied music—and even when the music is slow, the frantic drumming persists, as though the sounds he hears are coming from within; veiling his eyes—lowered lids—or looking down at the bar—as if he doesn’t want to see too Clearly; creating circles on the surface of the bar with the water from the glass, then erasing them abruptly with his hand.... By midnight, he is usually drunk. After being around him a few times, I began to avoid him; stifled by the knowledge of the sad, sad loss of Youth, of the terrible hints that life, perversely, may make one a caricature of oneself, a wandering persistent ghost of the youngman that was, once—the attitudes of youth lingering after the youth itself was gone, played out With Skipper, this loss was concentrated, emphasized because life had given him nothing but physical beauty, an ephemeral beauty relying on Youth.... That sense of loss had seized me acutely one day when, sitting with him and two scores, I watched him remove from his wallet a set of photographs, about six of them, all of him in different poses, showing him—almost nude, much younger—a glowing youngman of about 20. “Thats me!” he had said, almost challengingly, as he passed the photographs to the two scores. And he carried, too, mysteriously, some frayed clippings, in an envelope, an envelope which, once, I saw him replace with a newer one, with great tenderness: the frayed clippings becoming older and older—the envelope, new. There were hints, in his conversations, of closed doors behind him, doors which had opened temptingly and Slammed! with great finality; hints of painful resignation. Behind the sullen look with which he nailed the people who bought him was the unmistakable awareness that he was on the brink of facing his doom: of facing Death.... And Death for Skipper was the loss of Youth.... The years that would follow the knowledge of his premature death would be played out by him like a ghost.... Watching him rush out of a bar once, Chuck had said: “Man, that stud walks more miles in a day than I do all mammy-screwin week long!” And Darling Dolly Dane had added, sighing deeply: “Yeah, baby, but he always ends up where he started from....” Perhaps realizing this, Skipper constantly veiled his eyes.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Midrash would become a new ritual evoking the divine and would always retain connotations of dedication, emotional involvement, and expectant inquiry. 91 Scientific Religion I n 1610, the English poet John Donne (1572–1631) lamented the state of the world, which he thought was entering its final phase. A deeply conservative man, Donne was a casualty of the Reformation. Born into a devout Catholic family, he had abjured his faith after his brother had died in prison for sheltering a Catholic priest and had become bitterly hostile to the new Catholicism. He was profoundly disturbed by the recent scientific discoveries that seemed wantonly to have destroyed the old cosmic vision of perfection and harmony. These were hard times. Europe was in the throes of economic recession and the social unrest attendant on modernization, and yet in the midst of this confusion, the “new Philosophy” * called “all in doubt.” ‘Tis all in peeces, all cohaerence gone; All just supply, and all Relation. 1 It was as though the universe had suffered a massive earthquake. New stars had been sighted in the firmament, and others had disappeared. The heavens no longer enjoyed their “Sphericall … round proportion embracing all,” and planets were said to wander in “Eccentrique parts” that violated the “pure forme” that men had observed for so long. 2 When these fundamentals had shifted, how could anybody be certain of the truth? Donne was not alone in his pessimism. That same year Henry IV of Navarre, who had seemed the only monarch capable of stemming the tide of denominational violence that was threatening to engulf the whole of Europe, had been assassinated by a Catholic fanatic. This was immediately recognized as a tragic turning point and had the same kind of impact in seventeenth-century Europe as did the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in twentieth-century America. 3 Henry had been determined to contain the religious passions that were becoming murderously divisive in France and had followed a policy of strict neutrality. He had granted civil liberties to French Protestants, and when the parlement expelled the Jesuits, Henry had reinstated them. His death, which shocked moderate Catholics and Protestants alike, sent a grim message: a policy of toleration had been tried but it had failed. By 1600, England was drifting into a civil war and the principalities of Germany were struggling to achieve independence from the Holy Roman Empire and form nation-states. Sweden supported the Protestant princes, and the Austrian Hapsburgs the Catholics. In 1618, this strife escalated into the full-scale Thirty Years’ War, which killed 35 percent of the population of central Europe, which was reduced to a charnel house. Religion was clearly incapable of bringing the warring parties together. The more Roman Catholic zealots gloried in the slaughter of Protestants and the more Protestants exultantly burned Catholic strongholds to the ground, the more people of moderation and goodwill despaired of a solution. But not everybody shared Donne’s misgivings about the “new Philosophy.”

• From The Case for God (2009)

  When they turned their attention to religion, all three were liable to depart from the precision that characterized their discussion of science, so their critique was marred by wild generalizations. When he read Haeckel’s best seller The Riddle of the Universe , the philosopher Friedrich Paulsen said that he burned with shame to think that it had been written by a German scholar in the land of scholarship. 77 Haeckel had, for example, argued that at the Council of Nicaea, the bishops had compiled the New Testament by simply picking the four gospels at random from a pile of forged documents—information he had acquired from an exceptionally scurrilous English pamphlet. He even got the date of Nicaea wrong. When he discussed science, Haeckel was careful, methodical, and accurate; none of these qualities was in evidence when he wrote about religion. Huxley had little time for this polemic, because he understood that no investigation of the physical world could provide evidence for or against God. He thought Draper a bore, Vogt a fool, and utterly despised Büchner’s best-selling Force and Matter , which argued that the universe had no purpose, that everything had derived from a single cell, and that only an idiot could believe in God. Pascal had explained that “the heart has its reasons” for beliefs that were not accessible to our reasoning powers, and this also seems true of late-nineteenth-century unbelief. The proselytizing atheists did not exemplify the precision, objectivity, and impartial examination of the evidence that was now characteristic of the scientific rationalism they glorified. Nevertheless, their emotional diatribes attracted huge crowds. There had always been an intolerant strain in modernity; it had long seemed necessary to abjure recent orthodoxy as a condition for the creation of new truth. Atheism was still a minority passion, but people who nurtured subterranean doubts yet were not ready to let their faith go may have found this passionate critique vicariously cathartic. Others relinquished their faith with sorrow and felt no Promethean defiance, no heady liberation. In “Dover Beach,” the British poet Matthew Arnold (1822–88) heard the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of faith as it receded, bringing “the eternal note of sadness in.” Human beings could only cling to one another for comfort, for the world that once seemed So various, so beautiful, so new , Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light , Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight , Where ignorant armies clash by night. 7 8 At its best, religion had helped people to build within themselves a haven of peace that enabled them to live creatively with the sorrow of life; but during the scientific age, that interiorized security had been exchanged for an unsustainable certainty.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

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

• From City of Night (1963)

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

• From City of Night (1963)

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

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

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

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

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

• From The Case for God (2009)

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

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

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

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

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

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

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

• From City of Night (1963)

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