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 City of Night (1963)

  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?” “It’s easier to hustle men,” I defended myself quickly, at the same time trying to put him down—but, although that is true on the streets, it had sounded weak and I knew it.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  History, and life too. It might resemble Old England here but it is not anything like the country of four hundred years ago, of one hundred years ago. I am nearly home, now, and I’m sad, and angry, and fired up as hell. I wish that we would not fight for landscapes that remind us of who we think we are. I wish we would fight, instead, for landscapes buzzing and glowing with life in all its variousness. And I am guilty too. I’d wanted to escape history by running to the hawk. Forget the darkness, forget Göring’s hawks, forget death, forget all the things that had been before. But my flight was wrong. Worse than wrong. It was dangerous. I must fight, always, against forgetting , I thought. And I wish I had run after that couple and explained about the deer . I wish I had stood there in the mud in the rain, waving one hand with a hawk on the other , shouting about history and blood. Later that night I find my father’s plane-spotting diaries at the bottom of his bookshelves: six hardbacked, cloth-spined exercise books. I pull one out at random. 1956. He was sixteen. The pages are divided into columns, headed with careful, inked capitals: TIME. NUMBER OF PLANES. TYPE OF PLANE. REMARKS. REGISTRATION NUMBER . I look at the first column. On the twenty-fifth of April he starts watching at 9.40 a.m. and leaves at 7 p.m. On the twenty-sixth he starts at 9 and ends at 9 p.m. Twelve hours of looking up at the sky. Good God . There are hundreds of pages and thousands upon thousands of aircraft here. Vickers V70 Viscounts, F-86 Sabres, Airspeed Ambassadors, Lockheed Super Constellations, Gloster Meteors. Here’s his report of a visit to Croydon Airport at the end of May. ‘Eight de Havilland Tiger Moths. Two Auster Aiglet trainers. Two Taylorcraft Plus Ds. One Auster 5. Three De Havilland 104 Doves.’ I have no idea what these planes are. I find a glued-in snapshot of a Tupolev Tu 104. He has written a few lines underneath: ‘This aircraft is undoubtedly a civil conversion of the Type 39 Badger but the Russians said it was a completely new aircraft.’ It has all the burning pedantry I remember from my childhood obsession with hawks. Suddenly my father seems very close. Another photograph falls out. I pick it up. De Havilland 104 Dove, Croydon Airport, 2–4–56 . I cross-check the registration number against the list. G–AMYO. Morton Air Services . The edge of the runway is lost in mist. I can see a tiny profile inside the cockpit, the suggestion of a man leaning forward to wipe the canopy before the plane climbs into the grey April sky.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  But I was quite wrong about her. Whether I were in her paradise or not, she wouldn’t have noticed; and it was not her mother she hoped to see there, nor even Eleanor Marx, nor even Karl Marx. It was another person altogether that she had in mind - but it was not until a few weeks later, one evening in the autumn of that year, that I found out who. I had begun, as I have said, to accompany Florence on her visits for the Guild, and on this night I found myself in the home of a seamstress at Mile End. It was a terribly poor home: there was no furniture, hardly, in the woman’s rooms, only a couple of mattresses, a threadbare rug, and one rickety table and chair. In the chamber that passed for a parlour, a tea-chest was upturned and had the remains of a sad little supper on it: a crust of bread, a bit of dripping in a jar, and a cup half-full of bluish milk. The dinner-table was all covered with the paraphernalia of the woman’s trade - with folded garments and tissue wrappers, with pins and cotton reels and needles. The needles, she said, were always dropping on the floor, and the children were always stepping on them; her baby had recently put a pin in his mouth, and the pin had stuck in his palate and almost choked him. I listened to her story, and then watched while Florence spoke to her about the Women’s Guild, and about the seamstresses’ union it had established. Would she come to a meeting? Florence asked. The woman shook her head, and said she didn’t have the time; that she had no one to mind the children; that she was frightened that the masters at the outfitters for whom she worked would hear about it, and stop her shillings. ‘Besides that, miss,’ she said at last, ‘my husband wouldn’t care for me to go. Not but what he ain’t a union man himself; but he don’t think much of women having a say in all that stuff. He says there ain’t the need for it.’ ‘But what do you think, Mrs Fryer? Don’t you think the women’s union a good thing? Wouldn’t you like to see things changed - see the masters made to pay you more, and work you kinder?’ Mrs Fryer rubbed her eyes. ‘They would drop me, miss, that’s all, and find a gal to do it cheaper. There are plenty of ’em - plenty gals what envy me even my poor few shillings...’ The discussion went on, until at last the woman grew fidgety, and said she thanked us, but couldn’t spare the time to hear us any longer. Florence shrugged. ‘Think on it a bit, won’t you?

• From Educated (2018)

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

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  History, and life too. It might resemble Old England here but it is not anything like the country of four hundred years ago, of one hundred years ago. I am nearly home, now, and I’m sad, and angry, and fired up as hell. I wish that we would not fight for landscapes that remind us of who we think we are. I wish we would fight, instead, for landscapes buzzing and glowing with life in all its variousness. And I am guilty too. I’d wanted to escape history by running to the hawk. Forget the darkness, forget Göring’s hawks, forget death, forget all the things that had been before. But my flight was wrong. Worse than wrong. It was dangerous. I must fight, always, against forgetting, I thought. And I wish I had run after that couple and explained about the deer. I wish I had stood there in the mud in the rain, waving one hand with a hawk on the other, shouting about history and blood. Later that night I find my father’s plane-spotting diaries at the bottom of his bookshelves: six hardbacked, cloth-spined exercise books. I pull one out at random. 1956. He was sixteen. The pages are divided into columns, headed with careful, inked capitals: TIME. NUMBER OF PLANES. TYPE OF PLANE. REMARKS. REGISTRATION NUMBER. I look at the first column. On the twenty-fifth of April he starts watching at 9.40 a.m. and leaves at 7 p.m. On the twenty-sixth he starts at 9 and ends at 9 p.m. Twelve hours of looking up at the sky. Good God. There are hundreds of pages and thousands upon thousands of aircraft here. Vickers V70 Viscounts, F-86 Sabres, Airspeed Ambassadors, Lockheed Super Constellations, Gloster Meteors. Here’s his report of a visit to Croydon Airport at the end of May. ‘Eight de Havilland Tiger Moths. Two Auster Aiglet trainers. Two Taylorcraft Plus Ds. One Auster 5. Three De Havilland 104 Doves.’ I have no idea what these planes are. I find a glued-in snapshot of a Tupolev Tu 104. He has written a few lines underneath: ‘This aircraft is undoubtedly a civil conversion of the Type 39 Badger but the Russians said it was a completely new aircraft.’ It has all the burning pedantry I remember from my childhood obsession with hawks. Suddenly my father seems very close. Another photograph falls out. I pick it up. De Havilland 104 Dove, Croydon Airport, 2–4–56. I cross-check the registration number against the list. G–AMYO. Morton Air Services. The edge of the runway is lost in mist. I can see a tiny profile inside the cockpit, the suggestion of a man leaning forward to wipe the canopy before the plane climbs into the grey April sky.

• From City of Night (1963)

  She fixed her eyes stonily on the deserted gray bar. At first, I had thought she hadnt recognized me; now she calls me by my name. “What happened to that kid?” she asked me. Interrupting my narration of the fight before I could get beyond the girl’s goading of her boyfriend, Sylvia shook her head wearily as if she had already heard too much. “I know the girl youre talking about,” she said. “Shes always trying to make others prove something—but shes really trying to prove it to herself.” And I think of Barbara, perhaps still somewhere in the maze of downtown Los Angeles.... Sylvia said: “I’ll take that knife from that kid, if hes still got it—he probably doesnt even know how to use it.” She shook her head again in bewilderment. “You should have taken it from him when you first knew he had it,” she said, as if I had failed in some established duty. “All of you—” she started, compelled to approach a certain dangerous subject which, barely neared, must be avoided. She was silent. I felt uncomfortable with her right now—mysteriously guilty, blame-ridden, as if I had done something to her. “Is this your bar too?” I asked her, only to fill the powerful silence. “Yes,” she answered. “It’s been closed for quite a while, though—it was too far from the Quarter. I bought that other one instead. The Rocking Times.” She added the name with deep sarcasm. “Hell, I couldve sold this place, many times. But I prefer to keep it—for a while anyway.” Like a person prepared to fight even before a hostile situation exists, she added defensively, abruptly belligerently. “Yeah, sure, this was a hustling bar too: hustlers! queens! butch homosexuals! Everything!” She pronounced each word with bravado, like a child who must prove he can use dirty words; and, as with that child, each word had sounded unconvincing. “What else?” she challenged, as if I had been questioning her. “When those bars swing, they make a lot of money, I guess,” I said clumsily, still trying to ease some of the strain I felt with her. She flashed a ferocious look at me. In the gray darkness, I could almost feel her eyes burning on my face. Predictably, she relented, changing the subject. “Usually, by this time,” she was telling me, “Im already at the bar. But what the hell? Everyone whos there now will be there later—or theyll come back.” “You know everyone who goes there?” “I see everyone,” she said. “And I know most of the regulars—the ones who stay here all year. It’s mainly during Mardi Gras that the gay scene really changes in this city.... I hate that word, ‘gay’—‘queer’ too, even more,” she said quickly. I remember the man on the beach, that afternoon in Santa Monica, with whom I had sat on the sand watching that bird Escape into the sky.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I’d seen signs over the last week or so. The season was turning. A bluebottle in the garden; torpid purple crocuses on the lawn. Dots of cherry blossom falling outside the walls of St John’s. And one evening last week, a host of blackbirds carrolling into the deepening sky from perches all over the city’s gable ends and Gothic spires. Spring was coming. And usually I’d rejoice at the curious bluish tint to the air and the lengthening days. But spring will mean no more Mabel. She’ll be moulting in an aviary. I shan’t see her for months. My heart hurts thinking of it. So I wasn’t thinking of it; I’d ignored the flowers and the flies. And that was part of the problem. For something was stirring in Mabel’s accipitrine heart, and perhaps it was spring. I had an hour to fly her today. I’d some freelance teaching in town that afternoon, and I knew I was cutting it fine. So I decided to head back to the old field where the rabbits are. We’ll catch a rabbit , I thought, then I’ll drop her back at the house, pick up the teaching material, and run down the road to teach it. What could possibly go wrong? Everything. She flies a rabbit half-heartedly, lights upon a hedge-line and looks about. When I call her back she takes a while to return. The warning signs are there already, but I’m ignoring them. One more flight, I tell myself. But what Mabel is doing is revelling in the weight of the sun on her back, and in the little intimations that warm air is rising into this steady, grey-blue sky. She courses another rabbit, and sails onward, away from me, pitching high up in chestnut trees, and now I realise she’s losing all interest in me. I kick myself. After the last debacle here, I swore I’d be more careful. The trees are above a road; there’s an unsettling proximity of moving cars and trucks and tractors: she doesn’t want to be here any more. She crosses the road into a belt of trees and gravelled drives. I follow her. Rabbits break all around me and the PRIVATE: KEEP OUT signs. She ignores them. And me. She’s taken stand in a tree a good twenty-five feet above me, and looks out at the prospect all around. I’m waving my glove and whistling, but this is a lost cause. She fluffs her tummy and shakes her tail: a goshawk’s signs of happiness and contentment. But on an inaccessible branch, with the seconds ticking past, these lovely signs of relaxation and calm bring a sinking feeling. And I realise I failed to bring my telephone. Or my cigarettes.

• From City of Night (1963)

  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. She glides through the bar now, easily, past the bunched groups; nodding to the others—not aloofly, but, rather, as if she herself is aware of the unreality of her person; and they stare at her in a kind of bewildered awe. She moves like fog, as if some invisible wind is carrying her along toward Sylvia. Now, closely, I can see the queen’s haunting green eyes. And I feel a great sadness because of the doom so inexorably stamped on that beautiful face. “How do you feel now, Kathy?” Sylvia asked her softly. “Oh, Im always all right,” Kathy answered. Even her voice has a quality of unreality. “Im fine.... Sylvia, what time is it, honey?” Without looking at her watch, Sylvia said: “It’s five o’clock.” But I knew it was much later. “I dont mean what time. Did I say that? I mean what day?” Sylvia answered. She reached out to touch the queen, but she brought her hand quickly back. “That late in the week?” Kathy sighs. “That early,” Sylvia laughed unconvincingly. “Oh, well,” Kathy said indifferently. The smile hasnt left her face. “Youre new in the Quarter, arent you, baby?” she asked me. “I dont come out very often any more.” She seemed to be looking through me, as if everyone within the span of her vision is as unreal as she herself. “New people all the time, some come back, some never do.” She asked Sylvia, “Is Jocko back in town yet?” “Yes. He was here earlier.” “Good,” said Kathy. “I like him.... What time did you say it is?” she asked again, vaguely. Sylvia answered, this time correctly. But Kathy seemed not to have noticed the difference. “Excuse me,” she breathed—and she disappeared as unreally as she had appeared. “Shes beautiful,” I said.

• From City of Night (1963)

  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. I watch the skinny man now talking to Skipper. And I see the damning smile on the fatman’s face as he motions them over. As Skipper walks toward us with the skinny man, I notice immediately that Skipper is already drunk; he stumbles, curses. His eyes are smoldering with the hinted awareness of tonight.... “Hi, jack,” he says to me. “Hi cholly,” he says to the fatman. This is Skipper’s way of putting a score down. The world is divided into “jacks”—of which he is one—and “chollys.”

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Remembering. I put my hand out, drag the tips of my fingers down her teardrop-splashed front. The new feathers she will grow will be barred stone-grey and white. The tones of earth and ochre will disappear. Her eyes, when I see her next, will be the deep orange of glowing coals. Everything changes. Everything moves. I lift my hand, cast her towards the nearest perch. She flies, lands, shakes her tail, sees a branch above her and leaps upon it. She’s facing away from me. ‘I’ll miss you,’ I say. No answer can come, and there is nothing to explain. I turn and walk out of the door, leaving the hawk behind. Tony is waiting outside, his eyes crinkled into a smile. ‘Come inside the house,’ he says. He knows what I am feeling. And in I go, where the dogs lie flat on the kitchen floor, tails wagging, and the kettle is whistling, and the house is very warm. Postscript I needed to find out more about White to write this book. So I spent a week in the Harry Ransom Center, the Texas archive where T. H. White’s papers and journals are kept. Reading about muddy English winters while sitting in an air-conditioned library was a very strange experience; outside, vultures soared on tilted wings through ninety-degree heat and grackles hopped on the burning sidewalks. I turned pages, sifted through manuscripts, read through the books he had owned, returned home with stacks of notes and thoughts. But they did not seem enough. There was something else to be done. So one hot July day I drove across England to Stowe. It’s still a school, but its grounds are open to the public. I parked my car in the National Trust car park, paid my entrance fee, clutched a map, and walked up the long lane to the gate. ‘Turn left for the best views,’ the man at the sentry box said. I turned right out of sheer contrariness and set off on my quest, the vast Palladian palace bright on the horizon, everything under metallic sunlight that made the lime-leaves black and the lakewater a deep, painful blue. Water lilies glowed on it in thick constellations. Ink-black shadows underpinned the parkland trees. Swifts pushed through air so thick they hardly beat their wings against the breeze. These were the grounds of the school where White had taught, landscape gardens that had drawn tourists for hundreds of years. After an hour of walking past temples with fluted columns and painted doors, cupolas, obelisks, porticoes and follies, I started to freak out. Nothing made any sense. Greek Temples, Roman Temples, Saxon gods on runic plinths starred with orange lichen. A vast Gothic Temple in rouged ironstone. Palladian bridges, tufa grottoes and Doric arches.

• From Educated (2018)

  Dad didn’t leave his bed for two months unless one of my brothers was carrying him. He peed in a bottle, and the enemas continued. Even after it became clear that he would live, we had no idea what kind of life it would be. All we could do was wait, and soon it felt as though everything we did was just another form of waiting—waiting to feed him, waiting to change his bandages. Waiting to see how much of our father would grow back. It was difficult to imagine a man like Dad—proud, strong, physical— permanently impaired. I wondered how he would adjust if Mother were forever cutting his food for him; if he could live a happy life if he wasn’t able to grasp a hammer. So much had been lost. But mixed in with the sadness, I also felt hope. Dad had always been a hard man—a man who knew the truth on every subject and wasn’t interested in what anybody else had to say. We listened to him, never the other way around: when he was not speaking, he required silence. The explosion transformed him from lecturer to observer. Speaking was difficult for him, because of the constant pain but also because his throat was burned. So he watched, he listened. He lay, hour after hour, day after day, his eyes alert, his mouth shut.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I tie the swivel to the creance and lower her to the ground – she jumps to the grass crab-wise and looks up at me, hunched and baleful – then I put a scrap of food on my glove, raise it high in the air, and she flies vertically up to eat it. Then we do it again. And again. High-jumping like this is an old falconer’s way of manning and muscling-up a hawk in relatively enclosed spaces; it’s good exercise for the hawk and fun to do. It is also hard to do: Mabel is frighteningly fast. It is far from my walks with the hawk along twilit streets. There is something of the street performance about it, and it brings in the crowds. They stand, tonight, in a loose semi-circle twenty feet away. A mother crouches by her child, pointing at the hawk. ‘Isn’t it regal?’ she breathes. Mabel is far from regal; she’s gulping down bits of day-old chick with strange choking squeals. Next to the mother and child is a bus driver on his way to the depot, two hooded teenagers, and a girl taking pictures on her mobile phone. But they don’t bother me, because I’m concentrating on this. Grass, glove. Grass, glove. Grass, glove, grass . The rhythm becomes a heartbeat. The crowds recede. Then I come down with a fever . The sickness defeats all purpose, all purchase on the hawk. I feed her on the sofa, put her back on her perch and watch her drift into the place where goshawks go when they’ve eaten. It is very far away. I wave my hand in front of her face. She appears not to see it at all. Her eyes seem as remote from thought or emotion as a metal dish or a patch of sky. What is she thinking? What is she seeing? I wonder . I shut my eyes and guess. Blood, I am sure. Smoke, branches, wet feathers. Snow. Pine needles. More blood. I shiver . And the days pass and the fever continues. The rain continues. It dampens the house. Wide parchment stains bleed across the wall in the hall and front room. The house smells of stagnant water in the coal-cellar , hawk mutes, and dust. Nothing is moving, nothing improving, nothing heading anywhere. I am packing up boxes to leave, still not knowing where I’d live when the house was gone. In a fit of bitter misery I make a fort out of an old cardboard wardrobe box in the spare room upstairs and crawl inside. It is dark. No one can see me. No one knows where I am. It is safe here . I curl up in the box to hide. Even in my state of sickness I know this is more than a little strange.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Then she crouches, waiting for me to throw them to her again. It is as good as it gets. When I told Stuart I played catch with her for a while he didn’t believe me. You don’t play with goshawks. It’s not what people do. But I have had to, to somehow leaven the chill. Because other people with goshawks have people too. For them their goshawks are their little splinter of wildness, their balance to domesticity; out in the woods with the hawk, other falconers get in touch with their solitudinous, bloody souls. But then they come home and have dinner, watch TV, play with their kids, sleep with their partner, wake, make tea, go to work. You need both sides, as they say. I don’t have both sides. I only have wildness. And I don’t need wildness any more. I’m not stifled by domesticity. I have none. There is no need, right now, to feel close to a fetch of dark northern woods, a creature with baleful eyes and death in her foot. Human hands are for holding other hands. Human arms are for holding other humans close. They’re not for breaking the necks of rabbits, pulling loops of viscera out onto leaf-litter while the hawk dips her head to drink blood from her quarry’s chest cavity. I watch all these things going on and my heart is salt. Everything is stuck in an eternal present. The rabbit stops breathing; the hawk eats; leaves fall; clouds pass overhead. A car drives past the field, and there are people in it, held securely on their way somewhere, wrapped in life like a warm coat. Tyre sounds recede. A heron bows overhead. I watch the goshawk snip, tear and wrench flesh from the rabbit’s foreleg. I feel sorry for the rabbit. Rabbit was born, grew up in the field, ate dandelions and grass, scratched his jaw with his feet, hopped about. Had baby rabbits of his own. Rabbit didn’t know what lonely was; he lived in a warren. And rabbit is now just a carefully packed assemblage of different kinds of food for a hawk who spends her evenings watching television on the living-room floor . Everything is so damn mysterious. Another car passes. Faces turn to watch me crouched with rabbit and hawk. I feel like a tableau at a roadside shrine. But I’m not sure what the shrine is for. I’m a roadside phenomenon. I am death to community. I am missing the point. There is a point? White said that training a hawk was like psychoanalysis. He said that training a goshawk was like training a person that was not a human, but a hawk. Now I see that I am more of a rabbit than a hawk. Living with a goshawk is like worshipping an iceberg, or an expanse of sliprock chilled by a January wind.

• From City of Night (1963)

  She is really a boy-elephant But he has such A Special Appeal—such Graceful Talents—as Im sure youll agree—” (Applause! —and the elephant is persuaded by the trainer to bow his great head in thanks.) “—that we think it would be a shame to waste them. And so, Folks, a Great Big Hand for Miss Pinky—the graceful boy-elephant!”... I see Dave stare solemnly at the elephant being led off the small arena, the flowered hat perched crookedly over one ear.... “It’s sad—that great big male elephant painted pink—and that hat on his head,” Dave said. Suddenly Im frighteningly moved by this youngman beside me. I feel that impotent helplessness that comes when, through some perhaps casual remark, I see a person nakedly, sadly, pitifully revealed—as I see Dave now. We were both silent as we drove to his apartment. Along the hall of that building, a door is open. Two youngmen had moved in—and the mother of one, Dave had told me earlier, had come to visit them, staying there with them, aware that her son and the other youngman were lovers. Through the open door as we passed it, I heard the voice of one, whining peevishly: “Mommee! listen to what Duane is saying to me!”... I cringed visibly. Dave noticed this. “They fight all the time,” he told me. “Duane thinks Rick is making it with other guys—and Rick’s mother always takes Rick’s side.” Inside the apartment, Dave said unexpectedly: “It sure is great to be with you!” He put his hand fondly on my shoulder, letting it rest there—the first time he had touched me even this intimately since that first night For a long moment, I didnt move, feeling his hand increasingly heavier.... I ierked away from him. The words erupted out of me: “Maybe so—but it’s all stopping!” Even when I saw the look of amazement on his face, even when I wanted to stop, even when I felt that compassion, tenderness, closeness to this youngman—even then, I knew, as much for me as for him, that I had to go on; that although, inside, I was cringing at my own words, in hammerblows I have to destroy this friendship. “I mean—well—Ive spent too much time with you—thats all.” And crazily through it all, I keep thinking about the pink elephant at the park — the ridiculous flowered hat! — the sad eyes!... And the echoing, petulant, girlish “Mommee!” that had emerged from the half-open door along the hallway.... “Im sorry, Dave,” I said at the door, which I was opening now, to clinch the Escape, to get myself away from him. “Im sorry,” I repeated, “but this scene is nowhere!” Outside in the hall, I close the door behind me. I pause for a moment, not knowing why. Then I walked out of the building quickly. Im back in Santa Monica, alone, facing the wind-tossed ocean. SOMEONE: People Dont Have Wings I HAD SEEN HIM ON THE BEACH several times before. He never wore trunks.

• From City of Night (1963)

  (And I remember my own longing to watch Heaven, punctured, spilling down to earth....) Now Chuck catches sight of a man standing before us, looking in our direction. “That is a cool score, man—I know him. You wanna score off im (I am feelin too tired myself)—or you wanna hear the rest of the story?” “The story,” I said, feeling, suddenly, a great closeness to him—and at the same time a huge, undefined sadness. And he seemed childishly pleased by the decision, as he continues: “An we’re in that bar jes drinkin up that beer, an Ma keeps sayin, This is what your Pa wouldda done—an dammit to hell I aim to do it for him an do it right!’... We split that bar, an the sun was going down—all red an crazy an everything—like it gets in the South.” He squinted at the hazy feeble Los Angeles sun—and again he seemed to be looking beyond it: to the memory perhaps of another—brighter—sun. “An then—get this—then Ma points to this house, an she says: ‘Cat-house.’ Thats what she said, an she says: ‘Thats where you are gonna go next, youngman.’ Hell, man, I’d been there before with my brother. In fack—but Ma didn know this—there was this real cute whoor there—she wasnt no young chick, exactly, but she looked real nice in bed—an man, she throwed a mean screw. She said she would not charge me nothin—cause I was bettern a truck-driver. An thats what she said, man—an that is the truth. She said, Them others, they are work; you are dayoff.” He said this not with the vanity, the bragging of the male exhibiting his masculinity, but with the pride of a child who has gotten an A in school and can prove it with his report card. “So, when I come outta that house, Ma’s waitin on me. She says: ‘Okay?’ I said: ‘Fine, Ma, fine.’...” He looks down at the Tattoo. “Oh, yeah, The Tattoo,” he remembers. “So we go get more juice. ‘Im gonna teach you right,’ she keeps tellin me. We’re wobblin aroun the town like a couple of drunk buddies—but Ma, like I say, she knowed everyone, an everyone figures we’re jes cuttin up some.” He chuckled. “Ma fall in a ditch, starts cussin up a mammy-screwin storm!—” and now he throws back his head laughing “—an she says shes gonna sue the city, she sprained her ankle or somethin—says shes gotta rest till the pain goes.... But I knowed she is jes high, that is all.” The score in front of us moves away, toward a youngman in an army shirt who has just strayed into the park. The youngman, recognizing the man as a score, let his hand dangle suggestively between his legs to attract the score more quickly.

• From Educated (2018)

  looked something between homeless and on vacation. The sun warmed the water; Luke began to shift uncomfortably. I returned to the chest freezer but there was no more ice, just a dozen bags of frozen vegetables, so I dumped them in. The result was a muddy soup with bits of peas and carrots. Dad wandered home sometime after this, I couldn’t say how long, a gaunt, defeated look on his face. Quiet now, Luke was resting, or as near to resting as he could be standing up. Dad wheeled the bin into the shade because, despite the hat, Luke’s hands and arms had turned red with sunburn. Dad said the best thing to do was leave the leg where it was until Mother came home. Mother’s car appeared on the highway around six. I met her halfway up the hill and told her what had happened. She rushed to Luke and said she needed to see the leg, so he lifted it out, dripping. The plastic bag clung to the wound. Mother didn’t want to tear the fragile tissue, so she cut the bag away slowly, carefully, until the leg was visible. There was very little blood and even fewer blisters, as both require skin and Luke didn’t have much. Mother’s face turned a grayish yellow, but she was calm. She closed her eyes and crossed her fingers, then asked aloud whether the wound was infected. Click click click. “You were lucky this time, Tara,” she said. “But what were you thinking, putting a burn into a garbage can?” Dad carried Luke inside and Mother fetched her scalpel. It took her and Dad most of the evening to cut away the dead flesh. Luke tried not to scream, but when they pried up and stretched bits of his skin, trying to see where the dead flesh ended and the living began, he exhaled in great gusts and tears slid from his eyes. Mother dressed the leg in mullein and comfrey salve, her own recipe. She was good with burns—they were a specialty of hers—but I could tell she was worried. She said she’d never seen one as bad as Luke’s. She didn’t know what would happen. — MOTHER AND I STAYED by Luke’s bed that first night. He barely slept, he was so delirious with fever and pain. For the fever we put ice on his face and

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  This one - for all its charms - will hardly do for very long. I shall ask Mrs Hooper to send to an outfitters.’I buttoned my trousers and drew the braces over my arms. ‘I have other costumes,’ I said, ‘at home.’‘But you would rather have new ones.’I frowned. ‘Of course, but - I must fetch my things. I cannot leave them all unsorted.’‘I could send a boy for them.’I pulled on my jacket. ‘I owe my landlady a month in rent.’‘I shall send her the money. How much shall I send? A Pound? Two pounds?’I didn’t answer. Her words had made me understand anew the enormity of the change that was come upon me; and I thought, for the first time, of the visit I should have to make, to Mrs Milne and Gracie. I could hardly shirk my duty there by sending a boy, with a letter and a coin - could I? I knew I could not.‘I must go myself,’ I said at last. ‘I should like, you know, to say good-bye to my friends.’She raised an eyebrow: ‘As you wish. I shall have Shilling bring the carriage round, this afternoon.’‘I could just as easily catch a tram ...’‘I shall send for Shilling.’ She came to me, and set my guardsman’s cap upon my head, and brushed my scarlet shoulders. ‘I think it very naughty of you, to want to go from me at all. I must be sure, at least, of having you come swiftly back!’ My visit to Green Street was every bit as dreary as I knew it must be. I could not bear, somehow, for the brougham to draw up at Mrs Milne’s front door, so I asked Mr Shilling - Diana’s taciturn driver - to drop me at Percy Circus and wait for me there. When I let myself in with my house-key, therefore, it was as if I had just returned from a shopping expedition or a stroll, as I did most days; there was nothing but the length of my absence from them to hint to Mrs Milne and Gracie of my awful change of fortune. I closed the door very softly; still, Grace’s sharp ears must have caught the sound, for I heard her - she was in the parlour - give a cry of ‘Nance!’, and the next moment she had come lolloping down the stairs and had me in a fierce, neck-breaking embrace.

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

  will act, it gradually assumed the character of a fixed custom and ordinance of the church. Respecting the length of the season much difference prevailed, until Gregory I. (590–604) fixed the Wednesday of the sixth week before Easter, Ash Wednesday as it is called,735 as the beginning of it. On this day the priests and the people sprinkled themselves with dust and ashes, in token of their perishableness and their repentance, with the words: "Remember, O man, that dust thou art, and unto dust thou must return; repent, that thou mayest inherit eternal life." During Quadragesima criminal trials and criminal punishments, weddings, and sensual amusements were forbidden; solemn, earnest silence was imposed upon public and private life; and works of devotion, penances and charity were multiplied. Yet much hypocrisy was practised in the fasting; the rich compensating with exquisite dainties the absence of forbidden meats. Chrysostom and Augustine are found already lamenting this abuse. During the days preceding the beginning of Lent, the populace gave themselves up to unrestrained merriment, and this abuse afterward became legitimized in all Catholic countries, especially in Italy (flourishing most in Rome, Venice, and Cologne), in the Carnival.736 The six Sundays of Lent are called Quadragesima prima, secunda, and so on to sexta. They are also named after the initial words of the introit in the mass for the day: Invocabit (Ps. xci. 15), Reminiscere, (Ps. xxv. 6), Oculi (Ps. xxxiv. 15), Laetare (Is. lxvi. 10), Judica (Ps. xliii. 1), Palmarum (from Matt. xxi. 8). The three Sundays preceding Quadragesima are called respectively Estomihi (from Ps. xxxi. 2) or Quinquagesima (i.e., Dominica quinquagesimae diei, viz., before Easter), Sexagesima, and Septuagesima; which are, however, inaccurate designations. These three Sundays were regarded as preparatory to the Lenten season proper. In the larger cities it became customary to preach daily during the Quadragesimal fast; and the usage of daily Lenten sermons (Quadragesimales, or sermones Quadragesimales) has maintained itself in the Roman church to this day. The Quadragesimal fast culminates in the Great, or Silent, or Holy Week,737 which is especially devoted to the commemoration of the passion and death of Jesus, and is distinguished by daily public worship, rigid fasting, and deep silence. This week, again, has its prominent days. First Palm Sunday,738 which has been, in the East since the fourth century, in the West since the sixth, observed in memory of the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem for His enthronement on the cross. Next follows Maundy Thursday,739 in commemoration of the institution of the Holy Supper, which on this day was observed in the evening, and was usually connected with a love feast, and also with feet-washing.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  And again. High-jumping like this is an old falconer’s way of manning and muscling-up a hawk in relatively enclosed spaces; it’s good exercise for the hawk and fun to do. It is also hard to do: Mabel is frighteningly fast. It is far from my walks with the hawk along twilit streets. There is something of the street performance about it, and it brings in the crowds. They stand, tonight, in a loose semi-circle twenty feet away. A mother crouches by her child, pointing at the hawk. ‘Isn’t it regal?’ she breathes. Mabel is far from regal; she’s gulping down bits of day-old chick with strange choking squeals. Next to the mother and child is a bus driver on his way to the depot, two hooded teenagers, and a girl taking pictures on her mobile phone. But they don’t bother me, because I’m concentrating on this. Grass, glove. Grass, glove. Grass, glove, grass. The rhythm becomes a heartbeat. The crowds recede. Then I come down with a fever. The sickness defeats all purpose, all purchase on the hawk. I feed her on the sofa, put her back on her perch and watch her drift into the place where goshawks go when they’ve eaten. It is very far away. I wave my hand in front of her face. She appears not to see it at all. Her eyes seem as remote from thought or emotion as a metal dish or a patch of sky. What is she thinking? What is she seeing? I wonder. I shut my eyes and guess. Blood, I am sure. Smoke, branches, wet feathers. Snow. Pine needles. More blood. I shiver. And the days pass and the fever continues. The rain continues. It dampens the house. Wide parchment stains bleed across the wall in the hall and front room. The house smells of stagnant water in the coal- cellar, hawk mutes, and dust. Nothing is moving, nothing improving, nothing heading anywhere. I am packing up boxes to leave, still not knowing where I’d live when the house was gone. In a fit of bitter misery I make a fort out of an old cardboard wardrobe box in the spare room upstairs and crawl inside. It is dark. No one can see me. No one knows where I am. It is safe here. I curl up in the box to hide. Even in my state of sickness I know this is more than a little strange. I am not going mad, I tell myself. I’m ill. That is all. 17 Heat The days of rain are followed by heat and insomnia and white nights that go on for ever. Outside at three in the morning a woman is calling ‘William! William!’, over and over again in a hoarse, stagey whisper.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I told her you’ll be coming to see us, but - well - she’s that stubborn.’ ‘Stubborn?’ I said, as if amazed. ‘Not our Gracie?’ I took a step towards her and reached out a hand. With something like a yelp she thrust me away, and shuffled to the furthest end of the sofa, her head all the time kept at its stiff, unnatural angle. She had never shown me such displeasure before; when I spoke to her next it was with real feeling. ‘Ah, now don’t be like that, Gracie, please. Won’t you give me a word, or a kiss, before I go? Won’t you shake hands with me, even? I shall miss you, so; and I should hate us to part on bad terms, after all our fun together.’ And I went on in this fashion, half entreating, half reproachful, until Mrs Milne rose and touched my shoulder, and said quietly, ‘Best leave her, Nance, and be on your way. You come back and see her another day; she’ll’ve come round by then, I don’t doubt it.’ So I had to leave, in the end, without Grace’s good-bye kiss. Her mother accompanied me to the front door, where we stood awkwardly before the Light of the World and the blue effeminate idol, she with her arms folded over her bosom, me hung with bags, and still clad in my scarlet duds. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs M, that this has been so sudden,’ I tried; but she hushed me. ‘Never mind, dear. You must go your own way.’ She was too kind to be stern for long. I said that I had left my room in order; that I would send her my address (I never did, I never did!); and lastly that she was the best landlady in the city, and that if her next girl did not appreciate her I would make it my business to find out why. She smiled in earnest then, and we hugged. Yet, as we drew apart, I could sense that something was troubling her; and as I stood on the step for my final farewell, she spoke. ‘Nance,’ she said, ‘don’t mind me asking, but - this friend: it is a girl, ain’t it?’ I snorted. ‘Oh, Mrs Milne! Did you really think - ? Did you really think that I would - ?’ That I would set up house with a man, was what she meant: me, with my trousers and my barbered hair! She blushed. ‘I just thought,’ she said. ‘A girl can get herself hooked up by a feller, these days, quicker’n that. And what with you moving out so sudden, I was half convinced you’d let some gentleman or other make you a pile of promises. I should’ve known better.’