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 Filthy Animals (2021)

  The last time that he’d spoken to Sophie was at the end of the summer. They were sleeping in his bed, her body tight to his. The fan drew the heavy air through the window, animated it slightly, and cooled their skin. They slept naked on top of his thin sheet. Sophie’s hair writhed in the fan’s breeze, and he lay there, watching her sleep. He had sensed a distancing between them for a couple of weeks, ever since they had seen Charles at the bonfire that night after the concert in the park. Sophie left Alek’s lap to speak to Charles, and he had been forced to watch it all unfurl. Charles, thick, as if cut from the side of a mountain. Charles with his decent but unremarkable technique. Charles with his curls and handsome face—he and Sophie had gone around together for as long as Alek had known them both, but Sophie had surprised him by letting him kiss her the night after the cough began. Sophie had let him put his hand on her lower back and draw her to him, had let him feel so much bigger for it, in control of both of their bodies. It was like partnering, how one only appears to surrender to the illusion of grace. And then he’d thought, perhaps, that she liked him enough, that he was enough for her. That she and Charles were done. They made small dinners. They spoke together in low voices outside the practice hall. They held hands in the casual, easy way that comes to people in relationships. Alek had begun to imagine a lifetime of such minor joys, small intimacies, which were all he could manage. They would be dancers and in love. But when she left him by the fire to stand next to Charles, he had known that the thing between them, for all its easiness and the joy it brought him, would end. And so for weeks he had watched her recede. Watched her from the back of morning exercises, from the back of the library as she looked over old choreography. Watched her over dinner and coffee, even watched her buy cigarettes from the corner store, waiting for her to turn to him and smile and shrug. Waiting and watching. The last time he spoke to Sophie was some morning, when she was putting on her clothes and tying up her hair, shrugging. He watched the expanse of her back vanish into her shirt, and she turned, kissed his palm, and said she would call him later. But she didn’t. • • •

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  anger, and saying: “If thou art lord of the city for whose name was so great strife among the gods, and whence all knowledge sparkles, avenge thee of those daring arms which embraced our daughter, O Pisistratus.” And the lord seemed to me kindly and gently to answer her with placid mien: “What shall we do to him who desires ill to us, if he who loveth us is condemned by us?” Then saw I people, kindled with the fire of anger, slaying a youth with stones, 7 and ever crying out loudly to each other: “Kill, kill!” And him saw I sinking towards the ground, because of death, which already was weighing him down, but of his eyes ever made he gates unto heaven, praying to the high Lord in such torture, with that look which unlocks pity, that he would forgive his persecutors. When my soul returned outwardly to the things which are true outside it, I recognized my not false errors. 8 My Leader, who could see me acting like a man who frees himself from sleep, said: “What aileth thee that thou canst not control thyself, but art come more than half a league, veiling thine eyes, and with staggering legs, after the manner of him whom wine or sleep overcomes?” “O sweet Father mine, if thou listen to me, I will tell thee,” said I, “what appeared to me when my legs were thus taken from me.” And he: “If thou hadst a hundred masks upon thy face, thy thoughts, however slight, would not be hidden from me. What thou sawest was in order that thou have no excuse from opening thy heart to the waters of peace, which are poured from the eternal fount. I asked not: ‘What aileth thee,’ for that reason which he asks who looks but with the eye that seeth not when senseless the body lies, but I asked to give strength to thy feet; so must the slothful be goaded who are slow to use their waking hour when it returns.” We were journeying on through the evening, straining our eyes forward, as far as we could, against the evening and shining rays; and lo, little by little, a smoke, dark as night, rolling towards us, nor any room was there to escape from it. This reft us of sight and the pure air. 1. The Zodiac, which is improperly described as a sphere (instead of a zone or great circle on the sphere), is compared to a skipping child, because in the course of the day its extremities on the horizon play up and down, and the semi-circle above the horizon is now all north of the equator, now all south, and now crossing it from north to south, or from south to north. At the equinox a quarter of it crosses the eastern horizon between sunrise and nine o’clock. Dante tells us, therefore, that, at the moment of which he is speaking, a quarter of it had to cross the western horizon before sunset, i.e. it was three o’clock in the afternoon (here, in Italy, it was midnight, for Roman time is nine hours later than Purgatory time, and there it was Vespers, or 3 P.M.; see Canto iii, note 1). 2. The representations of the Mount of Purgatory given in the editions of the Commedia usually depict the poets as having circled the whole mountain in the course of their journey. But this is erroneous. They circle only the northern or sunny side, from east to west. Here, towards the close of the day, they are travelling almost due west, and are almost at the northern point of the mountain. 3. “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy” (Matt. v. 7).—The words Rejoice thou that over contest are variously referred to Matt. v. 12; Rom. xii, 21; or Rev. ii. 7. 4. See the preceding canto. 5. Mary’s words to the child Jesus, after he had “tarried behind in Jerusalem, and Joseph and his mother knew not of it.” See Luke ii. 43-50. 6. Pisistratus Atheniensium tyrannus [ca. 605-527 B.C.], cum adolescens quidam, amore filiæ ejus virginis accensus, in publico obvian sibi factam osculatus esset, hortante uxore, ut ab eo capitale supplicium sumeret, respondit: “Si eos, qui nos amant, interficimus, quid his faciemus, quibus odio sumus?” (Valerius Maximus, Fact. et dict. mem. vi). Allusion is made to the strife between Minerva and Neptune, as to which of them should name the city of Athens (see Ovid, Metam. vi). 7. The stoning of Stephen (Acts vii. 54-60). 8. Dante recognized that the scenes which had passed before him were merely visions (errors), though visions of events that had actually occurred in times gone by (therefore, not false).

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  When I was little, I used to curl up in the black-and-white-striped armchair in our living room with a thick book. Sometimes I would read but, often, I just held the book in my lap as a signal to passersby to let me be while my imagination roved. I treasured these moments of quiet. I grew into them, stretching out my girl mind into the implausible and absurd. I love my quiet. I hate how, in the after, my quiet has become silence. The room in my chest that was sky-lit has become a sealed and padded cell. 12. B., Somewhere in this essay is a love letter to you. Your love brought me back to my quiet. I needed a new language. I needed a new story—one where I don’t have to remember the beginning and don’t know the end. This is a love letter to our love, which was never the kind of durable love that built itself around errands and taxes. It was all our bodies and your brilliance, your language and where our language trailed off together into something dark and shimmering—like the sea, like the mud, like the shape of my imagination when I clutched a book for its world and its heft, like the Nashville summer nights when lightning bugs gifted their tiny glow, unjarred. All halo, all fleeting. 13. Judith Butler says that we suffer from our condition of addressability. My body feels like my condition, and everything feels like an address. 14. I look for them everywhere, women like me. And they find me, too. A teacher in my high school tells me, crying: “It happened to me, almost thirty years ago,” as I wonder whether three decades will sediment any of this for me. They are in the newspaper where the truth of their testimony is prodded: “The victim claimed . . .” “She believes . . .” They are on the other end of the rape and sexual assault hotline I volunteer with in college. We sit next to each other on the bus. We recognize each other, or we don’t. My beautiful friend in graduate school says to me, “I sit down, and I just lose time.” “I know,” I say. 15. In my notebook, I write, Create: there are parts of you even you can’t give away. 16.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  When a good part of the day was past, so that 1 was not able to endure any longer, they took off my harness, and tied me to the manger; but although my bones were weary, and that I needed to refresh myself with rest and provender, being utterly dead with hunger, yet I was so curious and anxious also, that I did greatly delight to behold the horrible fashion of the baker's mill, in so much that I could not eat nor drink while I looked on, although there was food in plenty. O good Lord, what a sort of poor slaves were there; some had their skin bruised all over black and blue, some had their backs striped with lashes and were but covered rather than clothed with torn rags, some had their members only hidden by a narrow cloth, all wore such ragged clouts that you might perceive through them all their naked bodies, some were marked and burned in the fore- head with hot irons, some had their hair half clipped, some had shackles on their legs, ugly and evil favoured, some could scarce see, their eyes and faces were so black and dim with smoke, their eye- lids all cankered with the darkness of that reeking 419 LUCIUS APULEIUS qui pulvisculo perspersi dimicant, farinulenta cinere 13 sordide candidati. Iam de meo iumentario contu- bernio quid vel ad quem modum memorem? Quales illi muli senes vel cantherii debiles! Circa praesepium capita demersi contruncabant moles palearum, cer- viees cariosa vulnerum putredine follicantes, nares lan- guidas assiduo pulsu tussedinis hiulci, pectora copulae sparteae tritura continua exulcerati, costas perpetua castigatione ossium tenus renudati, ungulas multivia cireumcursione in enorme vestigium porrecti totum- que corium veterno atque scabiosa macie exasperati. Talis familiae funestum mihi etiam metuens exem- plum veterisque Lucii fortunam recordatus et ad ultimam salutis metam detrusus summisso capite maerebam. Nec ullum uspiam cruciabilis vitae sola- cium aderat, nisi quod ingenita mihi curiositate re- ereabar dum praesentiam meam parvi facientes libere quae volunt omnes et agunt et loquuntur. Nec im- merito priscae poeticae divinus auctor apud Graios summae. prudentiae virum monstrare cupiens mul- tarum civitatum obitu et variorum populorum cognitu summas adeptum virtutes cecinit : nam et ipse gratas gratias asino meo memini, quod me suo celatum tegmine variisque fortunis exercitatum, etsi minus 14 prudentem, multiscium reddidit, Fabulam denique 490 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK IX

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Marta clenched, both from the news that Peter’s mother was ill and from the fact that he missed her. Peter’s mother, Irina, had always been so kind to Marta. She was well into her eighties, but she had the spry energy of a seventy-year-old. She spoke with a sluggish Russian accent, and liked to finish off her sentences with a khorosho!, which had endeared her to Marta. All through the three years she had dated Peter, Irina had sent her cards for her birthday and Christmas. More than once she’d sent her a little gift, too, something small and delicate, intricately carved from bone or stone so that they resembled small teeth. She had reminded Marta of her own grandmother, a benevolent Finnish woman of robust health who had fallen dead at the age of ninety-nine with all the unfussy ease that had seen her through her whole life, through famine and fury and the unassailable tide of history. “Oh, no. I’m sorry, Peter,” Marta said. “That’s awful, just awful.” “She really loves you, you know. She thinks the world of you.” “I care for her, too,” Marta said. “And for me?” Peter said wryly, but perhaps also seriously. Marta shook her head gently. “Peter, you know that’s done. You know that, right?” “I do,” he said. “I’m seeing someone.” “And even if you weren’t,” she started to say, but stopped herself. “That’s wonderful.” “Her name’s Katya. You know my mom always wanted me to marry a Russian.” “I’m sure she just wants you to be happy,” Marta said. “I bet she only wants you to be happy.” “I am. Now I am. I am happy now.” “I’m glad to hear that,” Marta said. “And you? Are you happy? Are you seeing someone?” If there was one thing that Marta resented, it was how those questions seemed to flow together: Are you happy or are you alone? “It’s possible to be happy and alone,” she said to Peter and to herself, to the voice inside her. “I get that, but you should have someone. You deserve happiness.” Marta turned to him and nodded. “Thank you, Peter.” The leaves had turned bright orange and gold. All along her street, the trees were beautiful, which meant that they were getting ready to shed their leaves. She wanted to say something about that to Peter, about Irina and how the trees grew more beautiful just as they seemed to die for the season, and how that was a sign of life. Only living things got to die, after all. She had not understood that before, but now she did, and she wanted to say some of it to Peter, hoping he’d say it to Irina. That dying meant you had lived. “Well, I better go,” he said. “All right,” Marta said. Peter did not move to get out of the car.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Rather, the images and characters all formulate varying states of isolation, loss, obsession, and ecstasy which generalize H.H.’s consuming passion; the concluding “co-ordinate,” after all, places in their midst the author, butterfly net firmly in hand. tinkling sounds … Lycaeides sublivens Nabokov : the final “co-ordinates” form a most interesting progression. The last “nerve of the novel” is in fact outside the novel and extends from the lepidopterist to the nympholept, who almost seem to pass one another on the same trail. H.H. also experiences a most pleasing unity of sounds coming from a valley town ( here ); and the butterfly in question was captured by Nabokov near Dolores, Colorado (see Dolores and Dolores, Colo. ). Nabokov commented: “This Coloradian member of the subgenus Lycaeides (which I now place in the genus Plebejus , a grouping corresponding exactly in scope to my former concept of Plebejinae ) was described by me as a subspecies of Tutt’s ‘ argyrognomon ’ (now known as idas L.), but is, in my present opinion, a distinct species.” See John Ray, Jr. . My private tragedy … my natural idiom : the narrator of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (Nabokov’s first novel in English) says something very similar about Knight: I know, I know as definitely as I know we had the same father, I know Sebastian’s Russian was better and more natural to him than his English. I quite believe that by not speaking Russian for five years he may have forced himself into thinking he had forgotten it. But a language is a live physical thing which cannot be so easily dismissed. It should moreover be remembered that five years before his first book—that is, at the time he left Russia,—his English was as thin as mine. I have improved mine artificially years later (by dint of hard study abroad); he tried to let his thrive naturally in its own surroundings. It did thrive wonderfully but still I maintain that had he started to write in Russian, those particular linguistic throes would have been spared him. Let me add that I have in my possession a letter written by him not long before his death. And that short letter is couched in a Russian purer and richer than his English ever was, no matter what beauty of expression he attained in his books. [pp. 82–83]. Nabokov’s “private tragedy” is our concern, for in varying degrees it involves us all. Nabokov’s search for the language adequate to Lolita is H.H.’s search for the language that will reach Lolita; and it is a representative search, a heightened emblem of all of our attempts to communicate. “ ‘A penny for your thoughts,’ I said, and she stretched out her palm at once .”

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Meakin Armstrong, who published a version of “Anne of Cleves” in Guernica. Sarah Lyn Rogers, who published a version of “What Made Them Made You” as “Grace” at The Rumpus . ABOUT THE AUTHOR Brandon Taylor is the author of the acclaimed novel Real Life , which has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Iowa, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in fiction. What’s next on your reading list? Discover your next great read! Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author. Sign up now. _140348931_ LITTLE BEAST Sylvia has blown up her life. She slices potatoes into screaming hot water and chants, “Take it back, take it back, take it back.” Out in the living room: regular thudding. She has agreed to let the twins have fries for lunch if they are quiet and good while they color. The boy’s whine trails each of the thuds. She’s been played. Sylvia drains the hot water, and then plunges the sliced potatoes into an ice bath. The water numbs her fingers and wrists. Starch turns the water hazy, and the potatoes go slick like something hauled out of the sea. When her hands turn white, she pours off the cold water and blots the potatoes dry. Then she rubs them down with salt and garlic butter she made herself. And into the oven. She feels productive, virtuous. Her reward is to close her eyes for just a moment. She dips into the brief dark of her eyelids, feels that woozy elation like holding her breath and letting it go. She drifts, sways. She considers, not for the first time this week, Hammond, the breakup. The doomed trip they took up to see her mother last month, how they’d they fought all the way there and back. The farm had done nothing to ease their splintering. All they’d done was move the location of the argument, not defuse the argument itself. Then she’d left him and that was that. But now, standing in the kitchen, she considers the permanence of that choice and how easy it had been to make in the end. So swift. Like a bolt of lightning. There and gone, but behind it an acrid, burning trail. But before she can conjure sufficient self-pity, something pulls at her shirt like she’s been caught on a nail or stray corner. She cracks her eyes open and sees the girl, who’s got the hem of Sylvia’s shirt gripped tight. Sylvia smiles at first. The desperate tension of the girl’s grip sends a little thrill through Sylvia’s stomach.

• From Escape (2007)

  The next morning we found not only candy canes and fruit in our stockings but a present under the tree. My father let us have candy once a year—no more. My mother was clearly disobeying our father in giving us sugary treats. And she let us eat them before we had our breakfast! Linda and I were old enough to realize that Mama was going to have to pay for her disobedience, but we loved feeling so spoiled. We had pancakes for breakfast and then went to the house of Mama’s friend, who’d also given her children a Christmas. These children told us Santa Claus had brought them presents, but we said ours came from Mama. My father came home the next night. I went to sleep listening to them fighting and screaming. The next morning, our Christmas tree was gone. Mama was crying when she fixed us breakfast. When we finished eating, Linda and I went outside to play and saw the Christmas tree lying under the house, stripped of its glittery lights. My mother was a beautiful person when she was happy. She glowed with delight and laughter the night we put up the tree. During these good times, Mother carried herself with poise and elegance and realized that she was a woman worthy of love. In Salt Lake City, we had been very happy and Mother was engaged in the world around her. In Colorado City, she was locked into a world of constant pregnancies, a loveless marriage, and a rural community strung together with dirt roads. My father criticized her constantly. The house was never clean enough, her children never well-mannered enough. Even after her babies, Mother was still thin, but my father felt she wasn’t thin enough. Mother sank into a deep depression after our first and last Christmas. She stayed in bed all day and stopped cleaning the house and doing the laundry. After a few days, the friend who had been her Christmas co-conspirator came over and told her to stop feeling bad about herself. If her husband didn’t want her to have fun with her kids, that was his problem. Mother rallied, but she never again did something with us in defiance of our religion. I did notice that she became more demanding of us and insisted on more perfection after the Christmas episode. I’m sure she would have preferred to play games with us instead of spanking us, but her own mental slavery prevented her from being who she was.

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  Now, on weekends, malehustlers—thumbs held out in varying personal styles—stand at virtually every parking meter along the newly thriving thoroughfare, sometimes so busy now you have to walk for blocks to find a place for yourself. Cars drive around the blocks slowly, choosing. This new style has the advantage that you're there legally—hitchhiking, not “loitering” (though cops have already begun their jealous harassment). The disadvantage is that you often get a ride from someone who doesn't know, or more often pretends not to know, that the hitchhikers are hustlers—a situation that has given rise to a breed of men who get off simply on giving hustlers a ride. You will see the same hustler a few minutes later hitchhiking back to the first turf—two small islands at the end of a stretch of a mile-and-a-half of street. In summer especially, the heavy influx of drifters creates a sad spectacle. Goodlooking anxious youngmen—a whole spectrum, from the slender and blond to the tough and dark—wait eagerly, even signaling cars on slow nights, buyers' nights—eager youngmen being driven up and down the same street and hoping for a firm connection for the night. And another change, this one internal—call it the subtle stirring of the radicalization of the malehustling contingent. Existing on the fringes of the gay world, male hustlers have always been dual outsiders, outlaws from the main society, and outcasts within the main gay world of hostile non-payers and non-sellers. Desired abundantly, and envied, they are nonetheless the least cared about. Routine mass roundups of hustlers occur with no outcry, virtually no manifestation of concern within the vast gay world—while a comparable gay roundup anywhere else will see mushrooming conferences called by ever-ready gay “spokesmen” before television cameras. An attorney points out that, compared to non-commercial gays, a disproportionate number of arrested hustlers will actually be jailed—because few can afford to pay for representation—hustlers are easy spenders, living from day to day—and because hustler arrests bring no free publicity for the lawyer who might defend them. Still, during a gay parade on Hollywood Boulevard, groups of malehustlers of a breed notorious for their posture that they are not gay—“just hustling for bread”—cheered marching contingents of open homosexuals. When three hustlers were arrested for popping firecrackers near invading cops, a pressurized anger stirred palpably among the others. That very night on Selma, a group of girls sped by in a car and yelled, “Queers! Queers!” at the masculine, toughlooking hustlers milling about on the streets. Only a few years earlier that breed would have answered with a ball-wounded, “Come back and I'll show you who's queer!” Not that night. There was an almost total indifference. One of the most masculine of the streethustlers southern-drawled at the shouting women: “Yeah, we queer, so what?”

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  I pull back in panic. I know what he's going to ask, he's already verbalizing it: “How old are you?” I lie outrageously—but even the fake age makes him react—in implied admiration, yes, of my street survival, but his reaction wounds anyway, deeply: “Wow!—and you still got a good hustle.” He's congratulating my survival, perhaps even envying it a tiny bit: For him at that age, what? “Am I dressed okay?” he asks me abruptly, nervously opening his shirt an extra button. “I mean, I'm not making it like I used to. I've been hanging around three hours today—and nothing!” I'm still wounded by his question, his reaction—the specter of age is floating under the street light. But I feel wounded for him, too. I have my body cunningly constructed for street survival, and I have options—but he, at nineteen or twenty, the freshness of his youth is already tarnished. He's a thin, no-longer-boy. Exploited? Oh, yes, unquestionably. Just as later tonight he may exploit; he may rob and beat up the next man who picks him up, or—but this is less likely—be robbed and beaten up himself. Most probably, both will make a bargain and go through with it. And the influx will continue, the new faces and young bodies fresh among the straining older ones; an influx created at least in part—and hypocritically—by grotesquely bloated cop reports issued periodically and aimed, despite disclaimers, at making all homosexuals look like rich predators luring innocent youths. Because: A twelve-year-old boy can earn up to $1000 a day as a prostitute, a recent, incredibly absurd cop report—front-paged rashly without questioning by Los Angeles newspapers—claimed (imagine!— a new upper-class!—aging rock stars and twelve-year-old male prostitutes in Gucci gear!); a report issued in the wake of a sex scandal involving underage scout girls and cops and in the face of threats to cut the vice division's budget. A thousand dollars a day, hustling!

• From Escape (2007)

  In the prophet’s eyes, Linda was now useless to him. But Alma was on the other side of the religious split. If Linda married this boy and managed to convert him to Uncle Roy’s side, it could be worthwhile. There had been several marriages already where women were given to men on the other side of the split in hopes of converting the men. If one of the women converted instead, her family condemned her and considered her as dead. But the door was always open to her return. She could renounce her marriage and win back her salvation if she came home and let the prophet assign her to another man. The boy and his father were subsequently called into Uncle Roy’s office. The prophet told Alma he wanted him to marry Linda. The boy’s father refused because his son was seventeen and had yet to finish high school. But Alma did not want to lose the prophet’s blessing. (I think he realized that Linda could think for herself and that he risked losing her by waiting.) Linda had fled the community to avoid marriage, and now she was being forced to marry someone to remain free. Poor Linda was exhausted. There was monumental pressure on her to marry Alma. It wasn’t what she wanted to do, but it would put an end to the crisis. The hunt would be called off. She could maintain a relationship with our family, but she would not have to move back to Colorado City. It felt like the best of bad options. Even though she agreed to do what the prophet asked of her, Linda’s marriage was still viewed as a marriage of rebellion. She had thwarted the prophet’s will by not marrying “the good man” he wanted to choose for her. Linda and Alma would have to have a civil marriage, and then a year later they would be eligible for a priesthood marriage by Uncle Roy. Dad told me I could go to Salt Lake City and be part of Linda’s wedding. This was the first time I had seen her since her escape. We had no time alone and were never able to talk. Linda looked like she’d been run over and was too tired to keep fighting. I thought she looked scared. It was hard for me to see that there had been anything positive for her in the escape. I didn’t know how she would survive in the outside world. Linda was married at the courthouse. My mother and father were there, as was Alma’s mother. His father refused to come since he opposed the marriage. Linda wore a simple white wedding dress. The ceremony felt more like a disgrace than a celebration. Linda seemed so unhappy. My father could barely hide his disgust for her. He made it clear that for him, this felt like the lesser of two evils.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Their eyes were pale blue. He fed them from a plastic bag, lifting chunk after chunk until they were all gone, and the goats, brushing his palms with their tongues, nipping at his fingertips, gave up on him. Off they wandered to find food elsewhere. At the kitchen table, Simon sat with his skinny legs crossed, reading the paper. Hartjes came in through the side door (the front door had been bolted for as long as Hartjes had known him). Simon did not look up. He was a tall man, very pale, with thinning white-blond hair. He was just shy of middle age, a little under forty. Hartjes was younger, twenty-five. Two years before, they had met at a party, as people do, and they had fucked three times on three separate occasions, each a little worse, not to any degree that would have made any of the individual incidents awful, but when taken together they represented a doomed enterprise. A year earlier, after the last time they’d had sex, Hartjes said it would be best if they were just friends, and Simon said, “Sure, okay, sure.” But it was clear even then that Simon expected that Hartjes would change his mind, and sometimes he grew irritated that it was taking so long. “It’s getting warmer,” Hartjes said after he had washed his hands and sat down with a glass of water. “So it is,” Simon said from behind the paper. “And the river’s thawed,” Hartjes said. “So it is.” “And then I decided to kill myself,” Hartjes said. “So do it,” Simon said, not letting Hartjes have the satisfaction. “Some friend.” “I can get you a rope.” “Only if you cut me down after,” Hartjes said, putting his head on the table, which smelled like ground pepper and flour. “Har-dee-har-har.” Hartjes looked up and saw Simon watching him and beyond Simon into the front hall, where the stairs ran up to the second floor. There were pears in a bowl on the table. Hartjes put his cheek against his forearm and gazed out the window over the sink, into the tall pine trees and the gathering dusk. The kitchen was warm. The goats had come around the house and were trotting around the backyard, Guy and Bertram chasing two of the fatter hens. Simon lifted a cigarette from the ashtray and lit it. “I just hate the spring,” he said. “Well, with luck, we’ll all freeze to death long before then,” Simon said, knitting the paper together and apart. “What are you reading about over there?” “War, famine, misery, and two for one at the co-op.” Hartjes felt little kick in his gut. “What’s two for one at the co-op?” “Apples,” Simon said, lowering the paper so that Hartjes could see his expression. “They charged me full price!” “Racists.” “It’s probably about class,” Hartjes said grimly. “Oh, it’s about class, is it? I was raised poor, don’t you know.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  clay that you will work with, slowly transforming your very weaknesses into strengths. You do not run away from your flaws but rather see them as a true source of power. Look at the career of the actress Joan Crawford (1908–1977). Her earliest years would seem to mark her as someone extremely unlikely to make it in life. She never knew her father, who abandoned the family shortly after her birth. She grew up in poverty. Her mother actively disliked Joan and constantly beat her. As a child she learned that the stepfather she adored was not really her father, and shortly thereafter he too abandoned the family. Her childhood was an endless series of punishments, betrayals, and abandonments, which scarred her for life. As she began her career as a film actress at a very young age, she examined herself and her flaws with ruthless objectivity: she was hypersensitive and fragile; she had a lot of pain and sadness she could not get rid of or disguise; she wanted desperately to be loved; she had a continual need for a father figure. Such insecurities could easily be the death of someone in a place as ruthless as Hollywood. Instead, through much introspection and work, she managed to transform these very weaknesses into the pillars of her highly successful career. She decided, for instance, to bring her own feelings of sadness and betrayal into all of the different roles she played, making women around the world identify with her; she was unlike so many of the other actresses, who were so falsely cheerful and superficial. She directed her desperate need to be loved toward the camera itself, and audiences could feel it. The film directors became father figures whom she adored and treated with extreme respect. And her most pronounced quality, her hypersensitivity, she turned outward instead of inward. She developed intensely fine antennae tuned to the likes and dislikes of the directors she worked with. Without looking at them or hearing a word they said, she could sense their displeasure with her acting, ask the right questions, and quickly incorporate their criticisms. She was a director’s dream. She coupled all of this with her fierce willpower, forging a career that spanned over forty years, something unheard of for an actress in Hollywood. This is the alchemy that you must use on yourself. If you are a hyperperfectionist who likes to control everything, you must redirect this energy into some productive work instead of using it on people. Your attention to detail and high standards are a positive, if you channel them correctly. If you are a pleaser, you have developed courtier skills and real charm. If you can see the source of this trait, you can control the compulsive and defensive aspect of it and use it as a genuine social skill that can bring you great power. If you are highly sensitive and prone to take things personally, you can work to

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  She tried to be severe. I knew she wasn’t angry, but I also knew she would become angry if I did not produce some mimicry of remorse, so I hung my head and declared that I would certainly think twice before letting myself be goaded into another fight. “You better tell Dad,” Pearl said to my mother. My mother nodded wearily. “You can tell him,” she said. She and Dwight weren’t getting along. They hadn’t gotten along since the night they returned from their honeymoon in Vancouver, two days early, silent and grim, not even looking at each other as they carried the suitcases into the house and down the hall to Dwight’s room. That night Dwight sat up drinking and went to sleep on the sofa. He did this often, sometimes three or four nights in a row, weekends especially. I was always the first one up on Saturday and Sunday because the papers came in early on those days, and when I got up I usually found Dwight asleep on the sofa, a test pattern hissing on the TV. For the first few weeks my mother was utterly cast down. She slept late, something she had never done before, and when I came home for lunch I sometimes found her still in her bathrobe, sitting at the kitchen table and staring dazedly down the bright white tunnel of the house. I had never seen my mother give up. I hadn’t even known the possibility existed, but now I knew, and it gave me pause. It made me feel for a little while the truth that everything good in my life could be lost, that it was all drawn day by day from someone else’s store of hope and will. But my mother got better, and I found other things to think about. She did not give up. Instead, she chose to believe that she could still make a life in Chinook. She joined the PTA and persuaded the head of the rifle club to admit her as a member. She took a part-time job waitressing in the bachelors’ mess hall. She filled the house with plants, mothered Pearl, and insisted that all of us spend time together like a real family. And so we did. But our failure was ordained, because the real family we set out to imitate does not exist in nature; a real family as troubled as ours would never dream of spending time together. Dwight thought that most of these troubles were my fault. And a lot of them were. I screwed up constantly, even when I meant to do well. Every screwup was good for a scene, and this fight I’d gotten into with Arthur Gayle was going to be good for a big one. When the whistle blew at five o’clock Pearl went outside to wait for Dwight. * * * HE CAME STRAIGHT to my room.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  215Lecture 22—The Social Gospel THE SECOND GENERATION õTo trace the work of this second generation, it’s helpful to move from Britain to North America and jump ahead to the late 1800s—a time known to historians as the Gilded Age. õDuring this time, a tiny number of tycoons were incredibly wealthy while masses of farmers and factory workers struggled to get by. New immigrants crowded into city slums with sanitation systems only slightly better than the sewers of the Middle Ages. The threat of violence in the United States and Canada was constant: There were clashes between striking workers and soldiers, confrontations that pitted activists against police, and rampant mob crime in the cities. õIt was in this context that a new generation of socially conscious Christians emerged. Among them was Walter Rauschenbusch, perhaps the most famous American prophet of the Social Gospel. õRauschenbusch grew up near Rochester, NY, as the son of a German preacher. The younger Rauschenbusch grew up steeped in the evangelical pietist tradition. He inherited a sense that the world was full of injustice but might be on the verge of massive change if the Holy Spirit moved in people’s hearts. õAs an adult, Rauschenbusch became a Baptist pastor. He ministered in Hell’s Kitchen in New York City for a time, but the neighborhood’s misery—alcoholism, women forced into prostitution to support themselves, and poverty—led him to leave for Europe in 1891 during a spiritual crisis. 216The History of Christianity II õHe went to Berlin, back to his German roots, and studied the Bible and modern sociology. He got to know religious and secular groups that were working for social change in Europe, particularly the Salvation Army movement. õRauschenbusch met Christian socialists who had worked with Frederick Maurice as well as more secular reformers. He got to know the famous English socialist couple Beatrice and Sidney Webb, and they convinced him that the traditional approach to poverty—relying on private charities and a small public relief system for the so-called deserving poor—was just not enough. õBy the time Rauschenbusch returned to New York in the winter of 1891, he had concluded that traditional Christians obsessed over individual sin but ignored the big picture: institutionalized, “social” sin built into everything from the tax code to the wretched state of public education in much of America.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  He has romantically offered America as the place where they will be able “to lead a quiet life.” H.H. is more specific in matters of geography. The Mérimée phrase “quelque part” mirrors “Quelquepart Island” (Aubrey Beardsley, Quelquepart Island), another “coincidence” that allows the author to reveal his presence at the center of a crucial scene, a verbal plant akin to the appearance of McFate’s “face” in the mirrorlike Ramsdale class list. For Mérimée, see Little Carmen. And we shall live happily ever after: H.H. holds out to Lolita the possibility of a stereotyped fairy-tale ending, even though the tale seems already to have ended in “Elphinstone” (Elphinstone). For more on the fairy tale, see Percy Elphinstone. Carmen ... moi: “Carmen, do you want to come with me?” A quotation from Mérimée; a most dramatic moment at the end of the novella (see also Keys, p. 51). Carmen does go with José, but after they ride off she says that she will never live with him again, and will only follow him to death. A tearful imploration fails, and he kills her. “you got it all wrong ... your incidental Dick, and this awful bole: obscene double entendres on his name and home, which may have been missed by speed-readers. More subtle is H.H.’s use of one last colloquialism, “got,” as though this common touch would help him communicate with Lolita. Her adult coarseness is telescoped by the “bucks” and “honey” here. mon petit cadeau: French; my little gift, the little something. His “4000 bucks” in 1952 meant a great deal more than in today’s money. “For some odd reason,” said Nabokov, “this paragraph, top of p. 279, is the most pathetic in the whole book; stings the canthus, or should sting it.” fly to Jupiter: they are going to Juneau, but to H.H. it might as well be the planet. Jupiter is veiled by haze, and Lolita dies in “Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest” (see Gray Star). Carmencita ... -je: “my little Carmen [in Spanish], I asked her”; another quotation from Mérimée. fool thing a reader ... suppose: especially a consumer of pulp fiction and movies, or a learned reader who has kept Carmen in mind. The several Carmen allusions on nearby pages serve as very fresh bait. See Little Carmen. See also Keys, p. 52. my American ... dead love: “One of the few real, lyrical, heartfelt outbursts on H.H.’s part,” said Nabokov. CHAPTER 30 pulled on ... sweater: H.H. dons Quilty’s fate, as it were. genuflexion lubricity: worshipful lasciviousness or lewdness. he: Quilty. For allusions to him, see Quilty, Clare. shadowgraphs: see shadowgraphs. CHAPTER 31 lithophanic: lithophane is porcelain impressed with figures made distinct by light (e.g., a lampshade).

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  “You have to call him. He’s afraid of you. But you have to call him.” Big Davis drops the bucket on the counter. Braces himself. “You better worry about yourself.” “Call him,” she says. “And say what?” “Tell him the truth. Tell him you love him,” Grace says. “If he doesn’t know that after all this time, that I love him, then that boy is worse off than you.” Grace sinks low in the chair. Enid is blotting her brow. “Well, that we can agree on,” Grace says. “You need rest,” Enid says. “You overdid it.” “She has a room,” Big Davis says. Enid nods at this, loops Grace’s arm over her shoulder, whispers reassuring things to her about strength and patience and balance. Grace feels embarrassed for her, the way she sometimes feels when she can hear Enid praying in the next room in that tiny apartment of hers. Some things you should get to keep to yourself. • • • Grace sits by her room’s wide window, from which she can see the deep green pond. The old forest rimming the property line. The sleepy fields. The house is full of sounds, night music. Enid sleeps in the adjoining room that had belonged to Davis. When they were little, the two of them would spend a portion of each night passing back and forth, leaving small things for each other. Sometimes, Davis pranked her. Or left frogs under her bed. But that night of the picnic all those years ago, when her grandmother had slapped her and locked her in this very room, Davis had come in from his side. Grace was on the ground sobbing, her face hot from her grandmother’s palm. She’d been banging at the door, begging to be let out. It hadn’t even occurred to her that Davis’s side would be open, but when she looked up, there he was. Her brother. He handed her a small kitten. It looked so young that it might not have even been weaned yet. Its fur was soft gray, and it had a pink tint to it. When she asked Davis why he’d brought it to her, he had only shrugged and said he’d grown bored with it, that he’d found it in the woods and played with it until he got tired of it, and he didn’t want a cat, anyway. All that long summer, she carried the kitten around with her, stroking it and petting it and saying that she loved it. Giving the kitten everything she didn’t have. Until her grandmother got sick of seeing her loving up on the kitten and pulled it from her hands and flung it out the back door. She said that girls had no business holding on to things with all them fleas. And cats would make a girl hot, and Grace was already fast enough. She never saw the kitten again.

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  Use it—take the war openly into the streets. As long as they continue to kill us, fuck and suck on every corner! Question their hypocritical, murderous, uptight world.” But I don't say that. Why? Because promiscuity, like the priesthood, requires total commitment and sacrifice. 3:48 P.M. The Restroom by the Pier. J IM STANDS PISSING at the urinal, aware of a man sitting in the open stall at the end of the row. A youngman is lingering before the metallic mirror. Finished, Jim turns, his trunks still open, allowing his cock to remain exposed before the man in the stall. The man licks his lips in signal. The youngman at the mirror advances. Jim moves into the stall and puts his cock in the waiting mouth. The other watches. Jim pulls away, adjusting his clothes hurriedly as they hear footsteps entering the restroom. The silent identification is given in a glance by the new presence, a goodlooking bodybuilder. Jim's hand drops lightly before his own groin; the man who just entered touches it. The youngman who stood at the mirror has moved into the stall with the other. Aware that they may be interrupted at any moment, Jim and the other move into a vacant stall. Open mouths kiss, hands touch trunk-straining groins. The two bodies thrust against each other, oblivious to all danger. Mouths devour tongues; hands pull down trunks, touch hard muscles. Jim feels the other's warm cum on his stomach, and his own cock stretches, bursts, pours out the withheld thick white liquid onto the other's smeared cock. A hostile presence enters the restroom. He is totally unaware of the sex-charged currents. The outlaws separate. Outside, Jim feels a sad joy. The sun and the beach are white now. Sea birds on the sand are clustered in rows facing the ocean. Jim has spoken not a word to anyone today. Not one. MONTAGE: The City MONTAGE: The City L ATE ONE S UNDAY a fire swept acres of forested canyons, threatening the outskirts of the city. At first it was only a cloud on the horizon, like the fog that invades the beaches. But this time the cloud came from inland. It thickened. The lacy white darkened, tinged with gray. It floated across the city toward the ocean as if to connect with the smog. At night the air hung heavy with ashy clouds. The next morning the sun came out hot, a luminous orange as if everything were on fire without flames. An eerie phosphorescence covered Los Angeles. As the afternoon sun attempted powerfully to penetrate the clouds of smoke, the city turned fiercer orange. On the sidewalks, through the patches of palmtree shadows, the glow created pools of frozen fire. As the residents fled dark with ashes, the ravaging flames devoured hilly acres.

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  I stood behind her for about half an hour, and then I went up the back stairs to use the bathroom in my grandmother’s house. I needed to be away from her and done with the impossibly tender act of fanning white gnats from her cropped hair. I stuck my head in the fridge and counted to ten, letting the cool air settle against my face and neck. Two of my young cousins came bounding into the house, laughing. They saw me, waved, and went directly to the back room. I leaned back against the fridge and closed my eyes. The air was so warm, so thick. It was a miserable day for a party. The music was loud—a kind of up-tempo blues—and omnipresent. I looked through the back door down the long stairs and saw my mother surrounded by her sisters and some of our distant cousins. It was familiar to me, this act of looking on from the back stairs. When I was younger, I used to do it all of the time with my cousins when we were banished from the party as the sun went down. “Grown folks only,” our mothers said, shooing us into the house. “Go play.” How strange to be back there. How strange to be watching it all unfold from a distance. I was grown now, wasn’t I? I was old enough to join them, to be among the adults and to bear their burdens. When I was little, all I ever wanted was to be down there dancing with them, laughing and talking to them as equals, and now that I had permission, which is to say that I had grown past the age of needing to ask permission, all I wanted to do was sit in the house and not have to fan bugs from my mother’s hair. I saw someone pick up the small hand towel I had been using. They looked around in confusion. It was my aunt Arleane, the mean one with the waspy hand and stinging pinches. She’d turn me inside out if she caught me. So I took another breath and pushed open the door and descended the stairs. She met me at the bottom with a firm look. “Bathroom,” I said. She popped my thigh with the towel and pointed me back to my mother. “Get,” she said. There is a picture of my mother at this party. She’s flanked by relatives, peace signs up, smiling. It was the first time I realized that death had brought out in her an almost uncanny resemblance to my brother and my grandfather. Someone uploaded this picture to my mother’s Facebook wall, and on the day she died, people streamed in to say how terribly sorry and sad they were that she was gone.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  disguised their faces with vizors, like unto spectres, they departed, and yet for all the great sleep that came upon me, I could in no wise leave eating, and whereas, when I wasa man, I could be contented with one or two loaves at the most, now my guts were so greedy that three panniers full would scarcely serve me ; and while I laboured at this business, the morning came, and being moved by even an ass's shamefastness, I left my food at last (though well I liked it) and at a stream hard by I quenched my thirst. And suddenly after, the thieves returned home careful and heavy, bringing no burdens with them, no not so much as one poor cloke, but with all their swords and strength, yea even with the might of their whole band, only a maiden that seemed by her habit to be some gentlewoman born, 4nd the daughter of some noble of that country, who was so fair and beautiful, that though I were an ass, yet I swear that I had a great affection to her. The virgin lamented and tore her hair, and spoiled her garments for the great sorrow she was in, but the thieves brought her within the cave, and essayed to comfort her in this sort: * Weep not, fair gentle- woman, we pray you, for be you assured that we will do no outrage or violence to your person, but take patience awhile for our profit; for necessity and poor estate hath compelled us to this enterprise : we warrant you that your parents (although they be covetous) from their great store will be contented to give us money enough to redeem and ransc« you, that are their own blood, from our hands." With such flattering words they endeavoured to appease the gentlewoman : howbeit she would in no case be comforted, but put her head between her knees and cried piteously. Then they called the old 179 25 LUCIUS APULEIUS