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 In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  She felt the same when she listened to the choir at Temple B’nai Israel but that was just on the High Holidays, the only time her family attended services, except for seventh grade, when the boys in her class had been bar mitzvahed and every week there was another celebration. Then she’d had to go with her friends to Friday night and Saturday morning services. The parties were lavish affairs at catering halls or places like Chi-Am Chateau. But no matter how thrilling it was to Miri, she couldn’t convince Irene to come to the pageant. Irene said it hurt to hear Miri singing songs about Jesus. Miri explained over and over that the songs didn’t mean anything to her. They were just songs. So what if they were about Jesus? He was a Jew, wasn’t he? They’d had this discussion every year since Miri joined the choir at Hamilton. Every year Irene told her it was against her principles. Why didn’t they celebrate the story of Hanukkah and sing Hanukkah songs, too? Deep inside, Miri knew Irene was right. It was unfair to celebrate only one religion. Still, she continued to march down the aisle singing “Adeste Fideles” in Latin. Natalie’s mother didn’t mind that Natalie was portraying Mary, mother of Jesus, in the Christmas pageant. It’s about acting, Corinne said. Not about believing. If only Miri could convince Irene of that. On the day of the afternoon performance of the pageant, halfway through, something happened onstage, something Miri couldn’t see because the choir was seated in front of the stage, facing the audience, and the pageant was unfolding behind them. A murmur went through the audience, and when Miri turned to see what was going on, Natalie was sobbing. This was not part of the pageant, although the audience didn’t know it yet. Natalie wasn’t supposed to talk or cry or do anything but look holy while cradling the baby Jesus, who was played by a doll swaddled in a blanket. “I hear the babies crying,” Natalie said once, clearly, before she ran offstage. The audience still didn’t get it. They were probably thinking this was some new, hastily added tribute to those who had lost their lives in the crash—until the other Mary, the nighttime Mary, Lois Morano, took Natalie’s place onstage. When Lois picked up the baby Jesus the pageant continued. Miri was both surprised and not surprised. Since the crash Natalie had been acting weird—that business about the buzzing in her head and Ruby talking to her. Natalie could be overly dramatic but she would never give up the chance to be onstage. Miri caught sight of Corinne, rushing out of the auditorium as the choir sang “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” She wondered if she should leave, too, because, after all, she was Natalie’s best friend. But that would be awkward since she was seated smack in the middle of the middle row of the choir.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  ON HER LAST NIGHT in town Natalie rolled over in the twin bed next to Miri’s, propped herself up on an elbow and asked, “Is it true about Mason?” “Is what true?” “That he had another girlfriend?” “Who told you that?” Natalie shrugged. “You can’t trust any of them. Not even after twenty years of marriage. Just ask my mother.” Miri lay on her back, trying to dismiss the pain spreading through her body. “I’m never going to let a boy break my heart,” Natalie said. “Not that friends can’t break your heart, too. And family. You think you can trust them, then you find out you were wrong. That’s all I’m going to say.” She turned away then, leaving Miri awake, tears rolling down her cheeks. — FERN DIDN’T WANT to leave. She wanted to be flower girl at the wedding. “We’re not having that kind of wedding,” Rusty told her. “What kind are you having?” Fern asked. “It will be a very quiet wedding in the rabbi’s study. You won’t be missing anything.” Still, Fern cried. “I want to be your sister,” she told Miri. “I like you better than Natalie.” “Don’t tell that to anyone else, okay?” Miri said. “You mean it’s a secret?” “Not so much a secret as something only the two of us know.” “I wish I could stay here and ride Trigger to school. I don’t want to go back to Mommy. She’s mean. She only cares about good manners.” “Good manners are important.” “Natalie doesn’t have good manners.” “She used to.” “But she doesn’t anymore.” “No, she doesn’t.” Miri went to the airport with them, to say goodbye. Fern wore her appliquéd jacket with the silver wings, a second set of wings still pinned to Roy Rabbit’s

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  tell, if courtesy and valour abide within our city as they were wont, or have gone quite out of it? for Guglielmo Borsiere5—who has been short time in pain with us, and yonder goes with our companions—greatly torments us with his words.’ “The upstart people and the sudden gains, O Florence, have engendered in thee pride and excess, so that thou already weepest thereat.” Thus I cried with face uplifted; and the three, who understood this as an answer, looked at one another as men look when truth is told. “If otherwhile it costs thee so little to satisfy others,” they all replied, “happy thou, if thus thou speakest at thy will! Therefore, if thou escape out of these gloomy regions, and return to see again the beauteous stars; when thou shalt rejoice to say, ‘I was,’6 see that thou speak of us to men.” Then they broke their wheel; and, as they fled, their nimble legs seemed wings. An “Amen” could not have been said so quickly as they vanished: wherefore it please my Master to depart. I followed him; and we had gone but little, when the sound of the water was so near us, that in speaking we should scarce have heard each other. As that river7—which first has a path of its own from Monte Veso toward the east, on the left skirt of the Apennine; which is called Acquacheta above, ere it descends to its low bed, and is vacant of that name at Forlì— resounds from the mountain, there above San Benedetto, in falling at a descent, where for a thousand there should be refuge: thus down from a steep bank we found that tainted water re-echoing, so that in little time it would have stunned the ear. I had a cord girt round me; and with it I thought some time to catch the Leopard of the painted skin.8 After I had quite unloosed it from me, as my Guide commanded me, I held it out to him coiled and wound up. Then he bent himself toward the right side, and threw it, some distance from the edge, down into that steep abyss. “Surely,” said I within myself, “something new must answer this new signal, which my Master thus follows with his eye.” Ah! how cautious ought men to be with those who see not only the deed, but with their sense look through into the thoughts! He said to me: “What I expect will soon come up; and what thy thought dreams of, soon must be discovered to thy view.” Always to that truth which has an air of falsehood, a man should close his lips, so far as he is able, for, though blameless, he incurs reproach; but here keep silent I cannot; and, Reader, I swear to thee, by the notes of this my Comedy—so may they not be void of lasting favour—

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  “I understand,” Frekki said. “I’m meeting him for lunch in L.A. He’s flying down for the day, without Adela or the boys.” She sighed deeply. Miri nodded. “I hear he’s changed his name to Monk.” “Yes.” Was she just finding out? “Well, I can’t say I blame him. Monsky was always a mouthful.” Miri took a bite of grilled chicken and chewed it very slowly. When she’d announced her marriage to Andy, Frekki sent a crystal bowl from Tiffany’s. Mike Monk sent a $100 check. — AT THE PODIUM Miri takes the leather-covered journal from her purse, opens to the first page and signals to Henry, she’s okay. She begins to read into the microphone, glancing over in Mason’s direction just once. His head is bowed. After enough time it fades and you’re grateful. Not that it’s ever completely gone. It’s still there, buried deep, a part of you. The stench is gone from your nostrils now Unless someone leaves the kettle on to boil and forgets about it. The nightmares have tapered out. There are more pressing things to dream about, to worry over, to keep you awake at night. Aging parents, adolescent children, work, money, the state of the world. Life goes on, as our parents promised that winter. Life goes on if you’re one of the lucky ones. But we’re still part of a secret club, One we’d never willingly join, With members who have nothing in common except a time and a place. We’ll always be connected by that winter. Anyone who tells you different is lying. The final speaker is Gaby Wenders. She introduces the boy heroes, especially her hero, Mason McKittrick. Then her husband, Dr. Larsen, her children and grandchildren present a plaque to Mason. The oldest grandchild, maybe five,

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Jerome, uneasy in this company, shook the hand of Choo. It drove Jerome nuts that Levi always assumed that everyone felt as comfortable as Levi did himself in any given situation. Now Levi left Choo and Jerome to stare blankly at each other as he crouched down and gathered up Murdoch in his arms. ‘And this is my little foot soldier. He’s my lieutenant. Murdoch always got my back.’ Levi let the dog lick his face. ‘So, how are you, man?’ ‘Good,’ said Jerome. ‘I’m good. Glad to be home.’ ‘Seen everybody?’ ‘Just saw Mom.’ ‘Cool, cool.’ They were both nodding a lot. Sadness swept over Jerome. They had nothing to say to each other. A five-year age gap between siblings is like a garden that needs constant attention. Even three months apart allows the weeds to grow up between you. ‘So,’ said Jerome, trying weakly to fulfil his mother’s brief, ‘what’s going on with you? Mom said you got lots going on.’ ‘Just . . . you know . . . hanging with my boys – getting things done.’ As usual, Jerome tried to sieve Levi’s elliptical language for any specks of truth concealed within. ‘You all involved in the . . . ?’ said Jerome, motioning to the little table across the way. Behind it two young black men with glasses were handing out leaflets and newspapers. A banner was propped up behind them:    ’  . ‘Me and Choo, yeah – trying to get the voice heard. Representing.’  On Beauty Jerome, who was finding this conversation increasingly irritating, stepped around the other side of Levi so as to get out of earshot of the silent burger-eating men beside him. ‘What did you put in his coffee?’ Jerome joked stiffly to Choo. ‘I couldn’t even get him to vote in his school elections.’ Choo clasped his friend around his shoulders and had the gesture returned. ‘Your brother,’ he said affectionately, ‘thinks of all his brothers. That’s why we love him – he’s our little American mascot. He fights shoulder to shoulder with us for justice.’ ‘I see.’ ‘Take one,’ said Levi, and pulled a double-sided piece of paper printed like a newspaper from his voluminous back pocket. ‘You take this, then,’ said Jerome, handing him the Herald in return. ‘It’s Zora. Page . I’ll get another one.’ Levi took the newspaper and forced it into his pocket. He tucked the last lump of burger into his mouth. ‘Cool – I’ll read it later . . .’ Which meant, Jerome knew, that it would be found torn and screwed up with the rest of the trash in his room a few days from now. Levi handed the dog over to Jerome. ‘Jay, actually – I got something I gotta do just now – but I’ll see you later . . . you coming to the Bus Stop tonight?’

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  A FAREWELL TO ELIZABETH By Henry Ammerman JUNE 23 — It is with some sadness that I write this, my last story for the Daily Post. I have been privileged over the past six months to report for you on the terrible series of airplane tragedies that has brought this city so much pain and unwanted national attention. As I leave the place of my birth for a job in a new one, the editors have invited me to offer some final thoughts. The investigations of the Civil Aeronautics Board have now been completed. The results will be annoying and maybe disbelieved by those who saw sinister forces conspiring to bring about the three crashes in rapid-fire succession. Each plane failed for a different reason, and none of them indicate any pattern of sabotage or nefarious activity. Dec. 16—The Miami Airlines non-scheduled C-46 that crashed in the Elizabeth River suffered engine failure, apparently from poor maintenance, which led to a catastrophic fire. The pilots had not been adequately trained to shut off fuel to a damaged engine. Jan. 22—American Airlines Flight 6780, a Convair 240, was an incoming flight in poor weather conditions. The weather could have caused carburetor ice. While the plane had heaters to preclude this, it is possible the heaters were not activated. But without definite evidence, the CAB was mystified as to the probable cause of the crash. Feb. 11—National Airlines Flight 101, a four-engine DC-6, suffered a sudden and unexpected reversal of its No. 3 propeller. Attempting to correct this, the pilot mistakenly feathered (shut off and locked) his other right-side propeller. With both the right-hand engines out, the CAB concluded “the aircraft did not maintain altitude and settled rapidly.” In both crash number one and number three there was a confluence of mechanical problems and mistaken action by the pilot. Perhaps if the Miami Airlines pilot had shut off fuel to the failed engine sooner, or if the pilot of the National plane had feathered the correct engine, they could have recovered altitude and made it back to the airport. Crash number two is more problematic but there remains a possibility that pilot action to overcome icing might have made a difference. The one lesson we can surely learn from these events is that airplanes are complex machines, operating in a precarious environment—the air—where any emergency, be it from mechanical failure, human error or weather hazard, is fraught with peril. The risk is especially great when it occurs at low altitude, giving pilots little opportunity to take corrective action. As if to underscore this point, just after midnight on Feb. 11, at almost the same time as the final doomed Elizabeth plane was going down, a Pan American airliner from Idlewild Airport lost an engine just after takeoff. But that pilot was free to maneuver over the Atlantic Ocean, unconcerned with multistory buildings or thousands at risk on the ground, and returned to the field in safety. Every effort must be taken to safeguard heavily inhabited areas from takeoffs and landings. Let us hope the Port Authority will take this lesson to heart before reopening Newark Airport.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  Miri Henry found Miri, limp and exhausted, on the steps outside their house. She had no idea how long she’d been there, only that she was cried out, her chest so heavy she thought she might never get up. Some boy she didn’t know had come by on a bike and dumped her books on the front lawn but she made no move to get them. When Henry pulled up and got out of the car she fell into his arms. “I know...I know...” He held her. But he didn’t know. He couldn’t know. “Come on,” he said, “get in.” He opened the car door for her and she got inside. “Where are we going?” she asked, as he started up the car and pulled away. “How about down the shore? How does that sound?” She loved the shore and he knew it. He drove for an hour and a half, stopping once at a phone booth to call Irene to tell her where they were, and not to wait for them for supper. When they got to Bradley Beach they took off their shoes and socks, leaving them under the boardwalk, while they walked along the shore, letting the waves drizzle out across their bare feet. Rusty called the smell of the sea, the salty air “the ultimate cure for whatever ails you,” but Miri didn’t think it could wash away her sadness today, even if she jumped in fully dressed. “You want to talk about it?” Henry asked. “I hate secrets,” Miri said. “I don’t blame you.” “Did you know?” she asked. “About Rusty and Dr. O?” Miri nodded. “No one knew.” “Until I found them, you mean.” “I think they wanted to be found—not by you, not the way it happened, but they wanted it known. Otherwise they’d never have been at home that day.” “Natalie called Rusty a whore.” “Poor Natalie, if she feels that to defend her mother she has to bad-mouth Rusty. Someday she’ll grow up and figure it out for herself.”

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I was appalled by Kevin’s frankness. At such moments, tears would come to my eyes in impotent compassion for Daddy: this invalid despot, this man who bullied everyone but suffered the consequences with such a tender, uneducated heart! Tears would also well up when I had to correct my father on a matter of fact. Usually I’d avoid the bother and smugly watch him compound his mistakes. But if he asked my opinion point-blank, a euphoria of sadness would overtake me, panicky wings would beat at the corners of the shrinking room and, as quietly and as levelly as possible, I’d supply the correct name or date. For I was a lot more knowledgeable than he about the things that could come up in conversation even in those days, the 1950s. But knowledge wasn’t power. He was the one with the power, the money, the right to read the paper through dinner as my stepmother and I watched him in silence; he was the one with the thirty tailor-made suits, the twenty gleaming pairs of shoes and the starched white dress shirts, the ties from Countess Mara and the two Cadillacs that waited for him in the garage, dripping oil on the concrete in the shape of a black Saturn and its gray blur of moons. It was his power that stupefied me and made me regard my knowledge as nothing more than hired cleverness he might choose to show off at a dinner party (“Ask this young fellow, he reads, he’ll know”). Then why did his occasional faltering bring tears to my eyes? Was I grieving because he didn’t possess everything, absolutely everything, or because I owned nothing? Perhaps, despite my timidity, I was in a struggle against him. Did I want to hurt him because he didn’t love me? Within a moment Kevin had made things right by asking Daddy how he thought the hometown baseball team would do next season. My father was soon expatiating on names and averages and strategies that meant nothing to me, the good spring training and the bad trade-off. When Kevin challenged him on one point, Dad laughed good-naturedly at the boy’s spunk (and error) and set him straight. I rested my arm on the rubber tread of the gunwale beside me and my chin on my arm and stared into the shiny water, which was busy analyzing a distant yellow porch light, shattering the simple glow into a hundred shifting possibilities.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  My mother’s interest in plans and arrangements coexisted with the most peculiar notion of what those arrangements should consist of—and a wild caprice that could overturn everything she’d worked out so methodically. Naïve and proud at the time of her divorce, she wanted to conserve money but also maintain a good address. She decided the three of us should live in that expensive hotel in one furnished room with twin beds, my sister and I taking turns sleeping on the floor. For the first time in her life our mother had a job, one at which she worked long hours. At night she was going out on dates or haunting nightclubs downtown. Because she was seldom at home I ate most of my suppers alone in the hotel dining room; my sister ate at a different hour in order to avoid my company. Before her divorce my mother had never so much as written a check. Now our fortunes teetered and careened and ground to a halt. She bought a knee-length mink but economized on food, bought a flashy Lincoln convertible but refused to send my sister to the orthodontist, packed us off to expensive summer camps but on the bus, not the train. She drank heavily and played sentimental records in the evening on the few nights she stayed home; one winter the record of “Now Is the Hour” became so worn the spindle hole grew as big as a dime, but still the voice yearned on and on. Another winter the voice, wobbling sickeningly, sang “The Tennessee Waltz.” When Mother was discouraged a smell of physical self-hatred would come off her body; she groaned her way through her self-hatred as though it were a mountain of laundry she had to wash, a dirty, physical, humiliating task. Then something nice would happen. Someone would compliment her or a man would take an interest in her—and presto, she was not only equal to other people but superior to them. The terrible laundering would be forgotten. She’d sit up very straight in her chair and smile a sort of First Lady smile. I spent many gala nights, including my eighth, ninth and tenth birthdays, in nightclubs beside my mother. She’d split a simple pasta dish with me to save money and then order highball after highball as we’d look longingly toward the man at the bar. Had he noticed Mother? Would he send her a drink? Or would he be scared off by my presence?

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Howard pushed open the Kippses’ front door, ajar once again, though for quite a different reason than the last time. The chequered hallway was busy with sombre faces and black suits. Nobody turned to look at Howard except one girl with a tray of sandwiches who came forward and offered him one. Howard took an egg and cress and wandered into the living room. It was not one of those wakes in which the tension of the funeral is released and dissipated. No one here was laughing softly at an affectionate memory or retelling a scurrilous story. The atmosphere was as solemn as it had been in the church, and that lively, surprising woman whom Howard had met a year ago in this very room was presently being piously preserved in the aspic of low voices and bland anecdote, pickled in perfection. She was always , Howard heard one woman say to another, thinking of other people, never of herself . Howard picked up somebody else’s large glass of wine from the dining table and went to stand by the French doors. From here he had a good view of the  On Beauty living room, the garden, the kitchen and the hallway. No Kiki. No kids. No Erskine, even. He could see half of Michael Kipps opening the oven door and taking out a large tray of sausage rolls. Suddenly Monty came into the room. Howard turned towards the garden and looked out on that huge tree where, unbeknown to him, his eldest son had lost his innocence. Not knowing what else to do, he stepped out and closed the door quietly behind him. Instead of walking down the long garden where, as the sole person out here, he would only make himself more conspicuous, Howard walked round the side return, a thin alley between the Kippses’ place and next door. Here he paused, rolled a thin cigarette and smoked it. The combination of this new, sweet white wine in his hand, the bitter air and the tobacco made him feel light-headed. He walked further down the alley to a side door and sat down on its cold step. From this perspective the suburban opulence of five neighbouring gardens announced itself: the knobby branches of the hundred-year-old trees, the corrugated roofs of the sheds, the moneyed amber glow of halogen bulbs. So quiet. A fox keening somewhere like a crying child, but no cars, no voices. Would his family have been happier here? He had run from a potentially bourgeois English life straight into the arms of an actual American one – he saw that now – and, in the disappointment of the attempted escape, he had made other people’s lives miserable. Howard put out his cigarette on the pebbled ground. He gulped thickly but did not cry. He was not his father. He heard the Kippses’

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  Christina It didn’t hit her until they made it to Las Vegas in Jack’s truck, how far she was from home. She cried for two days when she saw the dusty road stop of a desert town with a couple of motels and flashy signs spelling out CASINO or BAR, surrounded by brown and red mountains, mostly untouched by vegetation. She expected green, not brown, and summer flowers, not cacti. She couldn’t get out of bed. She wouldn’t eat. Jack enlisted Daisy’s help. Daisy had arrived before them to start setting up the new office. She’d been there a week when Jack and Christina finally made it. Daisy came to the cheap motel where Christina and Jack were staying until they found an apartment to rent, urged her out of bed, helped her into the shower and chose a sundress for her to wear to lunch at the Flamingo, a swell hotel with a pool, owned by some of Dr. O’s friends. “What have I done?” Christina asked Daisy, once they were seated with menus in front of them. She let Daisy order for both of them. “What am I doing here?” “I’d say you’re homesick, sweetie, but that will pass. Remember, you can always go back. You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to buy an open ticket on a plane from here to New York and keep it in my office drawer. It’s yours, anytime you want it.” Daisy reached across the table and touched Christina’s hand. “Thank you, Daisy. I don’t know what I’d do without you.” She picked up her burger and took a bite. She’d forgotten how hungry she was. “Um...good,” she said. Daisy laughed and took a bite of hers. “It is, isn’t it?” After lunch Daisy said, “I have something to show you.” They drove in Daisy’s new white Ford convertible to a long, low building, just out of town. “Welcome to the Las Vegas Medical Arts Building,” Daisy said. Inside, she walked Christina through the hall to a large, almost finished suite of offices. “This will be your new home-away-from-home. The dental offices of Dr. Arthur Alan Osner and Associates.” Christina was overwhelmed by the scope of the project, by the newness of everything.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  13By the time spring had touched up Thayer Street with yellow and green and pink, Lolita was irrevocably stage-struck. Pratt, whom I chanced to notice one Sunday lunching with some people at Walton Inn, caught my eye from afar and went through the motion of sympathetically and discreetly clapping her hands while Lo was not looking. I detest the theatre as being a primitive and putrid form, historically speaking; a form that smacks of stone-age rites and communal nonsense despite those individual injections of genius, such as, say, Elizabethan poetry which a closeted reader automatically pumps out of the stuff. Being much occupied at the time with my own literary labors, I did not bother to read the complete text of The Enchanted Hunters, the playlet in which Dolores Haze was assigned the part of a farmer’s daughter who imagines herself to be a woodland witch, or Diana, or something, and who, having got hold of a book on hypnotism, plunges a number of lost hunters into various entertaining trances before falling in her turn under the spell of a vagabond poet (Mona Dahl). That much I gleaned from bits of crumpled and poorly typed script that Lo sowed all over the house. The coincidence of the title with the name of an unforgettable inn was pleasant in a sad little way: I wearily thought I had better not bring it to my own enchantress’s notice, lest a brazen accusation of mawkishness hurt me even more than her failure to notice it for herself had done. I assumed the playlet was just another, practically anonymous, version of some banal legend. Nothing prevented one, of course, from supposing that in quest of an attractive name the founder of the hotel had been immediately and solely influenced by the chance fantasy of the second-rate muralist he had hired, and that subsequently the hotel’s name had suggested the play’s title. But in my credulous, simple, benevolent mind I happened to twist it the other way round, and without giving the whole matter much thought really, supposed that mural, name and title had all been derived from a common source, from some local tradition, which I, an alien unversed in New England lore, would not be supposed to know. In consequence I was under the impression (all this quite casually, you understand, quite outside any orbit of importance) that the accursed playlet belonged to the type of whimsey for juvenile consumption, arranged and rearranged many times, such as Hansel and Gretel by Richard Roe, or The Sleeping Beauty by Dorothy Doe, or The Emperor’s New Clothes by Maurice Vermont and Marion Rumpelmeyer—all this to be found in any Plays for School Actors or Let’s Have a Play! In other words, I did not know—and would not have cared, if I did—that actually The Enchanted Hunters was a quite recent and technically original composition which had been produced for the first time only three or four months ago by a highbrow group in New York. To me—inasmuch as I could judge from my charmer’s part—it seemed to be a pretty dismal kind of fancy work, with echoes from Lenormand and Maeterlinck and various quiet British dreamers. The red-capped, uniformly attired hunters, of which one was a banker, another a plumber, a third a policeman, a fourth an undertaker, a fifth an underwriter, a sixth an escaped convict (you see the possibilities!), went through a complete change of mind in Dolly’s Dell, and remembered their real lives only as dreams or nightmares from which little Diana had aroused them; but a seventh Hunter (in a green cap, the fool) was a Young Poet, and he insisted, much to Diana’s annoyance, that she and the entertainment provided (dancing nymphs, and elves, and monsters) were his, the Poet’s, invention. I understand that finally, in utter disgust at this cocksureness, barefooted Dolores was to lead check-trousered Mona to the paternal farm behind the Perilous Forest to prove to the braggard she was not a poet’s fancy, but a rustic, down-to-brown-earth lass—and a last minute kiss was to enforce the play’s profound message, namely, that mirage and reality merge in love. I considered it wiser not to criticize the thing in front of Lo: she was so healthily engrossed in “problems of expression,” and so charmingly did she put her narrow Florentine hands together, batting her eyelashes and pleading with me not to come to rehearsals as some ridiculous parents did because she wanted to dazzle me with a perfect First Night—and because I was, anyway, always butting in and saying the wrong thing, and cramping her style in the presence of other people.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  But if they had split up, I’d lay you bets that my father would have been remarried in a flash. And maybe had a couple more kids. We would have definitely lost out.” “How?” “I can imagine that if my dad had a new wife and kids, he wouldn’t have been around for me. I doubt that my mom would have remarried, although who knows? Maybe she’d have been happier with a different guy. I imagine she would. So to answer your question, of course it was better for me and my brother and sister to have a stable place and good parents, even if our folks missed out on some goodies of life. I know that’s selfish of me.” “Why do you say that?” “Because I have no idea how unhappy my parents were or whether they had regrets. After all, there are a lot of other things in life besides kids. I would have liked to see them both happier with their lives. Now that I’m an adult, I feel terribly sorry for both of them.” Gary makes a very important distinction between the competing interests of parents and children in unhappy marriages. When people stay together or decide to split, what do children gain or lose and what does each parent gain or lose? These are not abstract questions. They translate differently for each family depending on a variety of circumstances. If parenting has been poor, the household is in shambles, and the marriage is hopelessly unhappy, there seems little advantage to anyone to maintaining the status quo. The only way children will be helped is if one parent uses the divorce, over time, to rebuild his or her life with a good home and gives the children the role model of one who finds courage to make a better life. But if parenting has been good, as in Gary’s family, children stand to lose enormously from divorce. Clearly they are better off if the unhappy parents stay married and learn to accept their mutual disappointment. Ideally, parents will find a way to patch their relationship enough so that good parenting is maintained. If children had the vote, almost all would vote to maintain their parents’ marriage. What do parents gain or lose from divorce or staying unhappily married? Obviously, no one from the outside can tell people what to do. This is one of the most important decisions a person can make.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Recent scientific findings show that these little preschool children are right to feel seriously deprived.4 Young children need continuous interaction with caring, nurturing grown-ups to learn about human emotions and to develop their capacity to think. Being fed and put to bed is a tiny fraction of what they need. Parents must provide time and energy to talk, play, read, and pay attention to their young children. But where will the overwhelmed recently divorced parent find the time and the energy for this? In comparing the overall adjustment of young adults in our study with how old they were when their parents divorced, we found that the youngest looked the worst off and had the hardest time growing up.5 Nearly all lost their mothers to the workplace and the stresses of single parenthood. Their feelings of loneliness and anger at both parents carried over into later school years and adolescence. At the twenty-five-year mark, now between twenty-eight and thirty-two years old, they are doing less well in the workplace and in relationships compared with children who were older at the time of the breakup. They have a lower level of confidence about their chances of marrying successfully and are more worried about being betrayed. Only one of the preschool girls in our study is now in a happy, stable marriage while one other is living happily with a man without plans to marry any time soon. Another, who seemed happily married, suddenly left her devoted husband to live with a former high school lover and took her own preschool daughter with her. Most of the girls in this group have not found good jobs or satisfying careers. Several operate small and rather chancy businesses out of their homes. A few are cleaning houses to support themselves. Those who had good educational support have found rewarding careers but are having trouble with men. The boys are in similar straits. Most of the men in our study who led lonely, isolated lives came out of this group.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Victoria opened her mouth but said nothing. ‘Exactly,’ said Monty. He scrunched up the note in his fist and tossed it lightly into the flames. ‘Although we should invite her to the funeral, I think. Mrs Belsey.’ ‘Why!’ cried Amelia. ‘She’s nasty – I saw her that time in the station and she looked right through me like I didn’t even exist! She’s uppity. And she’s practically a Rastafarian!’ Monty frowned. It was becoming clear that Amelia was not the quietest of quiet Christian girls. ‘Ammy has a point. Why should we?’ said Michael. ‘Clearly, in some way your mother felt close to Mrs Belsey. She’d been left alone a lot in the last few months, by all of us.’ Upon hearing this obvious truth, everyone found a spot on the floor to focus on. ‘She made this friend. Whatever we think of it, we should respect it. We should invite her. It’s only decent. Are we agreed? I don’t suppose she’ll be able to make it anyway.’ A few minutes later the children filed out again, feeling a degree more confused as to the true character of the person whose obituary was to appear in tomorrow morning’s Times : Lady Kipps, loving wife of Sir Montague Kipps, devoted mother of Victoria and Michael, Windrush passenger, tireless church worker, patron of the arts.  on beauty and being wrong  Through the grubby windows of their minicab, the Belseys watched Hampstead morph into West Hampstead, West Hampstead into Willesden. At every railway bridge, a little more graffiti; on each street, fewer trees, and in their branches, more fluttering plastic bags. An acceleration of establishments selling fried chicken, until, in Willesden Green, it seemed every other shop sign made reference to poultry. Written in a giant, death-defying font above the train-tracks, a message:   . In different circumstances this would have amused. ‘It gets kind of . . . more crappy down here,’ ventured Zora, in the new, quiet voice she had assumed for this death. ‘Aren’t they rich? I thought they were rich.’ ‘It’s their home,’ said Jerome simply. ‘They love it here. They’ve always lived here. They’re not pretentious. That’s what I was always trying to explain.’ Howard rapped the thick glass side window with his wedding ring. ‘Don’t be fooled. There’re some bloody grand houses around here. Besides, men like Monty like being the big fish in a small pond.’ ‘ Howard ,’ said Kiki in such a tone that nothing further was said until Winchester Lane, where their journey ended. The car pulled up beside a little English country church, torn from its village surroundings and dropped into this urban suburb, or so it seemed to the Belsey children.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  [image file=image_rsrcA5N.jpg] ALREADY I was in a place where the resounding of the water, that fell into the other circle, was heard like the hum which bee-hives make; when three shades together, running, quitted a troop that passed beneath the rain of the sharp torment. They came towards us, and each cried: “Stay thee, thou who by thy dress to us appearest to be some one from our perverse country.” Ah me! what wounds I saw upon their limbs, recent and old, by the flames burnt in. It pains me yet, when I but think thereof. To their cries my Teacher listened; turned his face toward me, and said: “Now wait: to these courtesy is due; and were there not the fire, which the nature of the place darts, I should say the haste1 befitted thee more than them.” They recommenced, as we stood still, their ancient wail; and when they had reached us, all the three made of themselves a wheel. As champions, naked and anointed, were wont to do, spying their grasp and vantage, ere they came to blows and thrusts at one another: thus, wheeling, each directed his visage toward me, so that the neck kept travelling in a direction contrary to the feet. And one of them began: “If the misery of this loose2 place, and our stained and scorched aspect, bring us and our prayers into contempt, let our fame incline thy mind to tell us who thou art, that thus securely movest thy living feet through Hell. He in whose footsteps thou seest me tread, all naked and peeled though he be, was higher in degree than thou believest. Grandson of the good Gualdrada, his name was Guido Guerra;3 and in his lifetime he did much with counsel and with sword. The other, that treads the sand behind me, is Tegghiaio Aldobrandi, whose fame should be grateful up in the world. And I, who am placed with them in torment, was Jacopo Rusticucci;4 and certainly, more than aught else, my savage wife injures me.” Had I been sheltered from the fire, I should have thrown myself amid them below, and I believe my Teacher would have permitted it. But as I should have burnt and baked myself, fear overcame the good will which made me greedy to embrace them. Then I began: “Not contempt, but sorrow, your condition fixed within me, so deeply that it will not leave me soon, when this my Lord spake words to me, by which I felt that such men as you are might be coming. Of your city am I, and always with affection have I rehearsed and heard your deeds and honoured names. I leave the gall, and go for the sweet apples promised me by my veracious Guide; but to the centre it behoves me first to fall.” “So may the soul long animate thy members,” he then replied, “and so thy fame shine after thee;

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  [image file=image_rsrcA5N.jpg] ON SENSE returning, which closed itself before the pity of the two kinsfolk that stunned me all with sadness, I discern new torments, and new tormented souls, whithersoever I move, and turn, and gaze. I am in the Third Circle, that of the eternal, accursed, cold, and heavy rain; its law and quality is never new. Large hail, and turbid water, and snow, pour down through the darksome air; the ground, on which it falls, emits a putrid smell. Cerberus, a monster fierce and strange, with three throats, barks dog-like over those that are immersed in it. His eyes are red, his beard greasy and black, his belly wide, and clawed his hands; he clutches the spirits, flays, and piecemeal rends them. The rain makes them howl like dogs; with one side they screen the other; they often turn themselves, the impious wretches. When Cerberus, the great Worm, perceived us, he opened his mouths and showed his tusks: no limb of him kept still. My Guide, spreading his palms, took up earth; and, with full fists, cast it into his ravening gullets. As the dog, that barking craves, and grows quiet when he bites his food, for he strains and battles only to devour it: so did those squalid visages of Cerberus, the Demon, who thunders on the spirits so, that they would fain be deaf. We passed over the shadows whom the heavy rain subdues; and placed our soles upon their emptiness, which seems a body. They all were lying on the ground save one,1 who sat up forthwith when he saw us pass before him. “O thou, who through this Hell art led,” he said to me, “recognize me if thou mavest; thou wast made before I was unmade.” And I to him: “The anguish which thou hast, perhaps withdraws thee from my memory, so that it seems not as if I ever saw thee. But tell me who art thou, that art put in such a doleful place, and in such punishment; that, though other may be greater, none is so displeasing.” And he to me: “Thy city, which is so full of envy that the sack already overflows, contained me in the clear life. “You, citizens, called me Gacco; for the baneful crime of gluttony, as thou seest, I languish in the rain; and I, wretched spirit, am not alone, since all these for like crime are in like punishment”; and more he said not. I answered him: “Ciacco, thy sore distress weighs upon me so, that it bids me weep; but tell me if thou canst, what the citizens of the divided city shall come to?2 if any one in it be just; and tell me the reason why such discord has assailed it.” And he to me: “After long contention, they shall come to blood, and the party of the woods shall expel the other with much offence3

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  The best part of these adventures seemed to be the way we went into hysterics describing them to each other. Otherwise, they were mostly joyless. We were attracted to men, but when it came to understanding and good talk, we needed each other. Gradually, the men were reduced to sex objects. There is something very sad about this. Eventually we came to accept the lying and the role-playing and the compromises so completely that they were invisible—even to ourselves. We automatically began to hide things from our men. We could never let them know, for example, that we talked about them together, that we discussed the way they screwed, that we aped the way they walked and spoke. Men have always detested women’s gossip because they suspect the truth: their measurements are being taken and compared. In the most paranoid societies (Arab, Orthodox Jewish) the women are kept completely under wraps (or under wigs) and separated from the world as much as possible. They gossip anyway: the original form of consciousness-raising. Men can mock it, but they can’t prevent it. Gossip is the opiate of the oppressed. But who was oppressed? Pia and I were “free women” (a phrase which means nothing without quotes). Pia was a painter. I was a writer. We had more in our lives than just men; we had our work, travel, friends. Then why did our lives seem to come down to a long succession of sad songs about men? Why did our lives seem to reduce themselves to manhunts? Where were the women who were really free, who didn’t spend their lives bouncing from man to man, who felt complete with or without a man? We looked to our uncertain heroines for help, and lo and behold—Simone de Beauvoir never makes a move without wondering what would Sartre think? And Lillian Hellman wants to be as much of a man as Dashiell Hammett so he’ll love her like he loves himself. And Doris Lessing’s Anna Wulf can’t come unless she’s in love, which is seldom. And the rest—the women writers, the women painters—most of them were shy, shrinking, schizoid. Timid in their lives and brave only in their art. Emily Dickinson, the Brontës, Virginia Woolf, Carson McCullers…Flannery O’Connor raising peacocks and living with her mother. Sylvia Plath sticking her head into an oven of myth. Georgia O’Keeffe alone in the desert, apparently a survivor. What a group! Severe, suicidal, strange. Where was the female Chaucer? One lusty lady who had juice and joy and love and talent too? Where could we turn for guidance? Colette, under her Gallic Afro? Sappho, about whom almost nothing is known? “I famish/and I pine,” she says in my handy desk translation. And so did we! Almost all the women we admired most were spinsters or suicides. Was that where it all led? So the search for the impossible man went on.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  The sound of a piano is heard in the living room. It’s my father playing his own rendition of “Begin the Beguine,” which he played years ago in the first Broadway production of Jubilee. “When they begin…the…Beguine…It brings back the thrill of music so tennn-derrr….” His voice wafts to me over the chords of the slightly out-of-tune Steinway baby grand. But Papa and Jude don’t even notice his departure. “In this society,” Jude is saying, “the standards of art are set by press agents and public relations men—which means that there are no stan—” “I’ve always said,” Papa interrupts, “that the world is divided into two types of people: the crooks and the semicrooks….” And my father answers them both with a broken chord. — Charlie and I parted tearfully in Amsterdam. The central train station. He was off to Paris and Le Havre (to go right back to the States he said). But I didn’t believe him. I was off to Yorkshire—whether I liked it or not, and I didn’t like it at all. A tearful goodbye. We are eating Amsterdam herrings and weeping—both of us. “It’s best for us to be apart for a while, darling,” he says. “Yes,” I say, lying through my teeth (which are full of herring). And we kiss, exchanging oniony saliva. I board the train to the Hook of Holland. I wave one herring-scented hand. Charlie blows kisses. He stands on the platform, round-shouldered, a conductor’s baton protruding from his trench-coat pocket, a battered briefcase full of orchestral scores and Dutch herrings in his hand. And the train pulls out. On the steamer from the Hook of Holland to Harwich, I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book. With one long pinkie nail, I dislodge another piece of herring from between my teeth and flick it dramatically into the North Sea. In Yorkshire, I get a letter from Charlie who is still (of course) in Paris. “Darling,” he writes, “don’t think that just because I’m with Sally that I’ve stopped loving you….”

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Almost thirty. Strangers sometimes take me for twenty-five, but I can see the relentless beginnings of age, the beginnings of death, the gradual preparation for nonexistence. Already there are light furrows in my forehead. I can spread them with my fingers, but they fall back into creases immediately. Under the eyes, a fine network of lines is beginning: tiny canals, the markings of a miniature moon. In the corners of my eyes are one, two, three fine lines, as if made with a Rapidograph pen using invisible ink. Hardly perceptible—except to the artist herself. And the mouth is more set in its ways than it used to be. The smile takes longer to fade. As if aging were, above all, rigidity. The setting of the face into prearranged patterns; a faint foreshadowing of the rigidity which comes after death. Oh the chin is still firm enough…but isn’t there a fine, almost invisible chain around the midpoint of the neck? And the breasts are still high, but for how long? And the cunt? That will be the last to go. It will still be going strong when nobody wants the rest of me at all. It’s funny how in spite of my reluctance to get pregnant, I seem to live inside my own cunt. I seem to be involved with all the changes of my body. They never pass unnoticed. I seem to know exactly when I ovulate. In the second week of the cycle, I feel a tiny ping and then a sort of tingling ache in my lower belly. A few days later I’ll often find a tiny spot of blood in the rubber yarmulke of the diaphragm. A bright red smear, the only visible trace of the egg that might have become a baby. I feel a wave of sadness then which is almost indescribable. Sadness and relief. Is it really better never to be born? The diaphragm has become a kind of fetish for me. A holy object, a barrier between my womb and men. Somehow the idea of bearing his baby angers me. Let him bear his own baby! If I have a baby I want it to be all mine. A girl like me, but better. A girl who’ll also be able to have her own babies. It is not having babies in itself which seems unfair, but having babies for men. Babies who get their names. Babies who lock you by means of love to a man you have to please and serve on pain of abandonment. And love, after all, is the strongest lock. The one that chafes hardest and wears longest. And then I would be trapped for good. The hostage of my own feelings and my own child. “Isadora!”