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 On Beauty (2005)

  he’s completely untutored, but – no, yes, he is. He’s extremely charismatic, very good-looking. Very good-looking. Carl’s a rapper, really – he’s a very good rapper – and he is talented – he’s enthusiastic. He’s great to teach. Erskine, please – is there anything you can do here? Something you can find this kid to do on campus?’ ‘I have it. Let’s give him tenure!’ They both laughed, but Claire’s laugh slid to a whimper. She propped her elbow on the desk and rested her face in her hand. ‘I just don’t want to kick him back out on to the street. I really  on beauty and being wrong don’t. We both know the likelihood is that next month the board is going to vote against discretionaries and then he’ll be out on his ass. But if he had something else to do that . . . I know I probably should never have accepted him into the class in the first place, but now I’ve made this undertaking and I’m feeling like I’ve bitten off more . . .’ Claire’s phone started to ring. She held up her index finger in front of her face and took the call. ‘Can I . . . ?’ mouthed Erskine, standing and holding the printouts up in the air. Claire nodded. Erskine waved goodbye with his umbrella. Erskine’s great talent – aside from his encyclopedic knowledge of African literature – lay in making people feel far more important than they actually were. He had many techniques. You might receive an urgent message from Erskine’s secretary on your voicemail, which arrived simultaneously with an e-mail and a handwritten note in your college box. He might take you aside at a party and share with you an intimate story from his childhood that, as a recently arrived female graduate from UCLA, you could not know had already been intimately shared with every other female student in the department. He was skilled in the diverse arts of false flattery, empty deference and the appearance of respectful attention. It might seem, when Erskine praised you or did you a professional favour, that it was you who were benefiting. And you might indeed benefit. But, in almost every case, Erskine was benefiting more. Putting you forward for the great honour of speaking at the Baltimore conference simply saved Erskine from having to attend the Baltimore conference. Mentioning your name in connection with the editorship of the anthology meant that Erskine himself was free of one more promise he had made to his publisher, which, due to other commitments, he was unable to fulfil. But where is the harm in this? You are happy and Erskine is happy! Thus did Erskine run his academic life at Wellington. Occasionally, however, Erskine came across difficult souls whom he could not make happy. Mere praise did not pacify their tempers or ease their dislike and suspicion of him. In these cases, Erskine  On Beauty

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  Reva opened the bathroom door and handed me an old hairbrush with a long wooden handle. There was a spot on the back that was all scratched up. When I held it under the light, I could make out teeth marks. I sniffed it but couldn’t detect the smell of vomit, only Reva’s coconut hand cream. “I’ve never seen you in a suit before,” Reva said stiffly when she came out of the bathroom. The dress she wore was tight with a high center slit. “You look really put together,” she said to me. “Did you get a haircut?” “Duh,” I said, handing her back the brush. We put our coats on and went upstairs. The living room was empty, thank God. I filled my McDonald’s cup with coffee again as Reva stood at the fridge, shoving cold steamed broccoli in her mouth. It was snowing again. “I’m warning you,” Reva said, wiping her hands. “I’m going to cry a lot.” “It would be weird if you didn’t,” I said. “I just look so ugly when I cry. And Ken said he’d be there,” she told me for the second time. “I know we should have waited until after New Year’s. Not like it would have made a difference to my mom. She’s already cremated.” “You told me.” “I’ll try not to cry too hard,” she said. “Tearing up is OK. But my face just gets so puffy.” She stuck her hand in a box of Kleenex and pulled out a stack. “You know, in a way, I’m glad we didn’t have to get her embalmed. That’s just creepy. She was just a sack of bones, anyway. She probably weighed half of what I weigh now. Well, maybe not half exactly. But she was super skinny. Skinnier than Kate Moss, even.” She stuck the tissues in her coat pocket and turned off the lights. We went out the kitchen door into the garage. There was a storage freezer in the corner, shelves of tools and flowerpots and ski boots, a few old bikes, stacks of blue plastic storage bins along one wall. “It’s unlocked,” Reva said, motioning to a small silver Toyota. “This was my mom’s car. I started it last night. Hopefully I can start it again now. She hadn’t been driving it, obviously.” Inside, it smelled like menthol rub. There was a polar bear bobblehead on the dash, an issue of the New Yorker and a bottle of hand cream on the passenger seat. Reva started the car, sighed, clicked the garage door opener clipped to the visor, and started crying. “See? I warned you,” she said, taking out the wad of tissues. “I’m just going to cry while the car heats up. Just a sec,” she said. She cried on, gently shaking under her puffy jacket.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  He just kept clearing his throat nervously and peering into the open head of his egg. His cough was his only protestation. That cough took me back to one of the worst of our bad times together. The first Christmas we were married. We were in Paris. Bennett was hideously depressed and had been almost from the first week we were married. He hated the army. He hated Germany. He hated Paris. He hated me, it seemed, as if I were responsible for these things and more. Glaciers of grievances which extended far, far beneath the surface of the sea. Throughout the whole long drive from Heidelberg to Paris, Bennett said almost not a word to me. Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments. It seems to hammer you into the ground. It drives you deeper and deeper into your own guilt. It makes the voices inside your head accuse you more viciously than any outside voices ever could. I see the whole episode in my memory as if it were a very crisply photographed black and white movie. Directed by Bergman perhaps. We are playing ourselves in the movie version. If only we could escape from always having to play ourselves! Christmas Eve in Paris. The day has been white and gray. They walked in Versailles this morning pitying the naked statues. The statues were glaring white. Their shadows were slate gray. The clipped hedges were as flat as their shadows. The wind was sharp and cold. Their feet were numb. Their footsteps made a sound as hollow as their hearts. They are married, but they are not friends. Now it is night. Near Odéon. Near St. Sulpice. They walk up the Métro steps. There are the echoing sounds of frozen feet. They are both American. He is tall and slim with a small head. He is Oriental with shaggy black hair. She is blond and small and unhappy. She stumbles often. He never stumbles. He hates her for stumbling. Now we have told you everything. Except the story. We look down from the very top of a spiral staircase in a Left Bank hotel as they climb to the fifth floor. She follows him around and around. We watch the tops of their heads bobbing upward. Then we see their faces. Her expression petulant and sad. His jaw set in a stubborn way. He keeps clearing his throat nervously. They come to the fifth floor and find a room. He opens the door without any struggle. The room is a familiar seedy hotel room in Paris. Everything about it is musty. The chintz bedspread is faded. The carpeting is ravelling in the corners. Behind a pasteboard partition are the sink and bidet. The windows probably look out on rooftops, but they are heavily draped with brown velour. It has begun to rain again and the rain can be heard tapping its faint Morse code on the terrace outside the windows.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Fear of Flying’s legacy in our culture is as complicated as its birth was. The book’s movie rights were optioned, but a movie was never made. Erica sued for the rights back and lost. In those two sentences there live a thousand legal documents and just as many hurt feelings. The lawsuit consumed her. Her divorce consumed her. The unprecedented literary fame consumed her. She had sworn she would never write a sequel to Fear of Flying, but her next book was about a woman named Isadora who was suing a producer and movie studio and enduring a divorce amid unprecedented literary fame. She wrote three more books that were narrated by or featured Isadora as a character. But those books contain something slightly less than the promise of Fear of Flying; they lack its excitement, its ingenuity, its urgency. I don’t know, maybe they lack its youthful exuberance. Maybe they are just missing the surprise. But more likely, they are themselves a document of what happens when the lightning bolt of literary fame and success hits you so hard that, in your paralysis, you start to wonder what exactly people want from you in the first place. Don’t get me wrong; they are all worth reading. But in Erica’s later books—historical fiction about witches, about fourteen-year-old Sappho, about an eighteenth-century poet—where there is a spark of new territory, a reader is reminded of those first fists that held her lapels as she held her breath and read. It’s hard to know what she was thinking at that time and what it felt like to be inside of her mind. I met Erica for the first time in 2003, thirty years after the book’s publication. I was working at an Internet startup where I was in charge of hiring writing teachers for continuing education classes. Someone I knew had her email address and I invited her to meet me at Balthazar for lunch. She didn’t teach for us in the end; we couldn’t afford her. But I don’t think I ever thought she would. Instead, I used the lunch to tell her what she’d meant to me over the years—how she had legitimized the notion in modern books that a mouthy Jewish girl from Manhattan could also be intellectual and literary. We have all these dumb ways of categorizing books for women now, but back then, we were mostly left to read the men’s work. We had read every man’s musing and had allowed them to plant their flag to stand for all human experience. Our choices were to witness or to identify. With Erica, with Fear of Flying, the world started over, and all our stories were new and legitimate.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Most of the furniture had gone to Hampstead with Freud and now belonged to his daughter. The Vienna Freud Museum had to make do with photographs and largely empty rooms. Freud had lived here for nearly half a century, but there was no scent of him left—just photographs and a waiting room reconstituted with overstuffed furniture of the period. There was a photograph of the famous consulting room with its Oriental carpet-covered analytic couch, its Egyptian and Chinese figurines, and its fragments of ancient sculpture, but the consulting room itself had vanished, along with a whole era, in 1938. How strange, somehow, to pretend that Freud had never been driven out, or that with the help of a few yellowing photos, a world could be recreated. It reminded me of my trip to Dachau: the crematoria torn down and tow-headed German children running and laughing and picnicking on the newly seeded grass. “You can’t judge a country by just twelve years,” they used to tell me in Heidelberg. So we peered at the curiously sterile rooms, the left-over paraphernalia of Freud’s life: his medical diploma, his military record, his application for assistant professorship, a contract with one of his publishers, his list of publications attached to an application for promotion. And then we inspected the photographs: Freud, cigar in hand, with the first psychoanalytic circle, Freud with a grandson, Freud with Anna Freud, Freud before death leaning on his wife’s arm in London, young Ernest Jones striking a glamour-boy profile, Sandor Ferenczi peering imperiously at the world, circa 1913, mild-mannered Karl Abraham looking mild-mannered, Hanns Sachs looking like Robert Morley, und so weiter. The artifacts were present, but the spirit of the enterprise was lacking. We trooped obediently from one display to the next wondering about our own sticky history, still in the writing. We had a quiet lunch together and again tried to repair the damages of the previous evening. I vowed to myself I would never see Adrian again. Bennett and I treated each other with utmost consideration. We were careful not to discuss anything of consequence. Instead we spoke anecdotally of Freud. According to Ernest Jones, he was a poor judge of character, a poor Menschenkenner. Often this trait—a certain naiveté about people—went with genius. Freud could penetrate the secrets of dreams, but he could also fall dupe to an ordinary con man. He could invent psychoanalysis, but he would inevitably put his faith in people who betrayed him. Also he was very indiscreet. He often gave away confidences which had been entrusted to him on the sole condition that he keep quiet about them. Suddenly we realized that we were talking about ourselves again. There was no topic neutral enough for conversation that afternoon. Everything came back to us.

• 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 On Beauty (2005)

  She was so beautiful.’ ‘Well,’ said Monty, turning back to face Kiki, ‘I can assure you  on beauty and being wrong she is still beautiful – she has simply moved location. I decided to hang her in the Black Studies Department, in my office. It’s . . . well, she’s good company,’ he said sadly. He held his forehead for a moment in his hand. Then he crossed the room and opened the door to let Kiki out. ‘You must miss your wife so much,’ said Kiki zealously. She would have been shocked to be accused of emotional vampirism here, for she meant only to show this bereaved man that she empathized, but, either way, Monty did not oblige her. He said nothing and passed Kiki her overcoat. They left the house. Together they walked along the thin strip of sidewalk the neighbourhood’s snow shovels had collectively unearthed. ‘You know . . . I was interested in what you were saying, back there, about it being a ‘‘demoralizing philosophy’’,’ said Kiki, and at the same time carefully scanned the ground before her for any black ice. ‘I mean, I certainly wasn’t done any favours in my life – nor was my mother, nor was her mother . . . and nor were my children . . . I always gave them the opposite idea, you know? Like my mamma said to me: You gotta work five times as hard as the white girl sitting next to you. And that was sure as hell true. But I feel torn . . . because I’ve always been a supporter of affirmative action, even if I personally felt uncomfortable about it sometimes – I mean, obviously my husband has been heavily involved in it. But I was interested in the way you expressed that. It makes you think about it again.’ ‘Opportunity,’ announced Monty, ‘is a right – but it is not a gift. Rights are earned. And opportunity must come through the proper channels. Otherwise the system is radically devalued.’ A tree in front of them shuddered a shelf of snow from its branches on to the street. Monty held a protective arm out to stop Kiki passing. He pointed to a runnel between two ice banks, and they walked along this into the open road, only rejoining the sidewalk at the fire station. ‘But,’ protested Kiki, ‘isn’t the whole point that here, in America – I mean I accept the situation is different in Europe – but here, in  On Beauty this country, that our opportunities have been severely retarded, backed up or however you want to put it, by a legacy of stolen rights – and to put that right, some allowances, concessions and support are what’s needed? It’s a matter of redressing the balance – because we all know it’s been unbalanced a damn long time. In my mamma’s neighbourhood, you could still see a segregated bus in .

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  But their explanations always seem to lack something. As if the essential kernel had been left out. After the infatuation is over, you rationalize. I once adored a conductor who never bathed, had stringy hair, and was a complete failure at wiping his ass. He always left shit stripes on my sheets. Normally I don’t go for that sort of thing—but in him it was OK—I’m still not sure why. I fell in love with Bennett partly because he had the cleanest balls I’d ever tasted. Hairless and he practically never sweats. You could (if you wanted) eat off his asshole (like my grandmother’s kitchen floor). So I’m versatile about my fetishes. In a way, that makes my infatuations even less explicable. But Bennett saw patterns in everything. “That Englishman you were talking to,” he said when we were back in the hotel room, “he was really crazy about you—” “What makes you think that?” He gave me a cynical look. “He was slobbering all over you.” “I thought he was the most hostile son of a bitch I’ve ever met.” And it was partly true too. “That’s right—but you’re always attracted to hostile men.” “Like you, you mean?” He was drawing me toward him and starting to undress me. I could tell he was turned on by the way Adrian had pursued me. So was I. We both made love to Adrian’s spirit. Lucky Adrian. Fucked from the front by me, from the rear by Bennett. The History of the World Through Fucking. Love-making. The old dance. It would make an even better chronicle than The History of the World Through Toilets. It would subsume everything. What doesn’t come to fucking in the end? Bennett and I had not always made love to a phantom. There was a time when we made love to each other. I was twenty-three when I met him and already divorced. He was thirty-one and never married. The most silent man I’d ever met. And the kindest. Or at least I thought he was kind. What do I know about silent people anyway? I come from a family where the decibel count at the dinner table could permanently damage your middle ear. And maybe did. Bennett and I met at a party in the Village where neither of us knew the hostess. We’d both been invited by other people. It was very mid-sixties chic. The hostess was black (you still said “Negro” then) and in some fashionable sell-out profession like advertising. She was all gotten up in designer clothes and gold eye shadow. The place was filled with shrinks and advertising people and social workers and NYU professors who looked like shrinks. 1965: pre-hippie and pre-ethnic. The analysts and advertising men and professors still had short hair and tortoiseshell glasses.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  In a pattern so deeply embedded in her life that Byford suspected it of being rooted in her earliest babyhood, Claire compulsively sabotaged all possibilities of personal happiness. It seemed she was convinced that it was not happiness that she deserved. The Howard episode was only the last and most spectacular in a long line of acts of emotional cruelty she had felt impelled to inflict upon herself. You only had to look at the timing. Finally, finally , she had found this wonderful blessing, this angel, this gift , Warren Crane, a man who (she could not help but list his attributes as Byford encouraged her to do): (a) Did not consider her a threat. (b) Did not fear or dread her sexuality or gender. (c) Did not wish to cripple her mentally. (d) Did not, at a preconscious level, want her dead. (e) Did not resent her money, her reputation, her talent or her strength. (f ) Did not wish to interfere with the deep connection she had with the earth – indeed, loved the earth as she did and encouraged her love of it. She had come to a place of personal joy. Finally, at fifty-three. And so naturally it was the perfect time to sabotage her own life. To this end she had initiated an affair with Howard Belsey, one of her oldest friends. A man for whom she had no sexual desire  On Beauty whatsoever. Looking back on it, it was really too perfect. Howard Belsey – of all people! When Claire leaned into Howard’s body that day in the conference room of the Black Studies Department, when she clearly offered herself to him, she had not really known why. By contrast, she had felt all the classic masculine impulses and fantasies surge through her old friend back towards her – the late possibility of other people, of living other lives, of new flesh, of being young again. Howard was releasing a secret, volatile, shameful part of himself. And it was an aspect of himself with which he was unfamiliar, that he had always presumed beneath him; she could sense all of this in the urgent pressure of Howard’s hands on her tiny waist, the fumbling speed with which he undressed her. He was surprised by desire. In response Claire had felt nothing comparable. Only sorrow.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  He had also an album with snapshots of all the Jackies and Dickies of the neighborhood, and when I happened to thumb through it and make some casual remark, Gaston would purse his fat lips and murmur with a wistful pout “Oui, ils sont gentils.” His brown eyes would roam around the various sentimental and artistic bric-a-brac present, and his own banal toiles (the conventionally primitive eyes, sliced guitars, blue nipples and geometrical designs of the day), and with a vague gesture toward a painted wooden bowl or veined vase, he would say “Prenez done une de ces poires. La bonne dame d’en face m!en offre plus que je n’en peux savourer.” Or: “Mississe Taille Lore vient de me donner ces dablias, belles fleurs que j’exècre.” (Somber, sad, full of world-weariness.) For obvious reasons, I preferred my house to his for the games of chess we had two or three times weekly. He looked like some old battered idol as he sat with his pudgy hands in his lap and stared at the board as if it were a corpse. Wheezing he would meditate for ten minutes—then make a losing move. Or the good man, after even more thought, might utter: Au roi! with a slow old-dog woof that had a gargling sound at the back of it which made his jowls wabble; and then he would lift his circumflex eyebrows with a deep sigh as I pointed out to him that he was in check himself.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  A zoo in Indiana where a large troop of monkeys lived on concrete replica of Christopher Columbus’ flagship. Billions of dead, or halfdead, fish-smelling May flies in every window of every eating place all along a dreary sandy shore. Fat gulls on big stones as seen from the ferry City of Sheboygan, whose brown woolly smoke arched and dipped over the green shadow it cast on the aquamarine lake. A motel whose ventilator pipe passed under the city sewer. Lincoln’s home, largely spurious, with parlor books and period furniture that most visitors reverently accepted as personal belongings. We had rows, minor and major. The biggest ones we had took place: at Lace work Cabins, Virginia; on Park Avenue, Little Rock, near a school; on Milner Pass, 10,759 feet high, in Colorado; at the corner of Seventh Street and Central Avenue in Phoenix, Arizona; on Third Street, Los Angeles, because the tickets to some studio or other were sold out; at a motel called Poplar Shade in Utah, where six pubescent trees were scarcely taller than my Lolita, and where she asked, à propos de rien, how long did I think we were going to live in stuffy cabins, doing filthy things together and never behaving like ordinary people? On N. Broadway, Burns, Oregon, corner of W. Washington, facing Safeway, a grocery. In some little town in the Sun Valley of Idaho, before a brick hotel, pale and flushed bricks nicely mixed, with, opposite, a poplar playing its liquid shadows all over the local Honor Roll. In a sage brush wilderness, between Pinedale and Farson.

• 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 My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  There, I thought. A dream is starting. My eyes were closed. I felt myself begin to drift. And then, as though she’d timed it, as though she’d heard my thoughts, Reva was banging on my door. I opened my eyes. Slivers of white, snowy light striped the bare floor. It felt like the crack of dawn. “Hello? It’s me, Reva.” Had I slept at all? “Let me in.” I got up slowly and made my way down the hall. “I’m sleeping,” I hissed through the door. I squinted into the peephole: Reva looked bedraggled and deranged. “Can I come in?” she asked. “I really need to talk.” “Can I just call you later? What time is it?” “One fifteen. I tried calling,” she said. “Here, the doorman sent up your mail. I need to talk. It’s serious.” Maybe Reva had been involved somehow in my Infermiterol escapade downtown. Maybe she had some privileged information about what I’d done. Did I care? I did, a little. I unlocked the door and let her in. She wore, as I’d imagined, her mother’s huge beaver coat. “Nice sweater,” she said, slicking past me into the apartment, a whiff of cold and mothballs. “Gray is in for spring.” “It’s still January, right?” I asked, still paralyzed in the hallway. I waited for Reva to confirm but she just dumped the armful of mail on the dining table, then took off her coat and draped it over the back of the sofa next to my fox fur. Two pelts. I thought of Ping Xi’s dead dogs again. A memory arose from one of my last days at Ducat: a rich gay Brazilian petting the stuffed poodle and telling Natasha he wanted “a coat just like this, with a hood.” My head hurt. “I’m thirsty,” I said, but it came out like I was just clearing my throat. “Huh?” The floor shifted slightly beneath my feet. I felt my way into the living room, my hand skimming the cool wall. Reva had made herself comfortable in the armchair already. I steadied myself, hands free, before staggering toward the sofa. “Well, it’s over,” Reva said, “It’s officially over.” “What is?” “With Ken!” Her bottom lip trembled. She crooked her finger under her nose, held her breath, then got up and came toward me, cornering me against the end of the sofa. I couldn’t move. I felt slightly ill watching her face turn red from lack of oxygen, holding in her sobs, then realized that I was holding my breath, too. I gasped, and Reva, mistaking this for an exclamation of compassionate woe, put her arms around me. She smelled like shampoo and perfume. She smelled like tequila. She smelled vaguely of French fries. She held me and shook and cried and snotted for a good minute. “You’re so skinny,” she said, between her sniffles. “No fair.” “I need to sit down,” I told her. “Get off.” She let me go.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  and received him as chief of his familiar friends; which Lucius, after that he had sojourned there a good space, and won the heart of Milo's maid by feigned love, did thoroughly learn the ways and doors of all the house, and curiously viewed the coffers and chests, wherein was laid the whole substance of Milo. Neither was there small cause to judge him culpable, since as the very same night as this robbery was done, he fled away, and could be found in no place, and to the intent he might clean escape and better prevent such as made hue and cry after him, he took his white horse and galloped away. After this his servant was found in the house, who was taken as able to give an information of the felony and escape of his master, and was committed to the common gaol, and the next day following was cruelly scourged and tormented till he was well nigh dead, but he would confess nothing of the matter; and when they could wrest or learn no such thing of -him, yet sent they many persons after towards Lucius' country to enquire him out, and so take him prisoner to pay the punishment of that his crime." As he declared these things, I did greatly lament with myself to think of mine old and pristine estate, and what felicity I was sometimes in, in comparison to the misery that I presently sustained, being changed into a miserable ass. Then had I no small occasion to remember how the old and ancient writers did feign and affirm that fortune was stark blind and without eyes, because she always be- stoweth her riches upon evil persons and fools, and chooseth and favoureth no mortal person by judge- ment, but is always conversant especially with such whom if she could see, she would more shun and forsake ; yea, and which is worse, she soweth such 801 LUCIUS APULEIUS

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  The spirits in other circles have recognized the special grace shown to Dante in his anticipated vision of unseen things; and to this grace Dante himself now appeals to win from his new companion an account of himself, and directions as to the journey; for meeting these souls circling from west to east raises a doubt in his mind whether he and Virgil have been right in still following the sun. The spirit reveals himself as Marco Lombardo, refers, as other spirits had done, to the degeneracy of the times, reassures Dante as to the course he is taking and implores his prayers. Dante, while giving him the required pledge, catches at this renewed insistence on the evil times, and asks whether it is due to unfavourable conjunctions in the heavens or to inherent degeneracy of earth. Marco heaves a deep sigh at the blindness implied in such a question; as if man were handed over helplessly to planetary influences! As if he had no free will and no direct dependence upon God, which may make him superior to all material influences! The causes of degeneracy must be sought on earth and will be found in the absence of any true governor who perceives at least the turrets of the true city, and so can lead the guileless and impressionable souls of men on the right path. And this evil springs not from corruptness of human nature in general, but from the worldliness and ambition of the clergy who have grafted the sword upon the crook, so that the two lights of the world that once shone in Rome have quenched each other; and the temporal and spiritual powers, confounded together, have ceased to guide and check each other. Hence the world is so degenerate that only three good old men remain as a rebuke to the living generation. Dante accepts the sad wisdom of Marco’s discourse, only requesting a word of personal explanation as to one of the three still surviving types of antique virtues; and thereon he begins to see the light struggls through the enveloping darkness, and is told that the angel guardian of the next stair is at hand.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Victoria never for a moment considered . . . But of course Jerome did. Considering things too much, all the time, was the definition of who he was. ‘It’s not healthy, baby,’ said his mother now, smoothing his hair to his scalp, watching it spring back. ‘You’re brooding the hell out of this summer. Summer’s almost up.’ ‘What’s your point?’ said Jerome, with uncharacteristic rudeness. ‘It’s a shame, that’s all . . .’ said Kiki quietly. ‘Look, shug, I’m going to the festival – why don’t you come?’ ‘Why don’t I,’ replied Jerome, without inflection. ‘It’s a hundred and ten degrees in here, baby. Everybody done gone already.’ Jerome mimed a minstrel’s expression to match his mother’s intonations. He returned to his task. As he wrote, his womanly mouth drew into a tight, cushioned pout, and this in turn accentu-ated the family’s cheekbones. His prominent forehead – the detail that made him so unpretty – pulled forward, as if in sympathy with the long, horse’s lashes that curled up to meet it. ‘You just going to sit in all day, write your diary?’ ‘Not a diary. Journal.’ Kiki made a noise of defeat, stood up. She walked casually around  On Beauty the back of him and then bellyflopped suddenly towards him, hugging him from behind, reading over his shoulder: ‘ It is easy to mistake a woman for a philosophy . . .’ ‘Mom, fuck off – I’m serious – ’ ‘Watch your mouth – The mistake is to be attached to the world at all. It will not thank you for your attachments. Love is the extremely difficult realization – ’ Jerome wrestled the book away from her. ‘What is that – proverbs? Sounds heavy . You’re not gonna put on a trench coat and shoot up your school, now, are you, baby?’ ‘Ha, ha.’ Kiki kissed the back of his head and stood up. ‘Too much recording – try living,’ she suggested softly. ‘False opposition.’ ‘Oh, Jerome, please – get up out of that nasty thing, come with me. You live in that goddamn beanbag. Don’t make me go alone. Zora went with her girls already.’ ‘I’m busy . Where’s Levi?’ ‘Saturday job. Come on . I’m by myself . . . and Howard left me high and dry – he went off with Erskine an hour ago . . .’ This sneaky mention of his father’s negligence had exactly the effect his mother had intended. He groaned and closed the book between his big, soft hands. Kiki reached out her own hands in a cross towards her son. He grabbed both and heaved himself up. From the house to the town square was a pretty walk: swollen gourds on doorsteps, white clapboard houses, luscious gardens carefully planted in preparation for the famous fall.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  C A N T O X X I I IDante’s eyes search the foliage of the tree till he is summoned to advance by Virgil. Then he hears the cry, at once grievous and soothing, of the souls who presently overtake the travellers and turn to look upon them as they pass, though without pausing. These are the once gluttonous souls, with faces now drawn by thirst and hunger, so emaciated that the extremest examples of famine in sacred of profane records rush to Dante’s mind. Their eye-sockets are like rings that have lost their gems; and he who reads omo (homo) [image file=image_rsrcA62.jpg] on the face of man would find the three strokes of the m writ plain enough in the gaunt bones of cheek and nose. How can the fruit and trickling water work in such fashion on the shadowy forms? One of them turns his eyes from deep down in the sockets upon Dante, who, when he speaks, recognizes his old companion Forese; and each of the astonished friends demands priority of satisfaction for his own amazed curiosity. Forese explains that there are other trees like to this, and that each renews the pain of the purging souls; nay, rather their solace; for they exult in crucifying with Christ the old Adam in them. Forese further shows how he owes to his widowed Nella his speedy promotion to the sweet bitterness of torment. She is all the dearer to God in proportion to the loneliness of her virtue in the place of infamy in which she lives. Forese proceeds to denounce the dissolute fashions of the women of Florence. Dante must now in his turn unfold the story of how he had been rescued from the worldly life which he and Forese had once lived together, of the strange journey on which Virgil has conducted him, of the promise that he shall meet Beatrice, and of the manner in which they have encountered Statius. [image file=image_rsrcA5N.jpg] WHILE I WAS thus fixing mine eyes through the green leaves, even as he is wont to do who throws away his life after birds, my more than father said to me: “Son, come now onward, for the time which is allotted to us must be more usefully apportioned.” I turned my face, and my step not less quickly, towards the sages, who were discoursing so that they made the going of no cost to me. And lo, in tears and song was heard: “Labia mea Domine,”1 in such manner that it gave birth to joy and grief. “O sweet Father, what is that which I hear?” began I; and he: “Shades that perchance go loosening the knot of their debt.” Even as musing wayfarers do, who on overtaking strange folk by the way, turn round to them and stay not, so behind us, moving more quickly, coming, and passing by, a throng of spirits, silent and devout, was gazing upon us in wonder.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Moving your body can change your predictions and therefore your experience. Your movements may also help your control network to bring other, less bothersome concepts into the foreground. 26 Another approach to mastering your emotions in the moment is to change your location or situation, which in turn can change your predictions. During the Vietnam War, for example, 15 percent of U.S. soldiers were addicted to heroin. When they came home as veterans, 95 percent of them stayed off the drug in their first year back—an astounding figure compared to the general population, where only 10 percent of users avoid relapse. The shift in location changed their predictions, which lessened their craving for the drug. (I sometimes wonder if midlife crisis is a drastic attempt to change one’s predictions by changing the context. * ) 27 When changes in movement and context fail to help you master your emotions, the next big thing to try is recategorizing how you feel. This will require some explanation. Anytime you feel miserable, it’s because you are experiencing unpleasant affect due to interoceptive sensations. Your brain will dutifully predict causes for those sensations. Perhaps they are a message from your body, like “I have a stomachache.” Or perhaps they’re saying, “Something is seriously wrong with my life.” This is the distinction between discomfort and suffering. Discomfort is purely physical. Suffering is personal. Imagine what your body looks like to an invading virus. You are just a big bag of DNA, proteins, water, and whatever other biological stuff it must steal to replicate itself. An influenza virus doesn’t care about your beliefs, qualities, or values when it infects your cells. It does not make moral judgments on your character, like “Oooh, she’s a snob with a bad haircut . . . let’s infect her!” No, a virus is egalitarian toward its victims. It brings discomfort, but it’s nothing personal. All humans who haven’t slept enough, with a nice wet set of lungs, can apply for the job of host. Affect, on the other hand, transforms interoceptive sensation into something about you, with your particular strengths and faults. Now the sensations are personal—they reside inside your affective niche. When you feel wretched, the world seems like an awful place. People are judging you. Wars are raging. The polar ice caps are melting. You are suffering. Most of us devote a lot of time to relieving suffering. We often eat for pleasure or to soothe ourselves, rather than for the nutrients. I think drug addiction is often a misguided attempt to relieve the suffering from a body budget that’s chronically out of whack.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  This upon the belly, and that upon the shoulders of the other lay; and some were crawling on along the dismal path. Step by step we went, without speech, looking at and listening to the sick who could not raise their bodies. I saw two sit leaning on each other, as pan is leant on pan to warm, from head to foot spotted with scabs; and never did I see currycomb plied by stableboy for whom his master waits, nor by one who stays unwillingly awake, as each of these plied thick the clawing of his nails upon himself, for the great fury of their itch which has no other succour. And so the nails drew down the scurf, as does a knife the scales from bream or other fish that has them larger. “O thou!” began my Guide to one of them, “who with thy fingers dismailest thyself, and sometimes makest pincers of them; tell us if there be any Latian among these who are here within; so may thy nails eternally suffice thee for that work.” “Latians are we, whom thou seest so disfigured here, both of us,” replied the one weeping; “but who art thou that hast inquired of us?” And the Guide said: “I am one, who with this living man descend from steep to steep, and mean to show him Hell.” Then the mutual propping broke, and each turned trembling towards me, with others that by echo heard him. The kind Master to me directed himself wholly, saying: “Tell them what thou wishest.” And I began, as he desired: “So may your memory not fade away from human minds in the first world, but may it live under many suns, tell us who ye are, and of what people; let not your ugly and disgusting punishment frighten you from revealing yourselves to me.” “I was of Arezzo,”6 replied the one, “and Albert of Siena had me burned; but what I died for does not bring me here. ’Tis true, I said to him, speaking in jest: ‘I could raise myself through the air in flight’; and he, who had a fond desire and little wit, willed that I should show him the art; and only because I made him not a Daedalus, he made me be burned by one who had him for a son. But to the last budget of the ten, for the alchemy that I practised in the world, Minos, who may not err, condemned me.” And I said to the Poet: “Now was there ever people so vain as the Sienese? certainly the French not so by far.” Whereat the other leper, who heard me, responded to my words: “Except Stricca who contrived to spend so moderately; and Niccolò, who first discovered the costly usage of the clove, in the garden where such seed takes root; and except the company in which Caccia of Asciano squandered his vineyard and his great forest, and the Abbagliato showed his wit.7

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  In the meane season Psyches with all her beauty received no fruit of honor. She was wondred at of all, she was praised of all, but she perceived that no King nor Prince, nor any one of the superiour sort did repaire to wooe her. Every one marvelled at her divine beauty, as it were some Image well painted and set out. Her other two sisters, which were nothing so greatly exalted by the people, were royally married to two Kings: but the virgin Psyches, sitting alone at home, lamented her solitary life, and being disquieted both in mind and body, although she pleased all the world, yet hated shee in her selfe her owne beauty. Whereupon the miserable father of this unfortunate daughter, suspecting that the gods and powers of heaven did envy her estate, went to the town called Milet to receive the Oracle of Apollo, where he made his prayers and offered sacrifice, and desired a husband for his daughter: but Apollo though he were a Grecian, and of the country of Ionia, because of the foundation of Milet, yet hee gave answer in Latine verse, the sence whereof was this:— Let Psyches corps be clad in mourning weed, And set on rock of yonder hill aloft: Her husband is no wight of humane seed, But Serpent dire and fierce as might be thought. Who flies with wings above in starry skies, And doth subdue each thing with firie flight. The gods themselves, and powers that seem so wise, With mighty Jove, be subject to his might, The rivers blacke, and deadly flouds of paine And darkness eke, as thrall to him remaine. The King, sometimes happy when he heard the prophesie of Apollo, returned home sad and sorrowful, and declared to his wife the miserable and unhappy fate of his daughter. Then they began to lament and weep, and passed over many dayes in great sorrow. But now the time approached of Psyches marriage, preparation was made, blacke torches were lighted, the pleasant songs were turned into pittifull cries, the melody of Hymeneus was ended with deadly howling, the maid that should be married did wipe her eyes with her vaile. All the family and people of the city weeped likewise, and with great lamentation was ordained a remisse time for that day, but necessity compelled that Psyches should be brought to her appointed place, according to the divine appointment.