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.

Page 71 of 212 · 20 per page

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘Of course she would,’ said Kiki. Tears pricked her eyes. She squeezed Jerome’s hand and he, surprised by this emotion, returned the pressure. Without any announcement, or at least not one the Belseys heard, the crowd began to file into the church. The interior was as simple as the exterior suggested. Wood beams ran between stone walls, and the rood screen was of a dark oak, plainly carved. The stained glass was pretty, colourful, but rather basic, and there was only one painting, high on the back wall: unlit, dusty and too murky to make anything of at all. Yes, when you looked up and around you – as one instinctively does in a church – everything was much as you might have imagined. But then your eyes came to earth again, and at this point all those who had entered this church for the first time suppressed a shudder. Even Howard – who liked to think himself ruthlessly unsentimental when it came to matters of architectural modernization – could find nothing to praise. The stone floor had been completely covered by a thin, orange-and-grey capsule carpet; many large squares of fuzzy industrial felt slotted together. The pattern therein was of smaller orange boxes, each with its own sad grey outline. This orange had grown brownish under the influence of many feet. And then there were the pews, or rather their absence. Every single one had been ripped out and in their place rows of conference chairs – in this same airport-lounge orange – were placed in a timid half-circle meant to foster (so Howard envisioned) the friendly, informal atmosphere in which tea mornings and community meetings are conducted. The final effect was one of unsurpassable ugliness. It was not hard to reconstruct the chain of logic behind the decision: financial distress, the money to be had from selling nineteenth-century pews, the authoritarian severity of horizontal aisles, the inclusiveness of semicircles. But no – it was still a crime. It was too ugly. Kiki sat down with her family on the uncomfortable little plastic chairs. No doubt Monty wanted to prove he was a man of the people, as powerful men so often like to do – and at his wife’s expense. Didn’t Carlene deserve better than a small ruined church on a noisy main road?  On Beauty

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Although Nabokov called attention to the elements of parody in his work, he repeatedly denied the relevance of satire. One can understand why he said, “I have neither the intent nor the temperament of a moral or social satirist” (Playboy interview), for he eschewed the overtly moral stance of the satirist who offers “to mend the world.” Humbert’s “satires” are too often effected with an almost loving care. Lolita is indeed an “ideal consumer,” but she herself is consumed, pitifully, and there is, as Nabokov said, “a queer, tender charm about that mythical nymphet.” Moreover, since Humbert’s desperate tourism is undertaken in order to distract and amuse Lolita and to outdistance his enemies, real and imagined, the “invented” American landscape also serves a quite functional thematic purpose in helping to dramatize Humbert’s total and terrible isolation. Humbert and Lolita, each is captive of the other, imprisoned together in a succession of bedrooms and cars, but so distant from one another that they can share nothing of what they see—making Humbert seem as alone during the first trip West as he will be on the second, when she has left him and the car is an empty cell.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  Dark and hollow-eyed was each one, pallid of face, and so wasted away that the skin took form from the bones. I do not believe that Erysichthon became thus withered to the very skin by hunger, when greatest fear he had thereof.2 I said in thought within me: “Behold the people that lost Jerusalem when Mary fed on her child.”3 Their eye-sockets seemed gemless rings: he who reads “omo” in the face of man would clearly have recognized there the “m.”4 Who, not knowing the reason, would believe that the scent of fruit and that of water had thus wrought, by begetting desire? Already I was in astonishment at what thus famishes them, because of the reason not yet manifest, of their leanness, and of their sad scurf, when lo, from the hollow of the head a shade5 turned its eyes to me and fixedly did gaze; then cried aloud: “What grace is this to me?” Never had I recognized him by the face, but in his voice, was revealed to me, that which was blotted out in his countenance. This spark rekindled within me all my knowledge of the changed features, and I recognized the face of Forese. “Ah stare not,” he prayed, “at the dry leprosy which discolours my skin, nor at any default of flesh that I may have, but tell me sooth of thyself, and who those two spirits are that there make thy escort; abide thou not without speaking to me.” “Thy face,” answered I him, “which in death I wept for once, gives me now not less grief, even unto tears, seeing it so disfigured. Therefore tell me, in God’s name, what strips you so; make me not talk while I am marvelling, for ill can he speak who is full of other desire.” And he to me: “From the eternal counsel virtue descends into the water, and into the tree left behind, whereby I thus do waste away. All this people, who weeping sing, sanctify themselves again in hunger and thirst, for having followed appetite to excess. The scent which issues from the fruit, and from the spray that is diffused over the green, kindles within us a desire to eat and to drink. And not once only, while circling this road, is our pain renewed, I say pain and ought to say solace; for that desire leads us to the tree, which led glad Christ to say: ‘Eli’ when he made us free with his blood.”6 And I to him: “Forese, from that day on which thou didst change the world for a better life, not five years have revolved till now. If power to sin more came to an end in thee ere the hour supervened of the holy sorrow which weds us anew to God, how art thou come up here? I thought to find thee yet down below, where time for time is repaid.”7

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘And so this girl comes to me – into my house, this morning, without warning – to ask me to recommend to the board that she be kept in a class that she is illegally attending. She thinks because she is in my church, because she has helped with our charity work,  On Beauty that I will bend the rules for her. Because I am, as they say here, her ‘‘brother’’? I told her I was unwilling to do that. And we see the result. A tantrum!’ ‘Ah . . .’ said Kiki, and folded her arms. ‘Now, I know about this. If I’m not mistaken, my daughter’s fighting in the opposite corner.’ Monty smiled. ‘So she is. She gave an extremely impressive speech. I fear she might give me a run for my money.’ ‘Oh, honey,’ said Kiki, shaking her head the way people do in church, ‘I know she will.’ Monty nodded graciously. ‘But what about your pie?’ he asked, affecting a heartbroken face. ‘I suppose this means the houses of Kipps and Belsey are once again at war.’ ‘No . . . I don’t see why that should be so. All’s fair in love and . . . and academia.’ Monty smiled again. He checked his watch and rubbed a hand over his belly. ‘But unfortunately it is time , not ideology, that comes in the way of your pie and me. I must get to college. I wish we could spend the morning eating it. It was truly thoughtful of you to bring it.’ ‘Oh, another time. But are you walking into town?’ ‘Yes, I always walk. Are you going that way?’ Kiki nodded. ‘In which case, let us perambulate together,’ he said rolling his r magnificently. He put both hands on his knees and stood up, and, as he did, Kiki noticed the blank wall behind him. ‘Oh!’ Monty looked up at her inquiringly. ‘No, it’s just – the painting – wasn’t there a painting there? Of a woman?’ Monty turned to look at the blank space. ‘As a matter of fact there was – how did you know that?’ ‘Oh, well – I spent some time with Carlene in here and she spoke about that painting. She told me how much she loved it. The woman was a goddess of some kind, wasn’t she? Like a symbol. 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.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Except for the fact that we had no clocks, our apartment was not much different from the typical young officer’s quarters in the compound. The furniture was of the hideous German overstuffed variety made right after the war and given to the Americans as part of the reparation. No doubt it was made even uglier than usual in revenge. It was sickly beige to begin with, but now, after twenty years of hard labor, it had mellowed, stained, and splotched to a mottled urine-yellow which bore the marks of many household pets and children and early-morning beer-barfs. We had done our best to cover these hippopotamuslike couches and elephantine chairs with bright shawls and pillows and tapestries. We had covered the walls with posters and the windowsills with plants. We had filled the shelves with most of our own books (shipped, at great expense, by the government). But still, the place was depressing. Heidelberg itself was dismal. A beautiful town in which it rains ten months of the year. The sun struggles to appear for days, comes out for an hour or so, and then retreats again. And we were living in a prison of sorts. A spiritual and intellectual ghetto which we literally could not leave without being jailed. Bennett was lost in the army and in his own depression. He had no help to offer me. I had none to offer him. I used to walk the streets of the old town alone in the rain. I spent hours wandering through department stores fingering merchandise I knew I’d never buy, dreaming in crowds, overhearing long conversations which at first I understood only snatches of, listening to the demonstration hucksters barking out the virtues of stretch wigs, false fingernails, carving sets, meat grinders, chopping blocks…. “Meine Damen und Heren…” they begin, and every long sentence is interlarded with that phrase. It rings in your ears after a while. All the potato-shaped ladies would stand around me, forming a gray wall of loden cloth. Germany is patrolled by armies of gray-coated ladies in Tyrolean hats and sensible shoes and jowls crimson with exploded capillaries. Up close, their cheeks seem laced with tiny fireworks caught, as in a photograph, at the moment of bursting. These sturdy widows are everywhere: carrying string bags with bananas sticking out, riding broad-assed on narrow bicycle seats, taking the rain-streaked trains from München to Hamburg, from Nürnberg to Freiburg. A world of widows. The final solution promised by the Nazi dream: a Jewless world without men.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  With one hand absently holding on to the blinds’ strings, Howard looked out of the window on to Wellington’s yard. Here was the white church and the grey library, antagonizing each other on opposite sides of the square. A pot-pourri of orange, red, yellow and purple leaves carpeted the ground. It was still warm enough, but only just, for kids to sit on the steps of the Greenman, reclining on their own knapsacks, wasting time. Howard scanned the scene for Warren or Claire. The news was that they were still together. This from Erskine, who got it from his wife Caroline, who was on the board of trustees at the Wellington Institute of Molecular Research where Warren spent his days. It was Kiki who had told Warren; the explosion had happened – but no one had died. It was just walking wounded as far as the eye could see. No packed bags, no final door slams, no relocation to different colleges, different towns. They were all going to stay put and suffer. It would be played out very slowly over years. The thought was debilitating. Everybody knew about it. Howard expected that the shorthand, water-cooler version, currently circulating the college would be ‘Warren’s forgiven her’ said with pity mixed with a little contempt – as if that covered it, the feeling. People said ‘She’s forgiven him’ about Kiki, and only now was Howard learning of the levels of purgatory forgiveness involves. People don’t know what they’re talking about. At the water cooler Howard was just another middle-aged professor suffering the expected mid-life crisis. And then there was the other reality, the one he had to live. Last night, very late,  On Beauty he had peeled himself off the crushing, too short divan in his study and gone into the bedroom. He lay down in his clothes, above the quilt, next to Kiki, a woman he had loved and lived with his entire adult life. On her bedside table he could not avoid seeing the packet of anti-depressants, sitting alongside a few coins, some earplugs, a teaspoon, all crushed in a small wooden Indian box with elephants carved upon its sides. He waited almost twenty minutes, never sure if she was awake or not. Then he put his hand, above the quilt, very softly, somewhere on her thigh. She began to cry. ‘Ah got a good feelin’ about this semester,’ said Smith, and whistled and released his sprightly Southern chuckle. ‘Expectin’ standing room only.’ On to the blackboard Smith was poster-gumming a reproduction of Rembrandt’s Dr Nicolaes Tulp Demonstrating the Anatomy of the

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  But when he said: “Leave him, and press on, for here ’tis well that with sail and with oars, each one urge his bark along with all his might”; erect, even as is required for walking I made me again with my body, albeit my thoughts remained bowed down and shrunken. I had moved me, and willingly was following my master’s steps, and both of us already were showing how light of foot we were, when he said to me: “Turn thine eyes downward: good will it be, for solace of thy way, to see the bed of the soles of thy feet.” As in order that there be memory of them, the tombs on the ground over the buried bear figured what they were before; wherefore there, many a time men weep for them, because of the prick of remembrance which only to the pitiful gives spur; so saw I sculptured there, but of better similitude according to the craftsmanship, all that which for road projects from the mount. I saw him who was created nobler far than other creature, on one side descending like lightning from heaven.1 I saw Briareus,2 transfixed by the celestial bolt, on the other side, lying on the earth heavy with the death chill. I saw Thymbræus, I saw Pallas and Mars, armed yet, around their father, gazing on the scattered limbs of the giants.3 I saw Nimrod4 at the foot of his great labour, as though bewildered, and looking at the people who were proud with him in Shinar. O Niobe,5 with what sorrowing eyes I saw thee graven upon the road between seven and seven thy children slain! O Saul,6 how upon thine own sword there didst thou appear dead on Gilboa, which thereafter felt nor rain nor dew! O mad Arachne,7 so saw I thee already half spider, sad upon the shreds of the work which to thy hurt was wrought by thee! O Rehoboam, now thine image there seems no more to threaten; but full of terror a chariot beareth it away ere chase be given!8 It showed—the hard pavement—again how Alcmæon made the luckless ornament seem costly to his mother.9 It showed how his sons flung themselves upon Sennacherib within the temple, and how, him slain, there they left him.10 It showed the destruction and the cruel slaughter which Tomyris wrought when she said to Cyrus: “For blood thou didst thirst and with blood I fill thee!”11 It showed how in a rout the Assyrians fled, after Holofernes was slain,12 and also the relics of the assassination. I saw Troy in ashes and in ruins: O Ilion, thee how base and vile it showed—the sculpture which there is discerned!13 What master were he of brush or of graver, who drew the shades and the lineaments, which there would make every subtle wit stare?

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  My brain? It made no sense. Irritation was what I knew best—a heaviness on my chest, a vibration in my neck like my head was revving up before it would rocket off my body. But that seemed directly tied to my nervous system—a physiological response. Was sadness the same kind of thing? Was joy? Was longing? Was love? In the time I had to kill there in the dark of Reva’s childhood bedroom, I decided I would test myself to see what was left of my emotions, what kind of shape I was in after so much sleep. My hope was that I’d healed enough over half a year’s hibernation, I’d become immune to painful memories. So I thought back to my father’s death again. I had been very emotional when it happened. I figured any tears I still had left to cry might be about him. “Your father wants to spend his last days in the house,” my mother had said on the phone. “Don’t ask me why.” He had been dying in the hospital for weeks already, but now he wanted to die at home. I left school and took the train up to see him the very next day, not because I thought it would mean so much to him to have me there, but to prove to my mother that I was a better person than she was: I was willing to be inconvenienced by someone else’s suffering. And I didn’t expect that my father’s suffering would bother me very much. I barely knew him. His illness had been secretive, as though it were part of his work, something that ought not concern me, and nothing I’d ever understand. I missed a week of classes sitting at home, watching him wither. A huge bed had been installed in the den, along with various pieces of medical equipment that I tried to ignore. One of two nurses was always there, feeling my father’s pulse, swabbing his mouth with a soggy little sponge on a stick, pumping him with painkillers. My mother stayed mostly in her bedroom, alone, coming out every now and then to fill a glass with ice. She’d tiptoe into the den to whisper something to the nurse, hardly saying a word to me, barely looking at my father. I sat on the armchair by his bed pretending to read a course packet on Picasso. I didn’t want to embarrass my father by staring, but it was hard not to. His hands had grown bony and huge. His eyes had sunk into his skull and darkened. His skin had thinned.

• 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.