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 85 of 212 · 20 per page

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Sensing he was onto something, Chaplin shaped the role further in subsequent movies, rendering him more and more naive. The key was to make the character seem to see the world through the eyes of a child. In The Bank, he is the bank janitor who day- dreams of great deeds while robbers are at work in the building; in The Pawnbroker, he is an unprepared shop assistant who wreaks havoc on a grandfather clock; in Shoulder Arms, he is a soldier in the bloody trenches of World War I, reacting to the horrors of war like an innocent child. Chaplin made sure to cast actors in his films who were physically larger than he was, subliminally positioning them as adult bullies and himself as the helpless in- fant. And as he went deeper into his character, something strange hap- pened: the character and the real-life man began to merge. Although he had had a troubled childhood, he was obsessed with it. (For his film Easy Street he built a set in Hollywood that duplicated the London streets he had known as a boy.) He mistrusted the adult world, preferring the company of the young, or the young at heart: three of his four wives were teenagers when he married them. More than any other comedian, Chaplin aroused a mix of laughter and sentiment. He made you empathize with him as the victim, feel sorry for • "Agreed," said Hermes, and they shook hands on it. • . . . Apollo, taking the child back to Olympus, told Zeus all that had happened. Zeus warned Hermes that henceforth he must respect the rights oj property and refrain from telling downright lies; but he could not help being amused. "You seem to be a very ingenious, eloquent, and persuasive godling," he said. • "Then make me your herald, Father," Hermes answered, "and I will he responsible for the safety of all divine property, and never tell lies, though I cannot promise always to tell the whole truth." • "That would not be expected of you," said Zeus with a smile. . . . Zeus gave him a herald's staff with white ribbons, which everyone was ordered to respect; a round hat against the rain, and winged golden sandals which carried him about with the swiftness of the wind. —ROBERT GRAVES, THE GREEK MYTHS, VOLUME I A man may meet a woman and be shocked by her ugliness. Soon, if she is natural and unaffected, her expression makes him overlook the fault of her features. He begins to find her charming, it enters his head that she might be loved, and a week later he is living in hope. The following week he has been snubbed into despair, and the week afterwards he has gone mad. —STENDHAL, LOVE, TRANSLATED BY GILBERT AND SUZANNE SALE The Natural • 59 him the way you would for a lost dog.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  I often stumbled to the kitchen for a glass of water late at night to find only a blanket and a pillow on the couch. When I asked my mother where Brother Terrell went at night, she said he was probably walking around outside praying, like he did at the tent. I almost believed her until she introduced him to our neighbor Nila as her brother, her real brother. It wasn’t a lie, she explained, because she had a brother named Dave, after all. And by the way, it would be better if we called Brother Terrell Uncle David in front of the neighbors.“Why?”“It just would. Don’t back-talk.”It worked out okay, until Gary and I slipped and called him Brother Terrell in front of Nila from time to time. She cocked her head and looked at us funny. We kept playing and pretended not to notice. We also pretended not to notice when Brother Terrell/Uncle David eventually went missing from the couch altogether and reappeared from our mother’s bedroom in the mornings.Whenever Brother Terrell left, Mama moved through the house like a ghost. Her sighs were long and labored, and her face was vacant. She didn’t talk unless we asked her a question, and sometimes even then she forgot to answer. It took a few days for her to find her way back to us. First Nila would come through the hedge that separated our houses to tell Mama she had a call from her brother. (We didn’t have a phone.) It was always Brother Terrell, of course. These calls had a positive effect on my mother. Afterward, she stumbled into our room and told us we were going to Big Boy’s for burgers and shakes. Everything was on its way back to our version of normal. I don’t know how long the three of us lived in Houston. My mother’s memory is vague and my brother prefers to forget rather than to remember, so I am on my own when reconstructing this period of our past. My best estimate is three months. Despite my initial resistance to happiness, the end of it took me by surprise.A plague of dead crickets littered the porches and sidewalks of our neighborhood and the sun flattened everything with its white light. Gary and I had just taken our place at the picture window to watch the smallest and most unremarkable of planes make their way across a washed-out sky. We were just tuning up for the I’m-bored chorus when two black women glided up the cracked sidewalk to our house. They shimmered in the heat and humidity of the Houston summer, a mirage of leopard-skin pillbox hats and matching fur stoles. They pulled something big behind them, a console TV that sat high on a primitive wooden sled. There was something of the ancient caravan in their slow, rhythmic progress. They didn’t stress or strain or stop to wipe a brow. Gary and I watched, arms and legs swimming against the glass.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  that Emma is bored. A few weeks later he manages to run into her at a himself of the few clothes county fair, where he gets her alone. He affects an air of sadness and he was wearing, leaving gloom: "Many's the time I've passed a cemetery in the moonlight and asked himself completely naked. The girl followed his myself if I wouldn't be better off lying there with the rest. . . . " He men-example, and he sank to tions his bad reputation; he deserves it, he says, but is it his fault? "Do you his knees as though he really not know that there exist souls that are ceaselessly in torment?" Sev- Use Spiritual Lures • 365 eral times he takes Emma's hand, but she politely withdraws it. He talks of were about to pray, getting love, the magnetic force that draws two people together. Perhaps it has her to kneel directly opposite. • In this posture, roots in some earlier existence, some previous incarnation of their souls. the girl's beauty was "Take us, for example. Why should we have met? How did it happen? It displayed to Rustico in all can only be that something in our particular inclinations made us come its glory, and his longings blazed more fiercely than closer and closer across the distance that separated us, the way two rivers ever, bringing about the flow together." He takes her hand again and this time she lets him hold it. res u rrectio n of the flesh. After the fair, he avoids her for a few weeks, then suddenly shows up, Alibech stared at this in amazement and said: • claiming that he tried to stay away but that fate, destiny, has pulled him "Rustico, what is that I see back. He takes Emma riding. When he finally makes his move, in the sticking out in front of woods, she seems frightened and rejects his advances. "You must have some you, which I do not mistaken idea," he protests. "I have you in my heart like a Madonna on a possess?" • "Oh, my daughter," said Rustico, pedestal. . . . I beseech you: be my friend, my sister, my angel!" Under the "this is the devil I was spell of his words, she lets him hold her and lead her deeper into the telling you about. Do you woods, where she succumbs. see what he's doing? He's hurting me so much that I Rodolphe's strategy is threefold. First he talks of sadness, melancholy, can hardly endure it. " • discontent, talk that makes him seem nobler than other people, as if life's "Oh, praise be to God," common material pursuits could not satisfy him. Next he talks of destiny, said the girl, "I can see that I am better off than

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  It was late at night or early in the morning and Pam, Randall, Gary, and I fought to stay awake.“Afraid they’ll miss something,” the adults murmured, and they were right. We threaded a circle of twine through our fingers and snapped it. We arm-wrestled and popped our knuckles and kicked our feet until our bodies began to wind down and we moved slower and slower and then hardly at all. Gary went down first, then Randall. Pam and I hung on, despite knowing looks from the adults. I tried to figure out what those looks might mean, but couldn’t follow a thought.My head grew heavier until it leaned against Mama’s shoulder and my eyes shut for a minute, only a minute. They opened again as someone, a man, carried me from the tent into the cold, damp night air. He held me high on his shoulder, his arm wrapped tight around my legs. I breathed in familiar aftershave: Dockery or Brother Cotton, someone I knew. My head bounced and I saw my mother close behind with Gary in her arms. Low, serious voices moved around us. Smoke shot from a tailpipe, gray and blue against the blackness. Odd, how the mind records the most random detail and leaves the larger picture a blur. A car door opened and hands reached out and pulled me in and down, onto a scratchy weave of upholstery. My head settled on a broad thigh. A woman’s sob broke through the static of voices. What? A question, soft and unformed, rose from the bottom of my consciousness. I tried to push myself up and was pulled back down by hands, warm and soothing, on my shoulders, my forehead. The door closed. Car wheels crunched through gravel. We were moving. I let myself sink back into sleep. Everything was okay as long as we were moving. The Road Through Hell1962–1966 NOTHING IS SO MUTE AS A GOD’S MOUTH. Rainer Maria Rilke,“Straining So Hard Against the Strength of Night” Chapter ThirteenI WOKE THE NEXT MORNING WITH RANDALL’S FEET IN MY FACE AND PAM curled beside me. A familiar arrangement. We were used to rolling out of bed after a long night of travel, and tiptoeing around the new house or trailer while our parents slept. Their sprawled bodies and slack faces communicated everything we needed to feel secure. We must have lived in the cheapest and shabbiest of places, but I didn’t experience them that way. My mother’s presence, and her determination to scrub every corner of every place we lived in, made these temporary dwellings feel like home.Pam stirred and we sat up together and looked around. The dingy little room in which we found ourselves felt utterly forsaken. There was no window with morning light streaming through, no heater, no sad-sack Jesus staring down from the colorless wall, no boxes of sheets and bedspreads and whatnots waiting to be unpacked. I could feel my mother’s absence. She was gone; worse, she had never been here.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  which was roiled by complicated emotions, sadness, anger, and something else she couldn't name that hurt most of all. "The rent's unpaid, dear, we haven't a car," Lefty crooned in the sweet tenor I would later inherit; and beneath the music Desdemona now heard her mother's voice again, Euphrosyne Stephanides' last words spoken just before she died from a bullet wound, "Take care of Lefty. . and Desdemona, through her Promise me. Find him a wife!" . . . tears, replying, "I promise. I promise!" . . these voices all speaking at once in Desdemona's head as she crossed the yard to go into the house. She came through the small kitchen where she had dinner cooking (for one) and marched straight into the bedroom she shared with her brother. He was still singing—"Not much money, Oh! but honey"— fixing his cufflinks, parting his hair; but then he looked up and saw his sister—"Ain't we got"— and pianissimo now—"fun"— fell silent. For a moment, the mirror held their two faces. At twenty-one, long before ill-fitting dentures and self-imposed invalidism, my grandmother was something of a beauty. She wore her black hair in 23 long braids pinned up under her kerchief. These braids were not del- icate like a little girl's but heavy and womanly, possessing a natural power, like a beaver's tail. Years, seasons, and various weather had gone into the braids; and when she undid them at night they fell to her waist. At present, black silk ribbons were tied around the braids, too, making them even more imposing, if you got to see them, which few people did. What was on view for general consumption was Des- demona's face: her large, sorrowful eyes, her pale, candlelit com- plexion. I should also mention, with the vestigial pang of a once flat-chested girl, Desdemona's voluptuous figure. Her body was a constant embarrassment to her. It was always announcing itself in ways she didn't sanction. In church when she knelt, in the yard when she beat rugs, beneath the peach tree when she picked fruit, Desde- mona's feminine elaborations escaped the constraints of her drab, confining clothes. Above the jiggling of her body, her kerchief- framed face remained apart, looking slighdy scandalized at what her breasts and hips were up to. Eleutherios was taller and skinnier. In photographs from the time he looks like the underworld figures he idolized, the thin musta- chioed thieves and gamblers who filled the seaside bars of Athens and Constantinople. His nose was aquiline, his eyes sharp, the overall im- pression of his face hawk-like. When he smiled, however, you saw the softness in his eyes, which made it clear that Lefty was in fact no gangster but the pampered, bookish son of comfortably well-off parents.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  marsupial pouches, adaptations for fecundity, for procreating in the wild, which had nothing to do with skinny, hairless, domesticated me. I hurried by, desolate, my ears ringing with the noise of the place. Beyond the Charm Bracelets I passed next into the area of the Kilt Pins. The most populous phylum in our locker room, the Kilt Pins took up three rows of lockers. There they were, fat and skinny, pale and freckled, clumsily putting on socks or pulling up unbecoming underwear. They were like the devices that held our tartans together, unremarkable, dull, but necessary in their way. I don't remember any of their names. Past the Charm Bracelets, through the Kilt Pins, deeper into the locker room, Calliope limped. Back to where the tiles were cracked and the plaster yellowing, under the flickering light fixtures, by the drinking fountain with the prehistoric piece of gum in the drain, I hurried to where I belonged, to my niche of the local habitat. I wasn't alone that year in having my circumstances altered. The specter of busing had started other parents looking into private schools. Baker & Inglis, with an impressive physical plant but a small endowment, wasn't averse to increasing enrollment. And so, in the autumn of 1972, we had arrived (the steam thins out this far from the showers and I can see my old friends clearly): Reetika Chura- swami, with her enormous yellow eyes and sparrow's waist; and Joanne Maria Barbara Peracchio, with her corrected clubfoot and (it must be admitted) John Birch Society affiliation; Norma Abdow, whose father had gone away on the Haj and never come back; Tina Kubek, who was Czech by blood; and Linda Ramirez, half Spanish, half Filipina, who was standing still, waiting for her glasses to unfog. "Ethnic" girls we were called, but then who wasn't, when you got right down to it? Weren't the Charm Bracelets every bit as ethnic? Weren't they as full of strange rituals and food? Of tribal speech? They said "bogue" for repulsive and "queer" for weird. They ate tiny^ crustless sandwiches on white bread— cucumber sandwiches, mayon- naise, and something called "watercress." Until we came to Baker & Inglis my friends and I had always felt completely American. But now the Bracelets' upturned noses suggested that there was another America to which we could never gain admittance. All of a sudden America wasn't about hamburgers and hot rods anymore. It was about the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock. It was about something 298 that had happened for two minutes four hundred years ago, instead of everything that had happened since. Instead of everything that was happening now! Suffice it to say that, in seventh grade, Calliope found herself

• From Middlesex (2002)

  the redwood rotting. To my right was the bathhouse, smooth and poured. The guest house repeated the clean, rectilinear lines of the main house. The architecture of Middlesex was an attempt to redis- cover pure origins. At the time, I didn't know about all that. But as I pushed through the door into the skylit guest house I was aware of the disparities. The boxlike room, stripped of all embellishment or parlor fussiness, a room that wished to be timeless or ahistorical, and there, in the middle of it, my deeply historical, timeworn grandmother. Everything about Middlesex spoke of forgetting and everything about Desdemona made plain the inescapability of re- membering. Against her heap of pillows she lay, exuding woe vapors, but in a kindly way. That was the signature of my grandmother and the Greek ladies of her generation: the kindliness of their despair. How they moaned while offering you sweets! How they complained of physical ailments while patting your knee! My visits always cheered Desdemona up. "Hello, dolly mou" she said, smiling. I sat on the bed as she stroked my hair, cooing endearments in Greek. With my brother Desdemona kept a happy face the entire time he was there. But with me, after ten minutes, her buoyant eyes subsided, and she told me the truth about how she felt. "I am too old now. Too old, honey." Her lifelong hypochondria had never had a better field in which to flower. When she first sentenced herself to the mahogany limbo of her four-poster bed, Desdemona complained only of her usual heart palpitations. But a week later she began to suffer fatigue, dizziness, and circulation problems. "I am having in my legs pain. The blood it doesn't move." "She's fine," Dr. Philobosian told my parents, after a half-hour ex- amination. "Not young anymore, but I see nothing serious." "I no can breathe!" Desdemona argued with him. "Your lungs sound fine." "My leg it is like needles." "Try rubbing it. To stimulate the circulation." "He's too old now too," Desdemona said after Dr. Phil had left. "Get me a new doctor who he isn't already dead himself" My parents complied. Violating our family loyalty to Dr. Phil, they went behind his back and called in new physicians. A Dr. Tut- desworth. A Dr. Katz. The unfortunately named Dr. Cold. Every sin- gle one gave Desdemona the same dire diagnosis that there was 273 nothing wrong with her. They looked into the wrinkled prunes of her eyes; they peered into the dried apricots of her ears; they listened to the indestructible pump of her heart, and pronounced her well.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  Desdemona stayed home and cooked. Without silkworms to tend or mulberry trees to pick, without neighbors to gossip with or goats to milk, my grandmother filled her time with food. While Lefty ground bearings nonstop, Desdemona built pastitsio, moussaka and galacto- boureko. She coated the kitchen table with flour and, using a bleached broomstick, rolled out paper-thin sheets of dough. The sheets came off her assembly line, one after another. They filled the kitchen. They covered the living room, where she'd laid bedsheets over the furniture. Desdemona went up and down the line, adding walnuts, butter, honey, spinach, cheese, adding more layers of dough, then more butter, before forging the assembled concoctions in the oven. At the Rouge, workers collapsed from heat and fatigue, while on Hurlbut my grandmother did a double shift. She got up in the morning to fix breakfast and pack a lunch for her husband, then marinated a leg of lamb with wine and garlic. In the afternoon she made her own sausages, spiced with fennel, and hung them over the heating pipes in the basement. At three o'clock she started dinner, and only when it was cooking did she take a break, sitting at the kitchen table to consult her dream book on the meaning of her previ- ous night's dreams. No fewer than three pots simmered on the stove at all times. Occasionally, Jimmy Zizmo brought home a few of his business associates, hulking men with thick, ham-like heads stuffed into their fedoras. Desdemona served them meals at all hours of the day. Then they were off again, into the city. Desdemona cleaned up. The only thing she refused to do was the shopping. American stores confused her. She found the produce depressing. Even many years later, seeing a Kroger's Mcintosh in our suburban kitchen, she would hold it up to ridicule, saying, "This is nothing. This we fed to goats." To step into a local market was to miss the savor of the peaches, figs, and winter chestnuts of Bursa. Already, in her first months in America, Desdemona was suffering "the homesickness that has no cure." So, after working at the plant and attending En- PS glish class, Lefty was the one to pick up the lamb and vegetables, the spices and honey. . . . . three . . one month . And so they lived .

• From Middlesex (2002)

  "Yes." Tessie looked apprehensive. "What will you tell her?" "What should I tell her?" For another few seconds my mother was silent, thinking. Then she shrugged. "It doesn't matter. Whatever you say she won't re- member. Take this out to her. She wants to soak her feet." Carrying the Epsom salts and a piece of the baklava wrapped in cellophane, I came out of the house and walked along the portico past the courtyard and bathhouse to the guesthouse behind. The door was unlocked. I opened it and stepped in. The only light in the room came from the television, which was turned up extremely loud. Facing me when I entered was the old portrait of Patriarch Athenagoras that Desdemona had saved from the yard sale years ago. In a birdcage by the window, a green parakeet, the last surviving member of my grandparents' former aviary, was moving back and forth on its balsa wood perch. Other familiar objects and furnishings were still in evidence, Lefty's rebetika records, the brass coffee table, and, of course, the silkworm box, sitting in the middle of the en- graved circular top. The box was now so stuffed with mementos it wouldn't shut. Inside were snapshots, old letters, precious buttons, worry beads. Somewhere below all that, I knew, were two long braids of hair, tied with crumbling black ribbons, and a wedding crown made of ship's rope. I wanted to look at these things, but as I stepped farther into the room my attention was diverted by the grand spectacle on the bed. Desdemona was propped up, regally, against a beige corduroy cushion known as a husband. The arms of this cushion encircled her. Protruding from the elastic pocket on the outside of one arm was an aspirator, along with two or three pill bottles. Desdemona was in a pale white nightgown, the bedcovers pulled up to her waist, and in her lap sat one of her Turkish atrocity fans. None of this was surpris- ing. It was what Desdemona had done with her hair that shocked me. On hearing about Milton's death, she had removed her hairnet, 523

• From Middlesex (2002)

  That summer afternoon in 1922, Desdemona wasn't looking at her brother's face. Instead her eyes moved to the suit coat, to the gleaming hair, to the striped trousers, as she tried to figure out what had happened to him these past few months. Lefty was one year younger than Desdemona and she often won- dered how she'd survived those first twelve months without him. For as long as she could remember he'd always been on the other side of the goat's-hair blanket that separated their beds. Behind the kelimi he performed puppet shows, turning his hands into the clever, hunch- backed Karaghiozis who always outwitted the Turks. In the dark he made up rhymes and sang songs, and one of the reasons she hated his new American music was that he sang it exclusively to himself. Des- demona had always loved her brother as only a sister growing up on 24 a mountain could love a brother: he was the whole entertainment, her best friend and confidant, her co-discoverer of short cuts and monks' cells. Early on, the emotional sympathy she'd felt with Lefty had been so absolute that she'd sometimes forgotten they were sepa- rate people. As kids they'd scrabbled down the terraced mountainside like a four-legged, two-headed creature. She was accustomed to their Siamese shadow springing up against the whitewashed house at evening, and whenever she encountered her solitary outiine, it seemed cut in half. Peacetime seemed to be changing everything. Lefty had taken ad- vantage of the new freedoms. In the last month he'd gone down to Bursa a total of seventeen times. On three occasions he'd stayed overnight in the Cocoon Inn across from the Mosque of Sultan Ouhan. He'd left one morning dressed in boots, knee socks, breeches, doulamas^ and vest and come back the following evening in a striped suit, with a silk scarf tucked into his collar like an opera singer and a black derby on his head. There were other changes. He'd begun to teach himself French from a small, plum-colored phrase book. He'd picked up affected gestures, putting his hands in his pockets and rattling change, for instance, or doffing his cap. When Desdemona did the laundry, she found scraps of paper in Lefty's pockets, covered with mathematical figures. His clothes smelled musky, smoky, and sometimes sweet. Now, in the mirror, their joined faces couldn't hide the fact of their growing separation. And my grandmother, whose constitu- tional gloom had broken out into full cardiac thunder, looked at her brother, as she once had her own shadow, and felt that something was missing. "So where are you going all dressed up?" "Where do you think I'm going? To the Koza Han. To sell co- coons." "You went yesterday." "It's the season." With a tortoiseshell comb Lefty parted his hair on the right, adding pomade to an unruly curl that refused to stay flat.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  But there was another reason for my grandmother's unhappiness. She opened the silkworm box in her lap. Inside were her two braids, still tied with the ribbons of mourning, but otherwise the box was empty. After carrying her silkworm eggs all the way from Bithynios, Desdemona had been forced to dump them out at Ellis Island. Silk- worm eggs appeared on a list of parasites. Lefty remained glued to the window. All the way from Hoboken he'd gazed out at the marvelous sights: electric trams pulling pink faces up Albany's hills; factories glowing like volcanoes in the Buffalo night. Once, waking as the train pulled through a city at dawn, Lefty 82 had mistaken a pillared bank for the Parthenon, and thought he was in Athens again. Now the Detroit River sped past and the city loomed. Lefty stared out at the motor cars parked like giant beetles at the curbsides. Smokestacks rose everywhere, cannons bombarding the atmosphere. There were red brick stacks and tall silver ones, stacks in regimental rows or all alone puffing meditatively away, a forest of smokestacks that dimmed the sunlight and then, all of a sudden, blocked it out completely. Everything went black: they'd entered the train station. Grand Trunk Station, now a ruin of spectacular dimensions, was then die city's attempt to one-up New York. Its base was a mammoth marble neoclassical museum, complete with Corinthian pillars and carved entablature. From this temple rose a thirteen-story office building. Lefty, who'd been observing all the ways Greece had been handed down to America, arrived now at where the transmission stopped. In other words: the future. He stepped off to meet it. Des- demona, having no alternative, followed. But just imagine it in those days! Grand Trunk! Telephones in a hundred shipping offices ringing away, still a relatively new sound; and merchandise being sent east and west; passengers arriving and departing, having coffee in the Palm Court or getting their shoes shined, the wing tips of banking, the cap toes of parts supply, the saddle shoes of rum-running. Grand Trunk, with its vaulted ceilings of Guastavino tilework, its chandeliers, its floors of Welsh quarry stone. There was a six- chair barbershop, where civic leaders were mummified in hot towels; and bathtubs for rent; and elevator banks lit by translucent egg-shaped marble lamps. Leaving Desdemona behind a pillar, Lefty searched through the mob in the station for the cousin who was meeting their train. Sourmelina Zizmo, nee Papadiamandopoulos, was my grandparents' cousin and hence my first cousin twice removed. I knew her as a colorful, older woman. Sourmelina of the precarious cigarette ash. Sourmelina of the indigo bathwater. Sourmelina of the Thcosophical Society brunches. She wore satin gloves up to the elbow and moth- ered a long line of smelly dachshunds with tearstained eyes. Foot- stools populated her house, allowing the short-legged creatures access to sofas and chaise longues. In 1922, however, Sourmelina was only twenty-eight. Picking her out of this crowd at Grand Trunk 83

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  Wish I’d thought of this in high school.” — As I walked into the gym, Maxx/Dr. William Morse at my side, Takumi and the Colonel trailing a good bit behind me, I knew I was more likely to get busted than anyone else. But I’d been reading the Culver Creek Handbook pretty closely the last couple weeks, and I reminded myself of my two-pronged defense, in the event I got in trouble: 1. There is not, technically, a rule against paying a stripper to dance in front of the school. 2. It cannot be proven that I was responsible for the incident. It can only be proven that I brought a person onto campus who I presumed to be an expert on sexual deviancy in adolescence and who turned out to be an actual sexual deviant. I sat down with Dr. William Morse in the middle of the front row of bleachers. Some ninth graders sat behind me, but when the Colonel walked up with Lara a moment later, he politely told them, “Thanks for holding our seats,” and ushered them away. As per the plan, Takumi was in the supply room on the second floor, connecting his stereo equipment to the gym’s loudspeakers. I turned to Dr. Morse and said, “We should look at each other with great interest and talk like you’re friends with my parents.” He smiled and nodded his head. “He is a great man, your father. And your mother—so beautiful.” I rolled my eyes, a bit disgusted. Still, I liked this stripper fellow. The Eagle came in at noon on the nose, greeted the senior-class speaker—a former Alabama state attorney general—and then came over to Dr. Morse, who stood with great aplomb and half bowed as he shook the Eagle’s hand—maybe too formal—and the Eagle said, “We’re certainly very glad to have you here,” and Maxx replied, “Thank you. I hope I don’t disappoint.” I wasn’t worried about getting expelled. I wasn’t even worried about getting the Colonel expelled, although maybe I should have been. I was worried that it wouldn’t work because Alaska hadn’t planned it. Maybe no prank worthy of her could be pulled off without her. The Eagle stood behind the podium. “This is a day of historic significance at Culver Creek. It was the vision of our founder Phillip Garden that you, as students and we, as faculty, might take one afternoon a year to benefit from the wisdom of voices outside the school, and so we meet here annually to learn from them, to see the world as others see it. Today, our junior-class speaker is Dr. William Morse, a professor of psychology at the University of Central Florida and a widely respected scholar. He is here today to talk about teenagers and sexuality, a topic I’m sure you’ll find considerably interesting. So please help me welcome Dr. Morse to the podium.” We applauded. My heart beat in my chest like it wanted to applaud, too.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  She was grateful that her phone was back on, that her boy was home, that Alaska helped her cook and that I had kept the Colonel out of her hair, that her job was steady and her coworkers were nice, that she had a place to sleep and a boy who loved her. I sat in the back of the hatchback on the drive home—and that is how I thought of it: home—and fell asleep to the highway’s monotonous lullaby. forty-four days before “COOSA LIQUORS’ entire business model is built around selling cigarettes to minors and alcohol to adults.” Alaska looked at me with disconcerting frequency when she drove, particularly since we were winding through a narrow, hilly highway south of school, headed to the aforementioned Coosa Liquors. It was Saturday, our last day of real vacation. “Which is great, if all you need is cigarettes. But we need booze. And they card for booze. And my ID blows. But I’ll flirt my way through.” She made a sudden and unsignaled left turn, pulling onto a road that dropped precipitously down a hill with fields on either side, and she gripped the steering wheel tight as we accelerated, and she waited until the last possible moment to brake, just before we reached the bottom of the hill. There stood a plywood gas station that no longer sold gas with a faded sign bolted to the roof: COOSA LIQUORS: WE CATER TO YOUR SPIRITUAL NEEDS. Alaska went in alone and walked out the door five minutes later weighed down by two paper bags filled with contraband: three cartons of cigarettes, five bottles of wine, and a fifth of vodka for the Colonel. On the way home, Alaska said, “You like knock-knock jokes?” “Knock-knock jokes?” I asked. “You mean like, ‘Knock knock…” “Who’s there?” replied Alaska. “Who.” “Who Who?” “What are you, an owl?” I finished. Lame. “That was brilliant,” said Alaska. “I have one. You start.” “Okay. Knock knock.” “Who’s there?” said Alaska. I looked at her blankly. About a minute later, I got it, and laughed. “My mom told me that joke when I was six. It’s still funny.” — So I could not have been more surprised when she showed up sobbing at Room 43 just as I was putting the finishing touches on my final paper for English. She sat down on the couch, her every exhalation a mix of whimper and scream. “I’m sorry,” she said, heaving. Snot was dribbling down her chin. “What’s wrong?” I asked. She picked up a Kleenex from the COFFEE TABLE and wiped at her face. “I don’t…” she started, and then a sob came like a tsunami, her cry so loud and childlike that it scared me, and I got up, sat down next her, and put my arm around her. She turned away, pushing her head into the foam of the couch. “I don’t understand why I screw everything up,” she said. “What, like with Marya?

• From Middlesex (2002)

  And here I am now, sketching it all out for you, dutifully oozing feminine glue, but also with a dull pain in my chest, because I realize that genealogies tell you nothing. Tessie knew who was related to whom but she had no idea who her own husband was, or what her in-laws were to each other; the whole thing a fiction created in the lifeboat where my grandparents made up their lives. Sexually, things were simple for them. Dr. Peter Luce, the great sexologist, can cite astonishing statistics asserting that oral sex didn't exist between married couples prior to 1950. My grandparents' love- making was pleasurable but unvarying. Every night Desdemona would disrobe down to her corset and Lefty would press its clasps and hooks, searching for the secret combination that sprung the locked garment open. The corset was all they needed in terms of an aphrodisiac, and it remained for my grandfather the singular erotic 72 emblem of his life. The corset made Desdemona new again. As I said, Lefty had glimpsed his sister naked before, but the corset had the odd power of making her seem somehow more naked; it turned her into a forbidding, armored creature with a soft inside he had to hunt for. When the tumblers clicked, it popped open; Lefty crawled on top of Desdemona and the two of them hardly even moved; the ocean swells did the work for them. Their periphescence existed simultaneously with a less passionate stage of pair bonding. Sex could give way, at any moment, to cozi- ness. So, after making love, they lay staring up through the pulled- back tarp at the night sky passing overhead and got down to the business of life. "Maybe Lina's husband can give me a job," Lefty said. "He's got his own business, right?" "I don't know what he does. Lina never gives me a straight an- swer." "After we save some money, I can open a casino. Some gambling, a bar, maybe a floor show. And potted palms everywhere." "You should go to college. Become a professor like Mother and Father wanted. And we have to build a cocoonery, remember." "Forget the silkworms. I'm talking roulette, rebetika, drinking, dancing. Maybe I'll sell some hash on the side." "They won't let you smoke hashish in America." "Who says?" And Desdemona announced with certitude: "It's not that kind of country."

• From Middlesex (2002)

  that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train- car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've en- tered my story, I need them more than ever. I can't just sit back and watch from a distance anymore. From here on in, everything I'll tell you is colored by the subjective experience of being part of events. Here's where my story splits, divides, undergoes meiosis. Already the world feels heavier, now I'm a part of it. I'm talking about bandages and sopped cotton, the smell of mildew in movie theaters, and of all the lousy cats and their stinking litter boxes, of rain on city streets when the dust comes up and the old Italian men take their folding chairs inside. Up until now it hasn't been my world. Not my Amer- ica. But here we are, at last. The happiness that attends disaster didn't possess Desdemona for long. A few seconds later she returned her head to her husband's chest— and heard his heart beating! Lefty was rushed to the hospital. Two days later he regained consciousness. His mind was clear, his memory intact. But when he tried to ask whether the baby was a boy or a girl, he found he was unable to speak. According to Julie Kikuchi, beauty is always freakish. Yesterday, over strudel and coffee at Cafe Einstein, she tried to prove this to me. "Look at this model," she said, holding up a fashion magazine. "Look at her ears. They belong on a Martian." She started flipping pages. "Or look at the mouth on this one. You could put your whole head in it." 217 I was trying to get another cappuccino. The waiters in their Aus- trian uniforms ignored me, as they do everyone, and outside, the yel- low lindens were dripping and weeping. "Or what about Jackie O.?" said Julie, still advocating. "Her eyes were so wide-set they were basically on the sides of her head. She looked like a hammerhead."

• From Middlesex (2002)

  Magnanimously he cut me a slice. He watched me eat it. Then he said, "I'm telling! That cake was for Sunday." "No fair!" I ran at him. I tried to hit him, but he caught my arms. We wres- tied standing up, until finally Chapter Eleven offered a deal. As I said: in those days, the world was always growing eyes. Here were two more. They belonged to my brother, who, in the guest bathroom, amid the fancy hand towels, stood watching as I pulled down my underpants and lifted my skirt. (If I showed him, he wouldn't tell.) Fascinated as he was, he stayed at a distance. His Adam's apple rose and fell. He looked amazed and frightened. He didn't have much to compare me to, but what he saw didn't misin- form him either: pink folds, a cleft. For ten seconds Chapter Eleven studied my documents, detecting no forgery, as the clouds burst overhead, and I made him get me one more piece of cake. Apparendy, Chapter Eleven's curiosity hadn't been satisfied by 279 looking at his eight-year-old sister. Now, I suspected, he was looking at pictures of the real thing. In 1971, all the men in our lives were gone, Lefty to death, Mil- ton to Hercules Hot Dogs, and Chapter Eleven to bathroom soli- taire. Leaving Tessie and me to deal with Desdemona. We had to cut her toenails. We had to hunt down flies that found their way into her room. We had to move her birdcages around ac- cording to the light. We had to turn on the television for the day's soap operas and we had to turn it off before the murders on the evening news. Desdemona didn't want to lose her dignity, however. When nature called, she called us on the intercom, and we helped her out of bed and into the bathroom. The simplest way to say it is: years passed. As the seasons changed outside the windows, as the weeping willows shed their million leaves, as snow fell on the flat roof and the angle of sunlight declined, Desdemona remained in bed. She was still there when the snow melted and the willows budded again. She was there when the sun, climbing higher, dropped a sunbeam straight though the skylight, like a ladder to heaven she was more than eager to climb.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  My father and mother didn't discuss the situation in front of us and slipped into Greek when discussing it with our grandparents. Chapter Eleven and I were left to figure out what was going on by the tone of a conversation that made no sense to us, and to be hon- est, we didn't pay much attention. We only knew that Milton was suddenly around the house during the day. Milton, whom we had rarely seen in sunlight before, was suddenly out in the backyard, reading the newspaper. We discovered what our father's legs looked like in short pants. We discovered what he looked like when he didn't shave. The first two days his face got sandpapery the way it always did on weekends. But now, instead of seizing my hand and rubbing it against his whiskers until I screamed, Milton no longer had the high spirits to torment me. He just sat on the patio as the beard, like a stain, like a fungus, spread. Unconsciously Milton was adhering to the Greek custom of not shaving after a death in the family Only in this case what had ended wasn't a life but a livelihood. The beard fattened up his already plump face. He didn't keep it trimmed or very clean. And because he didn't utter a word about his troubles, his beard began to express silentiy all the things he wouldn't allow himself to say. Its knots and whorls indicated his increasingly tangled thoughts. Its bitter odor re- leased the ketones of stress. As summer progressed, the beard grew shaggy, unmown, and it was obvious that Milton was thinking about Pingree Street; he was going to seed the way Pingree Street was. Lefty tried to comfort his son. "Be strong," he wrote. With a smile he copied out the warrior epitaph at Thermopylae: "Go tell the Spar- tans, stranger passing by /that here obedient to their laws we lie." But Milton barely read the quote. His father's stroke had convinced him that Lefty was no longer at the top of his game. Mute, carrying his pitiful chalkboard around, lost in his restoration of Sappho, Lefty had begun to seem old to his son. Milton found himself getting im- patient or not paying attention. Intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members , that's what Milton felt, seeing his father sunk in desk light, jutting out a moist underlip, scanning a dead language. 234

• From Middlesex (2002)

  milk for dessert instead of ice cream. (His was a loud silence but a si- lence nonetheless.) A winter during which Tessie's worries about her children immobilized her, so that she failed to return Christmas pres- ents that didn't fit, and merely put them in the closet, without get- ting a refund. At the end of this wounded, dishonest season, as the first crocuses appeared, returning from their winter in the under- world, Calliope Stephanides, who also felt something stirring in the soil of her being, found herself reading the classics. Spring semester of eighth grade brought me into Mr. da Silva's 320 English class. A group of only five students, we met in the green- house on the second floor. Spider plants let down vines from the glass roof. Closer to our heads geraniums crowded in, giving off a smell somewhere between licorice and aluminum. In addition to me, there was Reetika, Tina, Joanne, and Maxine Grossinger. Though our parents were friends, I hardly knew Maxine. She didn't mix with the other kids on Middlesex. She was always practicing her violin. She was the only Jewish kid at school. She ate lunch alone, spooning kosher food from Tupperware. I assumed her pallor was the result of being indoors all the time and that the blue vein that beat wildly at her temple was a kind of inner metronome. Mr. da Silva had been born in Brazil. This was hard to notice. He wasn't exactly the Carnival type. The Latin details of his childhood (the hammock, the outdoor tub) had been erased by a North Ameri- can education and a love of the European novel. Now he was a liberal Democrat and wore black armbands in support of radical causes. He taught Sunday school at a local Episcopal church. He had a pink, cul- tivated face and dark blond hair that fell into his eyes when he recited poetry. Sometimes he picked thisties or wildflowers from the green and wore them in the lapel of his jacket. He had a short, compact body, and often did isometric exercises between class periods. He played the recorder, too. A music stand in his classroom held sheet music, early Baroque pieces, mostly. He was a great teacher, Mr. da Silva. He treated us with complete seriousness, as if we eighth graders, during fifth period, might settle something scholars had been arguing about for centuries. He listened to our chirping, his hairline pressing down on his eyes. When he spoke himself, it was in complete paragraphs. If you listened closely it was possible to hear the dashes and commas in his speech, even the colons and semicolons. Mr. da Silva had a relevant quotation for everything that happened to him and in this way evaded real life. In- stead of eating his lunch, he told you what Oblonsky and Levin had for lunch in Anna Karenina. Or, describing a sunset from Daniel Deronda, he failed to notice the one that was presendy falling over

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  It is often translated “that which the sea breaks against,” and I think that is Alaska’s experience of herself: She feels that the sea is breaking against her, again and again. Alaska isn’t introduced as fully as the other characters. Did you intentionally focus on the effect she has on people, rather than describing her? The first time Pudge and Alaska have a real conversation, she’s sitting next to him in the dark and he can’t really see her. And throughout the story, there are times when he’s looking at her without seeing her, or there’s something between them that prevents him from seeing her whole face, or he only sees the back of her head, etc. That was all meant to indicate how incompletely he sees Alaska, something she mentions to him repeatedly. But in all his fascination with her, he can’t help but romanticize her, which makes it difficult for him to understand the reality and seriousness of her pain. And that’s true for other characters in the book, too—Takumi, the Colonel, and Lara all think of Alaska as somehow more human than the rest of them. That’s something they all have to grapple with after. There are many similarities between the swan and Alaska. Were you aware of this connection when you were writing the book? That is really compelling. I don’t think I was conscious of it, but it holds together better than a lot of metaphors I did intend. Swans are animals that we romanticize—endowing with nobility and beauty—but if you’ve ever actually encountered a swan, they’re a hell of a lot more complicated than that. The complex (and flawed) ideas associating whiteness and purity resonate for both swans and Alaska, too. Most importantly, swans are traditionally associated with a passive beauty: They are things to be looked at. But in fact swans are capable of agency and power and biting people on the butt. Do you like Alaska as a person? I love her as a person. As for liking her: I’ve always sort of preferred people who are not entirely likable. Does Alaska have a mood disorder? I’m not a psychiatrist, so I’m not going to take a guess at that. I think Alaska is clearly struggling and in a lot of pain, though. And I think it’s particularly difficult for her because she feels alone in that pain, partly because no one listens to her when she tries to share it, which is what really (in my experience, anyway) makes suffering unbearable. But the weird thing about depression is that it tends to further isolate you from people, making it ever harder for anyone to bridge the gap and really hear you in the way you need to be heard. So it becomes progressively more difficult to feel that you aren’t alone with your pain, which can make the despair feel permanent and unsolvable.

• From Books That Have Made History: Books That Can Change Your Life (2005)

  161 of Independence and the Constitution, they studied classical antiquity for models of how republican and democratic governments had worked in the past. They believed that history was a tool and that no society was immune to the process of historical decay. They also believed that all nations would eventually pass away. The Romans of the 2 nd century A.D. believed that Rome was eternal, as the emperors told them. For individuals in the Enlightenment—including Goethe, the Founding Fathers, and Gibbon— the story of how and why the Roman Empire had passed away was of compelling importance. Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is the most infl uential historical work written in English. It ranks—along with the works of Thucydides, Herodotus, Livy, and Tacitus—as one of the fi ve greatest histories ever composed. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was published between 1776 and 1789, the time of the Declaration of Independence, the War of Independence, and the Constitution of the United States. For part of the time between 1776 and 1789, Gibbon was a member of Parliament. He later said that his time in Parliament was a school of civic virtue and patriotism, the fi rst qualities that a historian needs. The Decline and Fall is a long, sad commentary on the history of a nation that gave up political liberty to become a superpower. Under the republican constitution that the Founding Fathers admired and Gibbon describes, Rome enjoyed a balance between the senate and the people, with a strong executive commander-in-chief. Rome rose from a tiny city-state to master of its world. By the 1 st century B.C., Rome’s multicultural and diverse empire resulted in tremendous af fl uence. This af fl uence corrupted every aspect of the republican political system; elections were openly bought and sold, and political factions were so strong that the Roman senate was gridlocked. Finally, the Roman people lost con fi dence in their government and in the republican way of life. They wanted peace and order. The Roman people gave up their political liberty and transferred all real power to a military dictator, their emperor. The fi rst emperor was Julius Caesar, who was followed by the great statesman Augustus. Caesar and Augustus created a new order that brought peace and prosperity to their world. The Roman Empire reached its apex in the 2 nd century A.D. It stretched from the North