Shame

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Leading reasons for this novel’s preeminence in gender politics remain clear: its impenitent candor about sexual activities, its fearless ability to say whatever can be seen or felt whenever two or three disrobe, its very picaresque structure reflecting a less than monogamous model for the way learning takes place, and, of course, the sheer forceful beauty of its coruscated rendering. —And yet, with the hindsight of twenty years, we must admit this book seems an odd one for Gay Liberationists to have made their very bible. While its cultural allusiveness and mordant humor might make its tone seem perfect for the Movement’s uses, the work has one striking drawback: It does not, in fact, concern a youth’s difficult if necessary and finally healthy “coming out.” Though A Boy’s Own Story is still viewed as the classic late-twentieth-century novel of homosexual emergence, we do have a little problem here. Read now, in light of the thousands of lesser works it inadvertently spawned (so much for the myth of gay sterility—see Proust, Wilde, Genet, Tennessee Williams, Warhol, et al.) we note that this book succeeds as fiction precisely in how it fails as a “Come On Out” brochure. It never passed itself off as anything but a novel about a bright, agile, perverse imp. It is, in fact, the story of a child who would do most anything to “stay in.” Not yet fifteen, he seeks medical help, he begs to be sent to boarding school in hopes that male role models there might firm up his resolve to become a husband and father. He shudders at the thought of devolving into yet another aging “gay,” wearing Liberace ruffles, singing show tunes at the family piano for Mom’s delighted bridge club. Instead he falls in love with a girl wonderfully named Helen Paper (making his conquest of her seem all the more theoretical). And when their romance founders on date #1, our hero suffers the tortures of Goethe’s young Werther. In the twenty-first century, we must read this work not as a tract for that painfully titled option “the Gay Life Style” but as an account of the one young man most eager to forswear his homosexuality. And, no, this is not just “a phase,” his rabid denial. The book ends with definitive proof of his adult effectiveness, of his profound ambivalence concerning his unchosen sexuality. That foregone predisposition is visible to everyone else in the book; is visible alas in every line of its own exquisite expression. And here rests the source of much of this work’s humor. But movements, never known to get a joke, simply take what they need, extracting from whatever new work appears the vitality required for current propagandists needs.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I had never been bad before. Of course I’d been intolerably wicked or maybe just sick in sleeping with other boys and men, but those transgressions were secret and solitary. Now at last I, who’d always been considered obedient, even docile, was rubbing shoulders with guys who were about to flunk out, who got drunk and totaled cars, who knocked up girls, who got into fistfights with their dads, who stole motorcycles and went off on joy rides, who had created such chaos at home they’d been banished to Eton. These boys accepted anyone at all so long as he was a smoker and a failure. Here came the hell raisers who sneaked off campus after lights-out, who downed a quart of vodka a day and nodded off in class, who faked medical excuses to get out of gym, who went weeks without showering (“Give us a break”), who jerked off in the back of class to the amazement of their neighbors (“Yuck”), who farted and popped their zits in assembly (“Ee—yuh”), who bought term papers from brains or beat the brains up, who in one case seduced a master’s wife (“Neat”), in another a fat Latvian wash-up girl with greasy braids on the kitchen staff (“Barf”). My favorite smoker was Chuck, a gangly, pimply, popular guy with the gift of gab and the ambition to be a writer like Hemingway. Chuck was rumored to have the biggest dick on campus, but I never got to check it out. He was from a rich family and after listening to his stories of life at home I pieced together a glamorous feature film of two-seater planes, a sheep ranch in Montana, a fishing camp in Canada, a private island off Georgia—though Chuck didn’t give a damn about possessions, all he wanted to do was stuff two fat black whores into his rattletrap Chevy and head south with them and a case of beer and of painful but not quite incapacitating clap and holler curse words at Arkansas cops and pass out from tequila, fatigue and sunburn at a two-bit rodeo in some dusty Texas town before he revived long enough to slip over the border into Tijuana, where he’d find those magic mushrooms or whatever the hell they were and that fabled gal in a straw basket hung on ropes from the ceiling, just her cunt exposed as she’s lowered onto your stiff prong as you lie back and let the big-eyed nine-year-old girl assistant slowly, solemnly spin the basket and fan the flies off your face.

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

  I lay in the tub and let the hot water run until it singed my skin. I wished Mom had saved me the need to learn the why for myself. I wished she’d told me about what some men do. I wished I’d listened. I knew that I was dirty and disobedient and deserved to be punished. I started scratching my inner thigh and inched up slowly. I clawed until I bled. Then I cried quietly into my bloody hands. Each time I peed, the sting reminded me of my crime. I mutilated myself for months after, even after Valentín moved back to Puerto Rico. I never got close enough for him to touch me again. THERE WAS ANOTHER TIME: I WAS ASSAULTED ON A BROOKLYN street when I was visiting my mother, just down the block from where she still lives, I didn’t want to tell her what happened. But I couldn’t get myself together before I saw her: My shirt was ripped, my hair was a mess, my fists were red and swollen. I had his skin underneath my nails. She heard me sobbing in the hallway and came out running, “Que te pasó?” she yelled. I was twenty-four. This ain’t shit compared to what she’d been through. ON A SUMMER DAY WHEN MY DAUGHTER WAS SIX, I WENT TO the playground with a friend so that my daughter could play while we talked and, as happens often with women, we started talking about the things that girls endure. When she confessed that she was molested, I nodded and said, “Me too.” I watched as my daughter ran across the jungle gym and started grappling across the monkey bars. She hadn’t been able to do it just a few months before; she’d sulked as she watched other kids and gotten mad when I had tried to help. “Lemme do it myself,” she’d said, pushing my hands off. She made it a few rungs in and fell. She climbed up, tried again, and fell. I saw her tear up and wipe her eyes roughly. She spent the better part of the afternoon working on getting across those bars. When I asked her about it as we were leaving, she said, “I’m gonna do it, Mommy. Watch.” Sure enough, all these months later, her hands were calloused but she could grapple across all those rungs. She waved at me when she reached the other side. “Look, Mommy! I did it!” We gave her a thumbs-up and kept talking. “How old were you when it happened?” my friend asked. “I was little,” I said. “I was six.” “Vasia’s age?” “Yeah.” I looked over at my daughter, who had moved on to the swings, and that’s when it hit me: I’d been blaming myself for thirty years for what happened to me when I was just six.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  It fortuned that while Barbarus went towards the Justice in a fury and rage, and Myrmex fast bound, followed him weeping, not because he was accused before his master, but by reason he knew his owne conscience guilty: behold by adventure Philesiterus (going about earnest businesse) fortuned to meet with them by the way, who fearing the matter which he committed the night before, and doubting lest it should be knowne, did suddainly invent a meane to excuse Myrmex, for he ran upon him and beate him about the head with his fists, saying: Ah mischievous varlet that thou art, and perjured knave. It were a good deed if the Goddesse and thy master here, would put thee to death, for thou art worthy to be imprisoned and to weare out these yrons, that stalest my slippers away when thou werest at my baines yester night. Barbarus hearing this returned incontinently home, and called his servant Myrmex, commanding him to deliver the slippers againe to the right owner.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  At miles ille, ut postea didici, tandem velut emersus gravi crapula, nutabundus tamen et tot plagarum dolore saucius baculoque se vix sustinens civitatem adventat, confususque de impotentia deque inertiasuaquicquam ad quemquam referre popularium, sed tacitus iniuriam devorans, quosdam commilitones nanctus, is tantum clades enarrat suas. Placuit ut ipse quidem contubernio se tantisper absconderet (nam praeter propriam contumeliam militaris etiam sacramenti genium ob amissam spatham verebatur), ipsi autem signis nostris enotatis investigationi vindictaeque sedulam darent operam: nec defuit vicinus perfidus qui nos illico occultari nuntiaret. Tum commilitones accersitis magistratibus menti- untur sese multi pretii vasculum argenteum prae- sidis in via perdidisse, idque hortulanum quendam repperisse nec velle restituere, sed apud familiarem quendam sibi delitescere. Tunc magistratus et damno 466 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK IX hide himself and his ass awhile in some secret place, that he might be hid for the space of two or three days, until such time as all danger were past. Then his friend, not forgetting the ancient amity between them, entertained him willingly, and tying my legs drew me up a pair of stairs into a chamber, while my master, remaining in the shop, crept into a chest and lay hidden there with the cover closed fast. The soldier (as 1 afterwards learned) rose up at last as one awakened from a drunken sleep, but he could scarce go by reason of his wounds, howbeit,: at length, by little and little, through aid of his staff, he came to the town ; but he would not declare the matter to any person, nor complain to any justice, but inwardly digested his injury, lest he should be accused of cowardice or dastardness. Yet in the end he told some of his companions of all the matter that happened; but they advised him that he should remain for a while closed in some secret place, think- ing that beside the injury which he had received, he should be accused of the breach of his faith and soldier's oath, by reason of the loss of his sword,! and that they should diligently learn:the signs and appearance of my master and me to search him out and take vengeance upon him. At last, there was an unfaithful neighbour that told them where we were: then incontinently the soldiers went to the justice, declaring that they had lost by the way a silver goblet of their captain's, very precious, and that a gardener had found it, who, refusing to render up the goblet, was hidden in one of his friends’ house. By and by the magistrate, understanding the loss of the captain, 1 A soldier's loss of his sword was considered equal to desertion, and punished with equal severity. 461 LUCIUS APULEIUS

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Two fat maids were climbing the hill, stopping every few steps to catch their breath. One, a shiny, blue-black fat woman wearing a flowered turban and holding a purple umbrella with a white plastic handle, was scowling and talking fast but obviously to humorous effect, for her companion couldn’t stop laughing. The bells of the Catholic school behind the dripping trees across the street marked the quarter hour, the half hour. More and more cars were passing me. I studied every driver—had my friend overslept? The milkman. The bread truck. Damn hillbilly. A bus went by, carrying just one passenger. A quarter to seven. He wasn’t coming. When I saw him the next evening on the square he waved at me and came over to talk. From his relaxed manner I instantaneously saw that he’d duped me and I was powerless. To whom could I report him? Like a heroin addict or a Communist, I was outside the law—outside it but with him, this man. We sat side by side on the same bench. A bad muffler exploded in a volley and the cooing starlings perched on the fountain figure’s arm flew up and away leaving behind only the metal dove. I took off my tie, rolled it up and slipped it inside my pocket. Because I didn’t complain about being betrayed, my friend said, “See those men yonder?” “Yes.” “I could git you one for eight bucks.” He let that sink in; yes, I thought, I could take someone to one of those little fleabag hotels. “Which one do you want?” he said. I handed him the money and said, “The blond.” THREE Until I was seven my parents, my sister and I lived in a Tudor-style house at the end of a lane in the city where my father remained after the divorce. Our house and three others formed a wooded, almost rural enclave set down in the midst of an old, poor section of the city. I could never quite situate our enclave in the world outside; I remember my astonishment the day I roamed through the hollow behind our place, climbed up the far hill, pushed aside branches—and stared out at a major four-lane thoroughfare I’d been driven down countless times but had never suspected ran so close to our property. Certainly not behind it, of all things. To me the city lay entirely in front of our gates in a dirty, busy antechamber. I consulted with my sister. She was four years older, could read, went to school and knew everything. “Sure, dumbbell,” she said. “Of course it’s behind the house. Where’d you think it was?” She screwed her fingertip into her temple and said, “Duh.” She began to chant a colorless litany of “Dumbbells.” I stopped my ears with my hands and ran, crying, back into the house.

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

  One time we were riding a horse together. It spooked and ran and we fell off when it took a sharp turn. Her body fell into a wood post. Mine did not. I remember her crying, taking her shirt off, the pale white side of her scraped and bleeding. I remember thinking, She has her shirt off and she doesn’t care. I remember bathroom Bactine and bandages and never wanting to ride a horse again. Adventures. A fort down by the river. Fiberglass. Aluminum. Boards. Dirt. It had bunk beds. And boys. Her brothers. She brought me there one day. I was maybe seven. Now I wonder, did she lure me? Was this the plan all along? Adventures. They kissed her with tongue to show me how easy it was. “See? No big deal. Now you try it.” I didn’t want to try it. The fort was hot. The door was blocked. I didn’t want this. Seven years old? Eight? Nine? Six? Which age makes it better? “Just do it!” These weren’t the words. These were the words. I was a child. I was scared. She said them too. Three against one. I didn’t do it. They did it. I did nothing except endure my first lesson on how to be a girl. I remember not being able to breathe and crying while they felt my perfectly flat chest, their slimy hot tongues pushing into my mouth, alien and gross. I remember pushing and running because I was suffocating, scared, because it all felt like speeding downhill without brakes and if I didn’t run I would crash and that crash would cost too many points. I didn’t know about the points, but somewhere, deep down, I knew. I told my parents when I got home. Not everything. We learn not to tell everything. We know telling everything will make them see the bad in us. How it is our fault. How we contributed. We fear repercussions, albeit lighter than the ones we will administer to ourselves; slut, bad, ugly, weak, whore, trash, shame, hate. We tell just enough, if we tell at all. I wasn’t allowed to play with her after that. I was okay with that. Summary Sometimes you will be forced into things you don’t want to do. Sometimes you will be made to feel bad you don’t want to do the things. After the things are done, you will feel like a bad person. These feelings will never go away. They enter the wet plaster of you and harden into the mold of you. The way you are taught to be a girl will become how you are as a woman—a woman who is, at her core, not good enough, without worth, tarnished. Points: 2? 3? 1? Lesson Two Why was it always friends, friends of? Maybe because the door was already open, less work? Sitting ducks? Easy prey?

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  No one talked much. There was little laughter, except when my stepmother was on the phone with one of her social friends. Although my father hated most people, he had wanted my stepmother to take her place in society, and she had. She’d become at once proper and frivolous, innocent and amusing, high-spirited and reserved—the combination of wacky girl and prim matron her world so admired. I learned my part less well. I feared the sons of her friends and made shadows among the debs. I played the piano without ever improving; to practice would have meant an acceptance of more delay, whereas I wanted instant success, the throb of plumed fans in the dark audience, the glare off diamonded necks and ears in the curve of loges. What I had instead was the ache of waiting and the fear I wasn’t worthy. Before dressing I’d stand naked before the closet mirror and wonder if my body was worthy. I can still picture that pale skin stretched over ribs, the thin, hairless arms and sturdier legs, the puzzled, searching face—and the slow lapping of disgust and longing, disgust and longing. The disgust was hot, penetrating—nobody would want me because I was a sissy and had a mole between my shoulder blades. The longing was cooler, less substantial, more the spray off a wave than the wave itself. Perhaps the eyes were engaging, there was something about the smile. If not lovable as a boy, then maybe as a girl; I wrapped the towel into a turban on my head. Or perhaps need itself was charming, or could be. Maybe my need could make me as appealing as Alice, the woman who worked the Addressograph machine with me. I was always reading and often writing but both were passionately abstract activities. Early on, I had recognized that books pictured another life, one quite foreign to mine, in which people circled one another warily and with exquisite courtesy until an individual or a couple erupted and flew out of the salon, spangling the night with fire. I had somehow stumbled on Ibsen and that’s how he struck me: oblique social chatter followed by a heroic death in a snowslide or on the steeple of a church (I wondered how these scenes could be staged). Oddly enough, the “realism” of the last century seemed to me tinglingly farfetched: vows, betrayals, flights, fights, sacrifices, suicides.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  He then read me a very funny description of life at the Italian school. I tried to be attentive and complimented him. Then we turned to Argentina. I had been afraid he might have already forgotten this last plan of his. It had, in any case, probably been only a fantasy. As soon as I spoke of it, however, it again assumed reality in Henry’s eyes. He told me he had definitely decided to leave. “Well, I’m delighted,” he concluded. “You’ll see how rich we’ll become.” Henry, who was disinterested and both lavish and a little miserly, often spoke of fabulous deals and wealth. Financial power was a compensation for him and fed his imagination: “It is not wealth that attracts me,” I said. “Then why are you leaving?” “Just like that.” “Ah? And why follow me to Argentina, of all places?” I was trapped. I realized too late that I should never have started this discussion. An explanation seemed unbearable. What could I say, and how could I make myself clear? I had no intention of telling Henry about my health. Impulsively, however, I chose this alternative as the lesser evil. So I told him how necessary my departure was because of the climate, as though this was the real reason for my decision. He was the only person I had ever trusted with this secret. Sometimes I have childishly regretted it. Perhaps I did not derive from my illness all the attention and affection it generally warrants. Perhaps I revealed it to Henry, in spite of myself, to compensate for this. Well, I achieved my little success. Henry, who had his back turned, whirled around suddenly and, with real friendship, put his arm around my shoulders. He even used a few Italian expressions while his free hand gesticulated. But there was not the slightest trace of emotion in me. I was ashamed at cheating him like this, with such an obviously emotional excuse. My physical catastrophe was the least of my misfortunes. Henry told me that his sister too was “stricken”: he could not pronounce the word tubercular. She was living in Switzerland and was slowly getting better. It’s not as dangerous as it used to be, he assured me, and one gets over it very well. I would quickly get well with the will to do so, and I was sensible to come with him to live in Argentina, in the fresh air. For a second, I was tempted to confide in Henry and tell him all the truth. Did I still feel like living? But my courage failed. I confirmed him in his opinions and vaguely assured him that I very much wanted to get well. He let himself be persuaded, and I unjustly reflected that no one can put himself in the place of another.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I could never learn to use the phone. My excitement prevented me from hearing anything and, as I myself screamed and stammered into the receiver, no one could understand me. As for the refrigerator, white and cold and majestic as a medical mystery, I had a very special respect for it. I realized, quite truthfully, that to buy one of them we would have to sell all our furniture, and who, anyway, would want to buy our junk? So I managed to acquire a kind of practical wisdom. Unable to gain their elegance, their natural ease, their detachment born of excessive wealth, I pretended, at the cost of much self-torture, to be disinterested about the material things of the world. Because I could not afford cakes, I pretended not to like them; I pretended not to enjoy billiards, going to cafés, horse-racing, collecting stamps, dancing, dressing with care, chasing after girls. And, up to a point, I became really austere and modest in my appetites, even something of a moralist, for I was stern in my judgments of the conduct of others. In brief, I managed to acquire the reputation of being a serious boy. At this game, one can either diminish oneself or sublimate. I have known boys who have acquired tearful eyes, a head that always leans or turns to the side, and the gentleness and politeness of the vanquished. But I became inflexible in my principles, dogmatic in my judgments, easily offended, merciless about weakness, whether my own or that of others, and ambitious to the point of self-destruction. More or less consciously, of course, I tried to imitate my schoolmates. But nothing I did was spontaneous, everything required effort and calculation. I forced myself to listen to operas, to follow plays, to note the lives of their authors and information about the works themselves. I attended gatherings of youth organizations but brought to them so much tension and gravity of my own that I could never join in their spontaneity and enthusiasm that was so childish and thoughtless, but so relaxing. I was one of those rare characters who reflect on the theory of being a Boy Scout, on the organization’s place in society and its educational value, while the other boys are living it, singing and playing. It was impossible for me to forget myself; every once in a while this was brought to my attention by others. One day, Bouli, a boy I had begun to like because he was intelligent and seemed not to be blind to certain distinctions, remarked to me, much to my humiliation and surprise: “Why do you dress in such an impossible way? You love to ridicule the affectations of the overfastidious and yet, at heart, you have all those of the negligent.”

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Rachel had been brought up by her father, a Miami real estate investor of a cruelty that surpassed description, though incest, starvation and frequent beatings were hinted at. His evil nature I confused with his daughter’s poetic genius. Whereas DeQuincey sniggered, stuttered and shrugged his way through his gruesome account, never more than a wisecrack away from pain, Rachel refused to tell her story, but when she relented she proceeded with great gravity. Each of them, in fact, competed for my sympathy. One night I told the Scotts of my struggles against homosexuality and of my present effort to be cured through psychoanalysis. Although I maintained a flippant tone about sex, the Scotts both stood as I spoke, then came over to my kitchen chair, drew me to my feet and embraced me, tears in their eyes. “You poor boy,” Mr. Scott said again and again, searching my face for the stigmata of mental illness. “You poor, poor boy. But surely you haven’t acted on these impulses, have you?” It took a moment for me to realize they hoped I had only thought about sex with men but never actually engaged in it. I assured them I was very experienced, though I wasn’t. I exaggerated the depth of my depravity. Although I was content to accept their sympathy, I didn’t want them to pity me for crimes I had merely contemplated. My admission put them off a bit, as though the fact of sex were a coarse redundancy and the idea of it quite sinful enough. My confession spurred them on to more daring feats of self-disclosure. I learned that DeQuincey had also been homosexual briefly, a period just before his marriage and conversion, a period adumbrated as a time of faltering, of humiliation, exhaustion and confusion, of bouts of madness alternating with briefer and briefer zones of lucidity, as an accelerating train leaving the station might roll faster and faster under dim lamps before plunging into the blackout of night. Now he was no longer homosexual, not in any way, nor did he ever experience even the slightest twitch of forbidden desire. This complete change he attributed to Christ and Rachel. The November night went on and on endlessly, exactly like that ghost train in my story, dim rolling stock gliding slowly over the clicking place where the tracks switched, the constant bass hum of that somnolent progress passing over that one tenor break, the riveted and rusting bulkheads emblazoned with the mud-spattered logos of distant places, everything stately as destiny. I could hear the night’s freight cars clicking past, and the sky shook out its hair, silver clouds backlit by the moon. In this measured silence Rachel told me about her own conversion from Judaism to the Church of England, an enlightenment she attributed to her chance reading of C.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I remember the operation was over, all over, and she was weeping in my arms;—a salutory storm of sobs after one of the fits of moodiness that had become so frequent with her in the course of that otherwise admirable year! I had just retracted some silly promise she had forced me to make in a moment of blind impatient passion, and there she was sprawling and sobbing, and pinching my caressing hand, and I was laughing happily, and the atrocious, unbelievable, unbearable, and, I suspect, eternal horror that I know now was still but a dot of blackness in the blue of my bliss; and so we lay, when with one of those jolts that have ended by knocking my poor heart out of its groove, I met the unblinking dark eyes of two strange and beautiful children, faunlet and nymphet, whom their identical flat dark hair and bloodless cheeks proclaimed siblings if not twins. They stood crouching and gaping at us, both in blue play-suits, blending with the mountain blossoms. I plucked at the lap-robe for desperate concealment—and within the same instant, something that looked like a polka-dotted pushball among the undergrowth a few paces away, went into a turning motion which was transformed into the gradually rising figure of a stout lady with a raven-black bob, who automatically added a wild lily to her bouquet, while staring over her shoulder at us from behind her lovejy carved bluestone children. Now that I have an altogether different mess on my conscience, I know that I am a courageous man, but in those days I was not aware of it, and I remember being surprised by my own coolness. With the quiet murmured order one gives a sweatstained distracted cringing trained animal even in the worst of plights (what mad hope or hate makes the young beast’s flanks pulsate, what black stars pierce the heart of the tamer!), I made Lo get up, and we decorously walked, and then indecorously scuttled down to the car. Behind it a nifty station wagon was parked, and a handsome Assyrian with a little blue-black beard, un monsieur très bien, in silk shirt and magenta slacks, presumably the corpulent botanist’s husband, was gravely taking the picture of a signboard giving the altitude of the pass. It was well over 10,000 feet and I was quite out of breath; and with a scrunch and a skid we drove off, Lo still struggling with her clothes and swearing at me in language that I never dreamed little girls could know, let alone use.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I was going out on a date with Helen Paper and I had to calm myself by then because the evening would surely be quicksilver small talk and ten different kinds of smile and there would be hands linking and parting as in a square dance you had to be very subtle to hear called, subtle and calm. I wanted so badly to be popular, to have the others look back as I ran to catch up, then to walk with my left hand around his waist, the right around hers, her long hair blown back on my shoulder, pooling there for a moment in festive intimacy, a sort of gold epaulet of the secret order of joy. I had spent so much of my childhood sunk into a cross-eyed, nose-picking turpitude of shame and self-loathing, scrunched up in the corner of a sweating leather chair on a hot summer day, the heat having silenced the birds, even the construction workers on the site next door, and delivering me up to the admonishing black head of the fan on the floor slowly shaking from left to right, right to left to signal its tedious repetition of no, no, no, and to exhale the faintly irritating vacillations of its breath. No, no, no—those were the words I repeated to myself, not with force but as a Jesus prayer of listless grief. Energy in itself is a sort of redemption. No wonder we admire Satan. But if the Devil were listless, if he were a pale man in his underwear who watched television by day behind closed Venetian blinds—oh, if that were the Devil I would fear him. That’s what Being Popular seemed to promise, a deliverance from the humiliation of daily life, its geological torpor, the dailiness that rusts the blade of resolve and rots the stage curtain, that fades all colors and returns all fields to pasture. Being popular was equivalent to becoming a character, perhaps even a person, since if to be is to be perceived, then to be perceived by many eyes and with envy, interest, respect or affection is to exist more densely, more articulately, every last detail minutely observed and thereby richly rendered. I knew that my sister wasn’t popular, at least not at school. She sat at home night after night and no matter how she styled her hair or wore her skirts she looked unliked, dowdy with dislike. Our mother told us she’d been popular as a girl, but she had grown up on a farm where families did everything together.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  At the moment I was spelling out for him my objection to God, an argument I’d worked out previously but that the wine was muddling: “But if God is all-knowing He must have foreseen from the beginning how people would suffer, and if He foresaw it, then we didn’t really ever have a choice, and if He was all good, then why did He let us suffer, wait a minute, wait a minute …” Father Burke had stopped tapping his fingers. His smile had faded and his eyes had gone cloudy. He’d let his face become old and weary, as though to say I had done this to him. Suddenly his eyes were homing in on me, a flicker of his tongue stung his lips back into life and he said, “But shouldn’t we set aside this philosophy” —generous dollop of irony to suggest that if he was interested in my soul he was bored by my mind, for my soul might be eternal but my mind was all too obviously adolescent—“and move on to something a little more urgent.” He pressed his fingertips to his brow and hid behind his hands. “Haven’t you something you want to tell me about?” he asked out of this manual tent, his voice hollow. But he was trying to intimidate the wrong person. I was, after all, a Buddhist. I’d never believed, or only in fleeting reverie, in a warm, concerned, touchy Christian God, who seemed all too obviously a conflation of what people wanted and feared. As a character, Burke intrigued me more than his deity. I appreciated the sense of drama he wanted to inject into my existence and I was flattered he thought I, or at least some essential if rather abstract principle within me, was worth saving. But I also felt surging within me a fierce need to be independent. Of course I responded to the appeal of divine hydraulics, this system of souls damned or crowned or destroyed or held in suspense, these pulleys and platforms sinking and lifting on the great stage, and I recognized that my view of things seemed by contrast impoverished, lacking in degree and incident. But the charming intricacy of a myth is not sufficient to compel belief. I found no good reason to assume that the ultimate nature of reality happens to resemble the backstage of an opera house. On a more emotional level I had an aversion to anything authoritarian. I might long for the capacious, sheltering embrace of a father but I detested paternalism. I was quite hostile to it, in fact. “Well, yes,” I said, “I am seeing a psychiatrist because I have conflicts over certain homosexual tendencies I’m feeling.” At these words Father Burke’s face lurched up out of his hands. Not the nervous little confession he had expected. He recovered his poise and decided to laugh boisterously, the laugh of Catholic centuries. “Conflicts?” he whooped, in tears of laughter by now.

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

  Because I questioned myself and my sanity and what I was doing wrong in this situation. Because of course I feared that I might be overreacting, overemotional, oversensitive, weak, playing victim, crying wolf, blowing things out of proportion, making things up. Because generations of women have heard that they’re irrational, melodramatic, neurotic, hysterical, hormonal, psycho, fragile, and bossy. Because girls are coached out of the womb to be nonconfrontational, solicitous, deferential, demure, nurturing, to be tuned in to others, and to shrink and shut up. Because speaking up for myself was not how I learned English. Because I’m fluent in Apology, in Question Mark, in Giggle, in Bowing Down, in Self-Sacrifice. Because slightly more than half of the population is regularly told that what happens doesn’t or that it isn’t the big deal we’re making it into. Because your mothers, sisters, and daughters are routinely second-guessed, blown off, discredited, denigrated, besmirched, belittled, patronized, mocked, shamed, gaslit, insulted, bullied, harassed, threatened, punished, propositioned, and groped, and challenged on what they say. Because when a woman challenges a man, then the facts are automatically in dispute, as is the speaker, and the speaker’s license to speak. Because as women we are told to view and value ourselves in terms of how men view and value us, which is to say, for our sexuality and agreeability. Because it was drilled in until it turned subconscious and became unbearable need: don’t make it about you; put yourself second or last; disregard your feelings but not another’s; disbelieve your perceptions whenever the opportunity presents itself; run and rerun everything by yourself before verbalizing it—put it in perspective, interrogate it: Do you sound nuts? Does this make you look bad? Are you holding his interest? Are you being considerate? Fair? Sweet? Because stifling trauma is just good manners. Because when others serially talk down to you, assume authority over you, try to talk you out of your own feelings and tell you who you are; when you’re not taken seriously or listened to in countless daily interactions—then you may learn to accept it, to expect it, to agree with the critics and the haters and the beloveds, and to sign off on it with total silence. Because they’re coming from a good place. Because everywhere from late-night TV talk shows to thought-leading periodicals to Hollywood to Silicon Valley to Wall Street to Congress and the current administration, women are drastically underrepresented or absent, missing from the popular imagination and public heart. Because although I questioned myself, I didn’t question who controls the narrative, the show, the engineering, or the fantasy, nor to whom it’s catered. Because to mention certain things, like “patriarchy,” is to be dubbed a “feminazi,” which discourages its mention, and whatever goes unmentioned gets a pass, a pass that condones what it isn’t nice to mention, lest we come off as reactionary or shrill.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  LUCIUS APULEIUS 8 sine corporis calore flagrantem. Ergo igitur im- patientia furoris altius agitata diutinum rupit silen- tium et ad se vocari praecipit filium : quod nomen in eo, si posset, ne ruboris admoneretur, libenter eraderet. Nec adulescens aegrae parentis moratus imperium, senili tristitie striatam gerens frontem cubiculum petit, uxori patris matrique fratris utcum- que debitum sistens obsequium. Sed illa cruciabili silentio diutissime fatigata, et ut in quodam vado dubitationis haerens, omne verbum quod praesenti sermoni putabat aptissimum rursum improbans, nutante etiam nunc pudore, unde potissimum caperet exordium decunctatur. At iuvenis nihil etiam tunc sequius suspicatus, summisso vultu rogat ultro prae- sentes causas aegritudinis. ' Tunc illa nancta soli- tudinis damnosam occasionem, prorumpit in audaciam, et ubertim allacrimans laciniaque contegens faciem voce trepida sic eum breviter affatur: “ Causa omnis et origo praesentis doloris et etiam medela ipsa et salus unica mihi tute ipse es: isti enim tui oculi per meos oculos ad intima delapsi praecordia meis medullis acerrimum commovent incendium. Ergo miserere tua causa pereuntis nec te religio patris omnino deterreat, cui morituram prorsus servabis uxorem: illius enim recognoscens imaginem in tua facie merito te diligo. Habes solitudinis plenam 476 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK X

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  But he couldn’t admit it to this rabbi, who had bar mitzvahed his sons, who had married one of them, this rabbi who thought of Ben Sapphire as a loving husband and father, a pillar of the community. Instead, he went to a Catholic church in Elizabeth, where no one would know him, and sat for a long time before he told the priest he had something to confess. He had not been faithful to Estelle. Men are different, he’d explained early on, men have needs. And she’d understood. Not that she hadn’t cried the first time, until he’d taken her in his arms and reassured her. I will never leave you. You understand? I will always be here for you and the boys. The others, he didn’t love them, they weren’t worth the hem of her dress. He just couldn’t help himself. Couldn’t ask her to do the things he could pay for, things that made him feel dirty. She was his wife. Now he was done with all that. He’d been done with it for years. Couldn’t remember the last time. But there it was, gnawing at him, giving him sharp pains in his left side, as if he’d eaten popcorn and set off his diverticulitis. The priest listened as Ben explained he was a Jew but too ashamed to talk about this with his rabbi. The priest was kind and forgiving. He asked Ben to think of others before thinking of himself, to help others before helping himself. To do good with the time he had left. Ben promised. He made a generous donation to the church and another to his synagogue. He visited the cemetery every day to talk to Estelle, to apologize for the things he’d done, to tell her she’d been his one and only love. If I could do it over… he’d cry. Please, Stellie, give me another chance to prove how much I love you. But Estelle never responded. He stood alone as the winter wind whipped his hat off his head, hoping for a sign—a falling leaf, a dove flying by. He’d have settled for a pigeon. But there was nothing. This was why he cried. [image "Elizabeth Daily Post" file=Image00012.jpg] [image "Elizabeth Daily Post" file=Image00012.jpg] EditorialNEW YEAR, BUT OLD BUSINESSDEC. 31 — We watched while giant machines of the air skimmed our rooftops in ever-increasing numbers. We warned against that inevitable day when disaster would follow in their wake. They said it couldn’t happen. They said we were attempt ing to block progress. We watched as the last twisted wing of the plane that had claimed 56 lives was dragged from the banks of the Elizabeth River. We waited in vain for a solution that would make recurrence impossible. We are still watching and waiting. When will a concern for the safety of our citizens take pre cedence over a concern for the business of the Port Authority’s Newark Airport?

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  There were other unpleasant incidents. There was the movie theatre once, for example. Lo at the time still had for the cinema a veritable passion (it was to decline into tepid condescension during her second high school year). We took in, voluptuously and indiscriminately, oh, I don’t know, one hundred and fifty or two hundred programs during that one year, and during some of the denser periods of movie-going we saw many of the news-reels up to half-a-dozen times since the same weekly one went with different main pictures and pursued us from town to town. Her favorite kinds were, in this order: musicals, underworlders, westerners. In the first, real singers and dancers had unreal stage careers in an essentially grief-proof sphere of existence where-from death and truth were banned, and where, at the end, white-haired, dewy-eyed, technically deathless, the initially reluctant father of a show-crazy girl always finished by applauding her apotheosis on fabulous Broadway. The underworld was a world apart: there, heroic newspapermen were tortured, telephone bills ran to billions, and, in a robust atmosphere of incompetent marksmanship, villains were chased through sewers and storehouses by pathologically fearless cops (I was to give them less exercise). Finally there was the mahogany landscape, the florid-faced, blue-eyed roughriders, the prim pretty schoolteacher arriving in Roaring Gulch, the rearing horse, the spectacular stampede, the pistol thrust through the shivered windowpane, the stupendous fist fight, the crashing mountain of dusty oldfashioned furniture, the table used as a weapon, the timely somersault, the pinned hand still groping for the dropped bowie knife, the grunt, the sweet crash of fist against chin, the kick in the belly, the flying tackle; and immediately after a plethora of pain that would have hospitalized a Hercules (I should know by now), nothing to show but the rather becoming bruise on the bronzed cheek of the warmed-up hero embracing his gorgeous frontier bride. I remember one matinee in a small airless theatre crammed with children and reeking with the hot breath of popcorn. The moon was yellow above the neckerchiefed crooner, and his finger was on his strumstring, and his foot was on a pine log, and I had innocently encircled Lo’s shoulder and approached my jawbone to her temple, when two harpies behind us started muttering the queerest things—I do not know if I understood aright, but what I thought I did, made me withdraw my gentle hand, and of course the rest of the show was fog to me.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  He thought psychoanalysis was a terrible waste of money and breath. As for homosexuality, he didn’t know what to think about it. Last year he had told me with a saurian little smile that the Führer had liquidated Ernst Röhm for his “inversion.” But now all of Howie’s views were becoming mammalian. I saw that the anger and hauteur of the past, which I’d accepted without interpreting, had been merely a counterpart to his isolation and the terrible shame he’d felt about the way he looked. If he couldn’t participate in the festivities of friendship and romance, then he’d burn the tents and poison the wells. This intransigence had now given way to a new optimism and tenderness and a gracious, civilized uncertainty. “I don’t know what to say about homosexuality,” he said to me as we kicked our way down a long hillside of autumn leaves that crackled like the bright, cast-off shells of boiled crustaceans. “But at least you have some sort of sexuality. And you’ve actually had some sex. Which is neat, if you think about it. Not many kids can claim as much.” We were heading toward a Japanese stone lantern half mossed over beside a bridge wreathed in mists rising from the stream that fed into the man-made pond, empty now but in warm weather the home of corpulent, whiskered white fish freckled with pale brown spots. “Now, as to these High Church Scotts of yours, they seem like fanatics to me. Of course, they’re fascinating, I can see why you like them.” He compared them to characters in Proust, but the names meant nothing to me. I envied him his Olympian sureness in placing people according to the typology of classic fiction. I, too, would read Proust someday, but only after I’d mastered Pound, Moore, Eliot, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Donne, Dante and all the other poets the Scotts discussed every night. The talk with the Scotts was not exclusively literary. When we were alone, Rachel would confide in me how much she despised DeQuincey, how unworthy of her he was and how she longed to escape him and to remove little Tim from his debilitating influence. “DeQuincey’s just a creep, weak, ineffectual. You can see it for yourself. I hate him.” She lowered her head and her eyelids fluttered disquietingly as she spoke; she was ashamed of both her husband and her spleen.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  You call that a bit horny? I call that incest.” “Oh God, Isadora, you really are too much. That’s just your fucking brother-in-law…. It isn’t really incest.” “It isn’t?” I think I was disappointed. “It scarcely counts at all,” Lalah said contemptuously, “but I’m sure you’ll find a way to make it seem more lurid on paper.” (Lalah hated my writing even then.) “I’ll work on it,” I said. On the way back from Karkabi with the new maid, Pierre was utterly cool and unruffled. He pointed out landmarks. Arabs , I thought, goddamned Arabs. What a disproportionate sense of guilt I had over all my petty sexual transgressions! Yet there were people in the world, plenty of them, who did what they felt like and never had a moment’s guilt over it—as long as they didn’t get caught. Why had I been cursed with such a hypertrophied superego? Was it just being Jewish? What did Moses do for the Jews anyway by leading them out of Egypt and giving them the concept of one God, matzoh-ball soup, and everlasting guilt? Couldn’t he just have left them alone worshipping cats and bulls and falcons or living like the other primates (to whom—as my sister Randy always reminds me—they are so closely related)? Is it any wonder that everyone hates the Jews for giving the world guilt? Couldn’t we have gotten along nicely without it? Just sloshing around in the primeval slush and worshipping dung beetles and fucking when the mood struck us? Think of those Egyptians who built the pyramids, for example. Did they sit around worrying about whether they were Equal Opportunity Employers? Did it ever dawn on them to ask whether their mortal remains were worth the lives of the thousands upon thousands who died building their pyramids? Repression, ambivalence, guilt. “What—me worry?” asks the Arab. No wonder they want to exterminate the Jews. Wouldn’t anybody? Back in Beirut, we made plans to go home. Lalah and Chloe had a charter flight to New York, so they had to leave together, and I had my old Alitalia roundtrip from Beirut to Rome to JFK. I stopped in Rome as I’d planned and took one more week in Florence before going home to face the music with Charlie. Even in hot, crowded August, Florence remained one of my favorite cities in the world.