Surprise

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 Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  The following morning he awoke from an indecipherable dream, in which a crush of people were all running in the same direction. Though he saw only their backs, each was known to him. As they hurried by, he identified his mother. Lea — unaccountably naked, and out of breath — Desmond, the Pal, and young Maudru ... Edmee was the only one to turn and smile at him, with the grating little smile of a marten. ‘But it’s the marten Ragut caught in the Vosges!’ Cheri cried out in his dream, and this discovery pleased him immeasurably. Then he checked and recounted all the one-way runners, saying over to himself: “ There’s one missing.... There’s one missing. ...” Once out of his dream, on this side of awakening, it came to him that the one missing was none other than himself: “I must get back into it. ...” But the efforts of exerting every limb, like an insect caught on flypaper, served only to widen the bar of blue between his eyelids, and he emerged into that real world in which he was frittering away his time and his strength. He stretched out his legs, and bathed them in a fresh, cool part of the sheets. “Edmee must have got up some time ago.” He was surprised to see beneath the window a new garden of marguerites and heliotrope, for in his memory there was only a summer garden of blue and pink. He rang, and the sound of the bell brought to life a maid whose face was unfamiliar. ‘ Where is Henriette? ’ ‘I’ve taken her place, sir.’ ‘ Since when? * ‘Why — for the last month, sir.* He ejaculated an ‘Ah!’ as much as to say, ‘That explains everything.* ‘ Where’s your mistress? * ‘Madame is just coming, sir. Madame is ready to go out/ Edmee, indeed, did appear, as large as life, but stopped just inside die door in so marked a manner that Cheri was secretly amused. He allowed himself the pleasure of upsetting his wife a little by exclaiming, 4 But it’s Ragut’s marten I ’ and watching her pretty eyes waver under his gaze. ‘Fred, I../ ‘Yes, you’re going out. I never heard you get up/ She coloured slightly. ‘There’s nothing extraordinary in that. I’ve been sleeping so badly these last few nights, that I’ve had a bed made up on the divan in the boudoir. You’re not doing anything special to-day, are you? ’ But I am,’ he replied darkly. ‘Is it important?’ Very important/ He took his time, and finished on a lighter note: ‘I’m going to have my hair cut/ ‘But will you be back for luncheon?’ ‘No; I’ll have a cutlet in Paris. I’ve made an appointment at Gustave’s for a quarter past two. The man who usually comes to cut my hair is ill/

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  Held captive beneath the translucent skin, the seven colours of the rainbow flickered with some secret fire of their own all over the surface of each precious sphere. Cheri recognized the pearl with a dimple, the slightly egg-shaped pearl, and the biggest pearl of the string, distinguishable by its unique pink. 44 These pearls, these at least, are unchanged] They and I remain unchanged.” ‘ So you’ve still got your pearls,’ he said. She was astonished by the foolish phrase, and looked as though she wanted to interpret it. Yes, in spite of the war. Are you thinking that I could, or should, have sold them? Why should I have sold them?’ for whom”?’ he answered jokingly, in a tired voice. She could not restrain a rapid glance towards the bureau and its scattered papers; and Cheri, in his turn, felt he knew the thought behind it, guessing that it was aimed at some yellowish postcardphotograph, probably the frightened features of a beardless boy in uniform. Disdainfully, he considered this imaginary face and said to himself,44 That’s none of my concern,” adding a moment later,44 But what is there here that does concern me?” The agitation which he had brought in his heart was now excited by everything around him; everything added to it - the setting sun, the cries of insect-chasing swallows, and the ember-glowing shafts of light stabbing through the curtains. He remembered that Lea carried with her wherever she went this incandescent rose-pink, as the sea, on its ebb-tide, carries with it far out from shore the earthy smells of pastures and new-mown hay. No word passed between them for a while, and they were kept in countenance by pretending to listen to the clear fresh notes of a child singing. Lda had not sat down again. Standing massively in front of him, she carried her irretrievable chin higher than before, and betrayed some vague distress by the frequent fluttering of her eyelids. Am I making you late? Have you to go out this evening? Do you want to dress? 5 The questions were abrupt, and forced Lea to look at Cheri. Dress? Good Lord, and in what do you wish me to dress? I am dressed — irrevocably — once and for all/ She laughed her incomparable laugh, starting on a high note and descending the scale by leaps of equal interval till she got to the deep musical reaches reserved for sobs and amorous moans. Cheri unconsciously raised a hand in supplication. Dressed for life, I tell you! And how convenient that is 1 Blouses, fine linen, and this uniform on top, and here I am in full fig. Equally ready for dinner either at Montagne’s or somewhere modest, ready for the cinema, for bridge, or for a stroll in the Bois/ And what about love — which you’re forgetting to mention?’ Oh, child!5

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  Still. The recommended choice narrative did not end, as I had imagined it would (hoped it would, dreamed it would), with the perfect child placed on the table between us for lunch at The Bistro (Sidney Korshak’s corner banquette, the blue-and-white dotted organdy dress) on the hot day in September 1966 when the adoption became final. Thirty-two years later, in 1998, on a Saturday morning when she was alone in her apartment and vulnerable to whatever bad or good news arrived at her door, the perfect child received a Federal Express letter from a young woman who convincingly identified herself as her sister, her full sister, one of two younger children later born, although we had not before known this, to Quintana’s natural mother and father. At the time of Quintana’s birth the natural mother and father had not yet been married. At a point after her birth they married, had the two further children, Quintana’s full sister and brother, and then divorced. According to the letter from the young woman who identified herself as Quintana’s sister, the mother and sister lived now in Dallas. The brother, from whom the mother was estranged, lived in another city in Texas. The father, who had remarried and fathered another child, lived in Florida. The sister, who had learned from her mother only a few weeks before that Quintana existed, had determined immediately, against the initial instincts of her mother, to locate her. She had resorted to the internet. On the internet she had found a private detective who said that he could locate Quintana for two hundred dollars. Quintana had an unlisted telephone number. The two hundred dollars was for accessing her Con Ed account. The sister had agreed to the deal. It had taken the detective only ten further minutes to call the sister back with a street address and apartment number in New York. 14 Sutton Place South. Apartment 11D. The sister had written the letter. She had sent it to Apartment 11D at 14 Sutton Place South via Federal Express. “Saturday delivery,” Quintana said when she showed us the letter, still in its Federal Express envelope. “The FedEx came Saturday delivery.” I remember her repeating these words, emphasizing them, Saturday delivery, the FedEx came Saturday delivery, as if maintaining focus on this one point could put her world back together. I 23 cannot easily express what I thought about this. On the one hand, I told myself, it could hardly be a surprise. We had spent thirty-two years considering just such a possibility. We had for many of those years seen such a possibility even as a probability. Quintana’s mother, through a bureaucratic error on the part of the social worker, had been told not only our names and Quintana’s name but the name under which I wrote. We did not lead an entirely private life. We gave lectures, we attended events, we got photographed. We could be easily found.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  The device pleased Marchese and Stecchi and they went forth of the inn without delay, all three. Whenas they came to a solitary place, Martellino writhed his hands and fingers and arms and legs and eke his mouth and eyes and all his visnomy on such wise that it was a frightful thing to look upon, nor was there any saw him but would have avouched him to be verily all fordone and palsied of his person. Marchese and Stecchi, taking him up, counterfeited as he was, made straight for the church, with a show of the utmost compunction, humbly beseeching all who came in their way for the love of God to make room for them, the which was lightly yielded them. Brief, every one gazing on them and crying well nigh all, 'Make way! Make way!' they came whereas Saint Arrigo's body lay and Martellino was forthright taken up by certain gentlemen who stood around and laid upon the body, so he might thereby regain the benefit of health. Martellino, having lain awhile, whilst all the folk were on the stretch to see what should come of him, began, as right well he knew how, to make a show of opening first one finger, then a hand and after putting forth an arm and so at last coming to stretch himself out altogether. Which when the people saw, they set up such an outcry in praise of Saint Arrigo as would have drowned the very thunder. Now, as chance would have it, there was therenigh a certain Florentine, who knew Martellino very well, but had not recognized him, counterfeited as he was, whenas he was brought thither. However, when he saw him grown straight again, he knew him and straightway fell a-laughing and saying, 'God confound him! Who that saw him come had not deemed him palsied in good earnest?' His words were overheard of sundry Trevisans, who asked him incontinent, 'How! Was he not palsied?' 'God forbid!' answered the Florentine. 'He hath ever been as straight as any one of us; but he knoweth better than any man in the world how to play off tricks of this kind and counterfeit what shape soever he will.'

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  He followed the white butterfly, saying over to himself as he went: ‘Lea’s not alone. She’s laughing. She can’t be alone. So long as it’s not my mother.’ Beyond an open door, he was being welcomed by rosy pink daylight and he waited, standing there, for the rebirth of the world heralded by this dawn. A woman was writing at a small table, facing away from him. Cheri was able to distinguish a broad back and the padded cushion of a fat neck beneath a head of thick grey vigorous hair, cut short like his mother’s. “ So I was right, she’s not alone. But who on earth can this good woman be?” ‘ And, at the same time, write down your masseur’s address for me. Lea, and his name. You know what I’m like about names. These words came from a woman dressed in black, also seated, and Cheri felt a preliminary tremor of expectation running through him: “ Then ... where is L6a? ” The grey-haired lady turned round, and Ch<£ri received the full impact of her blue eyes. Oh, good heavens, child — it’s you I ’ He went forward as in a dream, and kissed an outstretched hand. ‘Monsieur Frederic Peloux— Princess Cheniaguine.’ Cheri bent over and kissed another hand, then took a seat. ‘Is he your ...?’ queried the lady in black, referring to him with as much freedom as if he had been a deaf-mute. Once again the great peal of girlish laughter rang out, and Ch£ri sought for the source of this laugh here, there, and everywhere — anywhere but in the throat of the grey-haired woman. ‘No, no, he isn’t! Or rather, he isn’t any longer, I should say. Valerie, come now, what are you thinking of?’ She was not monstrous, but huge, and loaded with exuberant buttresses of fat in every part of her body. Her arms, like rounded thighs, stood out from her hips on plump cushions of flesh just below her armpits. The plain skirt and the nondescript long jacket, opening on a linen blouse with a jabot, proclaimed that the wearer had abdicated, was no longer concerned to be a woman, and had acquired a kind of sexless dignity. Lea was now standing between Cheri and the window, and he was not horrified at first by her firm, massive, almost cubic, bulk. When she moved to reach a chair, her features were revealed, and he began to implore her with silent entreaties, as though faced with an armed lunatic. Her cheeks were red and looked over-ripe, for she now disdained the use of powder, and when she laughed her mouth was packed with gold. A healthy old woman, in short, with sagging cheeks and a double chin, well able to carry her burden of flesh and freed from restraining stays. ‘Tell me, child, where have you sprung from? I can’t say I think you’re looking particularly well.9

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints Course Guidebook (2023)

  1. Saints and the People Who Make Them 2 The Story of Saint Guinefort The old inquisitor jolted down the little road toward Dombes on his donkey, bones creaking. Stephen of Bourbon was approaching 70, and this was one of the last trips he would make in his long career rooting out heresies on the backroads of France. He was looking for an extraordinary saint named Guinefort. Stephen had heard about Guinefort from women who had sought her help with healing miracles for their children through a series of strange rituals. At first, the friar was intrigued. Guinefort seemed like a valiant defender of children and a most efficacious and miraculous intercessor—a saint worth looking into. Imagine, then, his shock when he learned that Guinefort was, in fact, a dog. 3 1. Saints and the People Who Make Them Her story begins like this: A couple went out for the day, leaving their baby boy with his nanny. She put the child down for a nap and left him alone with the family dog. It was a peaceful scene until a large snake got into the room and slithered over to the cradle. The dog, a greyhound, lunged at the snake and knocked the cradle down. Dog and snake grappled until the dog won and the snake was dead. The nanny came back to a shocking scene: the dog covered in blood, crouched over the baby. Her screams brought the father running, sword drawn. Thinking the dog had attacked the baby, he killed the dog in anger. Then, the couple found the baby unharmed and the snake’s body nearby. They realized how they had wronged the dog. But it was too late to do anything but throw her body in a well, cover it with stones, and plant trees nearby to commemorate the valiant animal. In later years, the manor was abandoned, but the story of the dog’s bravery and unjust death spread. Local peasants honored the dog as a martyr and prayed to her, particularly mothers with sick children. Eventually, they developed a number of curing rituals, some of which actually put children’s lives in danger. That drew Stephen’s attention, and when he showed up in the village, he gave them a strong sermon about superstition and infanticide, cut down the trees, and dug up the dog’s body so that they couldn’t make it into a shrine. He believed that the cult had been thoroughly suppressed. He returned to Lyons, where he wrote up the incident and died a year later. A saint’s cult doesn’t have the same negative connotations we use for modern cults. In fact, an active cult was and is a requirement for official recognition of a saint.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  My earliest recollection is being danced on the foot of my father’s brother James, the Captain of an Indiaman, who paid us a visit in the south of Kerry when I was about two. I distinctly remember repeating a hymn by heart for him, my mother on the other side of the fireplace, prompting: then I got him to dance me a little more, which was all I wanted. I remember my mother telling him I could read, and his surprise. The next memory must have been about the same time: I was seated on the floor screaming when my father came in and asked: “What’s the matter?” “It’s only Master Jim”, replied the nurse crossly, “he’s just screaming out of sheer temper, Sir, look, there’s not a tear in his eye.” A year or so later, it must have been, I was proud of walking up and down a long room while my mother rested her hand on my head, and called me her walking stick. Later still I remember coming to her room at night: I whispered to her and then kissed her, but her cheek was cold and she didn’t answer, and I woke the house with my shrieking: she was dead. I felt no grief, but something gloomy and terrible in the sudden cessation of the usual household activities. A couple of days later I saw her coffin carried out, and when the nurse told my sister and me that we would never see our mother again, I was surprised merely and wondered why. My mother died when I was nearly four, and soon after we moved to Kingstown near Dublin. I used to get up in the night with my sister Annie, four years my senior and go foraging for bread and jam or sugar. One morning about daybreak I stole into the nurse’s room, and saw a man beside her in bed, a man with a red moustache. I drew my sister in and she too saw him. We crept out again without waking them. My only emotion was surprise, but next day the nurse denied me sugar on my bread and butter and I said: “I’ll tell”—I don’t know why: I had then no inkling of modern journalism. “Tell what?” she asked. “There was a man in your bed”, I replied, “last night.” “Hush, hush!” she said, and gave me the sugar. After that I found all I had to do was to say “I’ll tell!” to get whatever I wanted. My sister even wished to know one day what I had to tell, but I would not say. I distinctly remember my feeling of superiority over her because she had not had sense enough to exploit the sugar mine.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  Here he ordered hash and I, hot coffee and when I came to pay I was agreeably surprised to find that the bill was only forty cents and we could talk in our corner undisturbed as long as we liked. In ten minutes’ chat the hobo had upset all my preconceived ideas and given me a host of new and interesting thoughts. He was a man of some reading if not of education and the violence of his language attracted me almost as much as the novelty of his point of view. All rich men were thieves, all workmen, sheep and fools, was his creed. The workmen did the work, created the wealth, and the employers robbed them of nine-tenths of the product of their labor and so got rich. It all seemed simple. The tramp never meant to work; he lived by begging and went wherever he wanted to go. “But how do you get about?” I cried. “Here in the middle west,” he replied, “I steal rides in freight cars and box-cars and on top of coal wagons, but in the real west and south I get inside the cars and ride, and when the conductor turns me off I wait for the next train. Life is full of happenings—some of ’em painful,” he added, thoughtfully rubbing his jaw again. He appeared to be a tough little man whose one object in life it was to avoid work and in spite of himself, he worked hard in order to do nothing. The experience had a warning, quickening effect on me. I resolved to save all I could. When I stood up to go the hobo grinned amicably: “I guess I’ve earned that dollar?” I could not help laughing. “I guess you have,” I replied, but took care to turn aside as I stripped off the bill. “So long,” said the tramp as we parted at the door and that was all the thanks I ever got. Another experience of this time told a sadder story. One evening a girl spoke to me; she was fairly well-dressed and as we came under a gas-lamp I saw she was good-looking with a tinge of nervous anxiety in her face. “I don’t buy love,” I warned her: “but how much do you generally get?” “From one dollar to five,” she replied; “but tonight I want as much as I can get.” “I’ll give you five,” I replied; “but you must tell me all I want to know.”

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  “You darling!” I cried, “I don’t believe there will be any consequences; but I want you to go to the basin and use this syringe: I’ll tell you why afterwards.” At once she went over to the basin: “I feel funny, weak”, she said, “as if I were—I can’t describe it—shaky on my legs. I’m glad now I don’t wear drawers in summer: they’d get wet.” Her ablutions completed and the sheet withdrawn and done up in paper, I shot back the bolt and we began our talk. I found her intelligent and kindly but ignorant and ill-read; still she was not prejudiced and was eager to know all about babies and how they were made. I told her what I had told Mrs. Mayhew and something more: how my seed was composed of tens of thousands of infinitesimal tadpole-shaped animalculae—Already in her vagina and womb these infinitely little things had a race: they could move nearly an inch in an hour and the strongest and quickest got up first to where her egg was waiting in the middle of her womb. My little tadpole, the first to arrive, thrust his head into her egg and thus having accomplished his work of impregnation, perished, love and death being twins. The curious thing was that this indescribably small tadpole should be able to transmit all the qualities of all his progenitors in certain proportions; no such miracle was ever imagined by any religious teacher. More curious still the living foetus in the womb passes in nine months through all the chief changes that the human race has gone through in countless aeons of time in its progress from the tadpole to the man. Till the fifth month the foetus is practically a four-legged animal. I told her that it was accepted today that the weeks occupied in the womb in any metamorphosis corresponded exactly to the ages it occupied in reality. Thus it was upright, a two-legged animal, ape and then man in the womb for the last three months and this corresponded nearly to one third of man’s whole existence on this earth. Kate listened enthralled, I thought, till she asked me suddenly: “But what makes one child a boy and another a girl?” “The nearest we’ve come to a law on the matter”, I said, “is contained in the so-called law of contraries: that is, if the man is stronger than the woman, the children will be mostly girls; if the woman is greatly younger or stronger, the progeny will be chiefly boys. This bears out the old English proverb: “Any weakling can make a boy, it takes a man to make a girl.’”

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints Course Guidebook (2023)

  169 22. Josephine Bakhita: Freed from Slavery When the British announced they would withdraw from the Sudan and evacuate foreigners, there was a hurried exodus. The Legnanis were among the families who f led northward in late 1884, eventually arriving in Genoa. There, they encountered friends from the Sudan: the Michielis, hoteliers who owned a luxury property in the Red Sea port city of Suakin. Maria Turina Michieli pressed her husband for a slave to look after their daughter, and Legnani gave Bakhita to them. Bakhita would have found herself in an entirely strange place, surrounded by people speaking a language she did not yet understand. To be so suddenly and casually cast off from the Legnanis—whom she clearly valued—must have caused her deep shock. The Michielis seem to have led a divided life between their property in Mirano, just outside Venice, and their hotel in Suakin. The situation in Sudan remained unstable for some years. After a calm interlude near Venice, during which Bakhita picked up the Venetian dialect that she spoke for most of her adult life, the Michielis spent nearly a year in Suakin, after which they decided to stay and make it their permanent base. The women of the household were sent back to Italy to wind up the family affairs there, a process that took some 2 years. Finally, unable to sell their property, Maria Turina departed again for Suakin to consult with her husband. She left her daughter and Bakhita in the care of a close friend, Illuminato Cecchini. Bakhita’s Religious Life Cecchini was a devout Catholic and an advocate for peasants. He seems to have begun Bakhita’s conversion to Christianity and to have encouraged further instruction by arranging lodging for Bakhita and her charge in Venice with the Canossian Daughters of Charity, an order of nuns also devoted to serving the poor. They were founded in nearby Verona in the early 1800s, and by the time Bakhita encountered them in 1888, they had multiple houses in Italy and Southeast Asia. By the time Maria Turina Michieli returned to collect them, Bakhita had developed a strong affinity for the sisters and her new faith. She bravely refused to go with Maria Turina, and they argued bitterly.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  I think now of that July day at St. John the Divine in 2003 and am struck by how young John and I appeared to be, how well. In actual fact neither of us was in the least well: John had that spring and summer undergone a series of cardiac procedures, most recently the implantation of a pacemaker, the efficacy of which remained in question; I had three weeks before the wedding collapsed on the street and spent the several nights following in a Columbia Presbyterian ICU being transfused for an unexplained gastrointestinal bleed. “You’re just going to swallow a little camera,” they said in the ICU when they were trying to demonstrate to themselves what was causing the bleed. I recall resisting: since I had never in my life been able to swallow an aspirin it seemed unlikely that I could swallow a camera. “Of course you can, it’s only a little camera.” A pause. The attempt at briskness declined into wheedling: “It’s really a very little camera.” In the end I did swallow the very little camera, and the very little camera transmitted the desired images, which did not demonstrate what was causing the bleed but did demonstrate that with sufficient sedation anyone could swallow a very little camera. Similarly, in another less than entirely efficient use of high-tech medicine, John could hold a telephone to his heart, dial a number, and get a reading on the pacemaker, which proved, I was told, that at the given instant he dialed the number (although not necessarily before or after) the device was operating. Medicine, I have had reason since to notice more than once, remains an imperfect art. Yet all had seemed well when we were shaking the water off the leis onto the grass outside St. John the Divine on July 26 2003. Could you have seen, had you been walking on Amsterdam Avenue and caught sight of the bridal party that day, how utterly unprepared the mother of the bride was to accept what would happen before the year 2003 had even ended? The father of the bride dead at his own dinner table? The bride herself in an induced coma, breathing only on a respirator, not expected by the doctors in the intensive care unit to live the night? The first in a cascade of medical crises that would end twenty months later with her death? Twenty months during which she would be strong enough to walk unsupported for possibly a month in all? Twenty months during which she would spend weeks at a time in the intensive care units of four different hospitals?

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  King Charles VIII. sent to Germany a gentleman named Bernage, Lord of Sivray, near Amboise. This gentleman, travelling day and night, arrived very late one evening at the house of a gentleman, where he Fourth day. I QUEEN OF NAVARRE. agg asked for a night's lodging, and obtained it, but with difficulty. The owner of the house, nevertheless, learn- ing in whose service he was, came to him and begged he would excuse the incivility of his servants, stating that certain of his wife's relations, who meant him mis- chief, obliged him to keep his doors thus closed. Ber- nage told him on what business he was travelling, and his host expressing his readiness to render the king his master all possible services, received his ambassador into his house, and lodged and treated him honourably. Supper-time being come, he showed him into a richly- tapestried hall, where, entering from behind the hang- ings, there appeared the most beautiful woman that ever was seen ; but her hair was cropped close, and she was dressed in black garments of German cut. After the gentleman had washed with Bernage, water was set be- fore this lady, who washed also, and took her seat at the end of the table without speaking to anyone, or anyone to her. Bernage often looked at her, and thought her one of the handsomest women he had ever seen, except that her face was very pale, and her air extremely sad. After she had eaten a little, she asked for drink, which was given to her by a domestic in a very singular vessel. This was a death's head, the holes of which were stopped with silver ; and out of this vessel she drank two or three times. After she had supped and washed, she made a reverence to the master of the house, and retired again behind the tapestry without speaking to anyone. Bernage was so surprised at this extraordinary spec- tacle that he became quite sombre and pensive. His host perceived this, and said to him, " You are surprised, I see, at what you have beheld at table. Now, the cour- teous demeanour I have marked in vou does not permit 300 THE HEPTAMERON OF THE [A'nz',/ 32.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  Here he ordered hash and I, hot coffee and when I came to pay I was agreeably surprised to find that the bill was only forty cents and we could talk in our corner undisturbed as long as we liked. In ten minutes’ chat the hobo had upset all my preconceived ideas and given me a host of new and interesting thoughts. He was a man of some reading if not of education and the violence of his language attracted me almost as much as the novelty of his point of view. All rich men were thieves, all workmen, sheep and fools, was his creed. The workmen did the work, created the wealth, and the employers robbed them of nine-tenths of the product of their labor and so got rich. It all seemed simple. The tramp never meant to work; he lived by begging and went wherever he wanted to go. “But how do you get about?” I cried. “Here in the middle west,” he replied, “I steal rides in freight cars and box-cars and on top of coal wagons, but in the real west and south I get inside the cars and ride, and when the conductor turns me off I wait for the next train. Life is full of happenings—some of ’em painful,” he added, thoughtfully rubbing his jaw again. He appeared to be a tough little man whose one object in life it was to avoid work and in spite of himself, he worked hard in order to do nothing. The experience had a warning, quickening effect on me. I resolved to save all I could. When I stood up to go the hobo grinned amicably: “I guess I’ve earned that dollar?” I could not help laughing. “I guess you have,” I replied, but took care to turn aside as I stripped off the bill. “So long,” said the tramp as we parted at the door and that was all the thanks I ever got. Another experience of this time told a sadder story. One evening a girl spoke to me; she was fairly well-dressed and as we came under a gas-lamp I saw she was good-looking with a tinge of nervous anxiety in her face. “I don’t buy love,” I warned her: “but how much do you generally get?” “From one dollar to five,” she replied; “but tonight I want as much as I can get.” “I’ll give you five,” I replied; “but you must tell me all I want to know.”

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  In actual fact neither of us was in the least well: John had that spring and summer undergone a series of cardiac procedures, most recently the implantation of a pacemaker, the efficacy of which remained in question; I had three weeks before the wedding collapsed on the street and spent the several nights following in a Columbia Presbyterian ICU being transfused for an unexplained gastrointestinal bleed. “You’re just going to swallow a little camera,” they said in the ICU when they were trying to demonstrate to themselves what was causing the bleed. I recall resisting: since I had never in my life been able to swallow an aspirin it seemed unlikely that I could swallow a camera. “Of course you can, it’s only a little camera.” A pause. The attempt at briskness declined into wheedling: “It’s really a very little camera.” In the end I did swallow the very little camera, and the very little camera transmitted the desired images, which did not demonstrate what was causing the bleed but did demonstrate that with sufficient sedation anyone could swallow a very little camera. Similarly, in another less than entirely efficient use of high-tech medicine, John could hold a telephone to his heart, dial a number, and get a reading on the pacemaker, which proved, I was told, that at the given instant he dialed the number (although not necessarily before or after) the device was operating . Medicine, I have had reason since to notice more than once, remains an imperfect art. Yet all had seemed well when we were shaking the water off the leis onto the grass outside St. John the Divine on July 26 2003. Could you have seen, had you been walking on Amsterdam Avenue and caught sight of the bridal party that day, how utterly unprepared the mother of the bride was to accept what would happen before the year 2003 had even ended? The father of the bride dead at his own dinner table? The bride herself in an induced coma, breathing only on a respirator, not expected by the doctors in the intensive care unit to live the night? The first in a cascade of medical crises that would end twenty months later with her death? Twenty months during which she would be strong enough to walk unsupported for possibly a month in all? Twenty months during which she would spend weeks at a time in the intensive care units of four different hospitals? In all of those intensive care units there were the same blue-and-white printed curtains.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  Chance treated us kindly; nothing happened beyond the shock we got in the middle of a January night, when a brigand-like figure, all swathed in leather and fur, crept into our midst—but it turned out to be only our former chauffeur, Tsiganov, who had thought nothing of riding all the way from St. Petersburg, on buffers and in freight cars, through the immense, frosty and savage expanse of Russia, for the mere purpose of bringing us a very welcome sum of money unexpectedly sent us by some good friends of ours. He also brought the mail received at our St. Petersburg address; among it was that letter from Tamara. After a month’s stay, Tsiganov declared the Crimean scenery bored him and departed—to go all the way back north, with a big bag over his shoulder, containing various articles which we would have gladly given him had we thought he coveted them (such as a trouser press, tennis shoes, nightshirts, an alarm clock, a flat-iron, several other ridiculous things I have forgotten) and the absence of which only gradually came to light if not pointed out, with vindictive zeal, by an anemic servant girl whose pale charms he had also rifled. Curiously enough, he had prevailed upon us to transfer my mother’s precious stones from the talcum powder container (that he had at once detected) to a hole dug in the garden under a versatile oak—and there they all were after his departure.

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  “Kristin?” he called. His voice was soft but serious. Assuming he needed water or more pain meds, I turned and said, “Yeah, Dad?” “Remember,” he shared in his morphine haze, “it’s a cash-only bar.” Good to know, Dad. Now, I don’t know where we go when we die or how we get there, but apparently they don’t take credit cards. Pretty sure my dad wanted me to know this in case I needed to swing by an ATM. As always, he wanted to make sure I was OK. I’m getting there. CHAPTER 2THE RUPTURE [image file=image_rsrc1VT.jpg] Now, every time I witness a strong person, I want to know: What dark did you conquer in your story? Mountains do not rise without earthquakes. — KATHERINE MACKENETT Have you ever had a moment of seeing your worst fears realized? Most of us have, at some point. A needle off the record of your life. Your world crumbling into a million disconnected puzzle pieces. A situation that is such a clusterf*ck that at first glance you’re positive it can’t be fixed. And if by some miracle you can make it better, you will surely never be the same. This is what I call “the rupture.” Ruptures come in all shapes and sizes. Getting unceremoniously fired from a job. Losing a close friendship for no discernible reason. Financial instability that leads to downsizing, a breakup or divorce, or other dramatic life alterations. A loved one’s health diagnosis, your own diagnosis, and so on. We can’t help but fear these moments and the subsequent changes that accompany them. But I’m here to tell you that even the worst ruptures can reveal a road map to our next chapter. While causing us dread, the unexpected ruptures in our lives can also bring our desires, values, and priorities into sharp relief, forcing us to reexamine where we’ve been and take urgent action that will hopefully get us where we’re meant to be. HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY, YOU HAVE CANCERThe biggest rupture I’ve ever experienced was on February 14, 2003. I was 31 years old, and I had been diagnosed with a rare, stage IV cancer with no cure and no treatment. The first doctor I met with suggested a triple-organ transplant. The next kept me waiting for three hours, rushed me through my appointment, and suggested radical treatments that wouldn’t do much, he admitted. As I sat there dumbfounded, he capped off our meeting by giving me an expiration date. “You probably have around 10 years to live if you’re lucky. . . . Next patient!” Afterward, I remember standing at the elevator outside his office, pressing the down button and feeling like my life was going up in a fiery blaze before my very eyes. But as anxiety prone as I can be, my loop of panicked thoughts went quiet. In their place, I could hear a calming and grounding inner voice coming straight from my heart. No. You need more information. Better information.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  A quarter of a century later, I learned two things: that Burness, by then dead, had been well known in Edinburgh as a scholarly translator of the Russian romantic poems that had been the altar and frenzy of my boyhood; and that my humble drawing master, whose age I used to synchronize with that of granduncles and old family servants, had married a young Estonian girl about the time I myself married. When I learned these later developments, I experienced a queer shock; it was as if life had impinged upon my creative rights by wriggling on beyond the subjective limits so elegantly and economically set by childhood memories that I thought I had signed and sealed. “And what about Yaremich?” I asked M. V. Dobuzhinski, one summer afternoon in the nineteen forties, as we strolled through a beech forest in Vermont. “Is he remembered?” “Indeed, he is,” replied Mstislav Valerianovich. “He was exceptionally gifted. I don’t know what kind of teacher he was, but I do know that you were the most hopeless pupil I ever had.” 51IHAVE often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it. Although it lingered on in my mind, its personal warmth, its retrospective appeal had gone and, presently, it became more closely identified with my novel than with my former self, where it had seemed to be so safe from the intrusion of the artist. Houses have crumbled in my memory as soundlessly as they did in the mute films of yore, and the portrait of my old French governess, whom I once lent to a boy in one of my books, is fading fast, now that it is engulfed in the description of a childhood entirely unrelated to my own. The man in me revolts against the fictionist, and here is my desperate attempt to save what is left of poor Mademoiselle. A large woman, a very stout woman, Mademoiselle rolled into our existence in December 1905 when I was six and my brother five. There she is. I see so plainly her abundant dark hair, brushed up high and covertly graying; the three wrinkles on her austere forehead; her beetling brows; the steely eyes behind the black-rimmed pince-nez; that vestigial mustache; that blotchy complexion, which in moments of wrath develops an additional flush in the region of the third, and amplest, chin so regally spread over the frilled mountain of her blouse. And now she sits down, or rather she tackles the job of sitting down, the jelly of her jowl quaking, her prodigious posterior, with the three buttons on the side, lowering itself warily; then, at the last second, she surrenders her bulk to the wicker armchair, which, out of sheer fright, bursts into a salvo of crackling.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  My friend, another Black woman from St. Croix, and I deplaned in Tortola to clear BVI [British Virgin Islands] immigration at the Beef Island Airport. I was happy to be a tourist for a change, looking forward to a wonderful holiday, post-hurricane problems left behind for a few days. The morning was brilliant and sunny, and in our bags was a frozen turkey, along with decorations for the rented house. The Black woman in a smartly pressed uniform behind the Immigration Control desk was younger than I, with heavily processed hair flawlessly styled. I handed her my completed entry card. She looked up at me, took it with a smile, and said, “Who does your hair?” My friend and I were the only passengers going on to Virgin Gorda. As a Black woman writer who travels widely, I have recently been asked that question many times. Thinking we were about to embark on one of those conversations about hairstyle Black women so often have in passing, on supermarket lines, buses, in laundromats, I told her I had done it myself. Upon her further questioning, I described how. I was not at all prepared when, still smiling, she suddenly said, “Well, you can’t come in here with your hair like that you know.” And reaching over she stamped “no admittance” across my visitor’s card. “Oh, I didn’t know,” I said, “then I’ll cover it,” and I pulled out my headkerchief. “That won’t make any difference,” she said. “The next plane back to St. Croix is 5:00 p.m. this evening.” By this time my friend, who wears her hair in braided extensions, tried to come to my aid. “What’s wrong with her hair,” she asked, “and what about mine?” “Yours is all right,” she was told. “That’s just a hairstyle.” “But mine is just a hairstyle too,” I protested, still not believing this was happening to me. I had traveled freely all over the world; now, in a Caribbean country, a Black woman was telling me I could not enter her land because of how I wore my hair? “There is a law on our books,” she said. “You can’t come in here looking LIKE THAT.” I touched my natural locks, of which I was so proud. A year ago I had decided to stop cutting my hair and to grow locks as a personal style statement, much the same as I had worn a natural afro for most of my adult life. I remembered an Essence magazine cover story in the early 80s that had inspired one of my most popular poems—Is Your Hair Still Political? “You can’t be serious,” I said. “Then why didn’t I know about this before? Where is it written in any of your tourist information that Black women are only allowed to wear our hair in certain styles in your country? And why do we have to?” Her smile was gone by now.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  “It was getting mashed, Mother,” I dared to protest, turning away to the icebox. “I’ll fetch the meat.” I was surprised at my own brazenness in answering back. But something in my voice interrupted my mother’s efficient motions. She ignored my implied contradiction, itself an act of rebellion strictly forbidden in our house. The thumping stopped. “What’s wrong with you, now? Are you sick? You want to go to your bed?” “No, I’m all right, Mother.” But I felt her strong fingers on my upper arm, turning me around, her other hand under my chin as she peered into my face. Her voice softened. “Is it your period making you so slow-down today?” She gave my chin a little shake, as I looked up into her hooded grey eyes, now becoming almost gentle. The kitchen felt suddenly oppressively hot and still, and I felt myself beginning to shake all over. Tears I did not understand started from my eyes, as I realized that my old enjoyment of the bone-jarring way I had been taught to pound spice would feel different to me from now on, and also that in my mother’s kitchen, there was only one right way to do anything. Perhaps my life had not become so simple, after all. My mother stepped away from the counter and put her heavy arm around my shoulders. I could smell the warm herness rising from between her arm and her body, mixed with the smell of glycerine and rose-water, and the scent of her thick bun of hair. “I’ll finish up the food for supper.” She smiled at me, and there was a tenderness in her voice and an absence of annoyance that was welcome, although unfamiliar. “You come inside now and lie down on the couch and I’ll make you a hot cup of tea.” Her arm across my shoulders was warm and slightly damp. I rested my head upon her shoulder, and realized with a shock of pleasure and surprise that I was almost as tall as my mother, as she led me into the cool darkened parlor. Uses of the Erotic The Erotic as Power There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change. For women, this has meant a suppression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information within our lives. We have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused, and devalued within western society. On the one hand, the superficially erotic has been encouraged as a sign of female inferiority; on the other hand, women have been made to suffer and to feel both contemptible and suspect by virtue of its existence.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  ‘I’m your friend and your doctor and anything but a fool: I’m sure I can cure you in double-quick time and you prefer to suffer. It’s stupid of you and worse—Come up now at once and think of me only as your doctor’, and I half lifted, half helped her to the door: I supported her up the stairs and at the door of her room, she said: ‘Give me ten minutes, Doctor, and I’ll be ready. I promise you I won’t lock the door again.’ “With that assurance I waited and in ten minutes knocked and went in. “Mrs. Carlyle was lying on the bed with a woolly-white shawl round her head and face. I thought it absurd affectation in an old married woman, so I resolved on drastic measures: I turned the light full on, then I put my hand under her dress and with one toss threw it right over her head. I pulled her legs apart, dragged her to the edge of the bed and began inserting the speculum in her vulva: I met an obstacle: I looked—and immediately sprang up: ‘Why, you’re a virgo intacta’ (an untouched virgin!) I exclaimed. She pulled the shawl from her head and said: ‘What did you expect?’ ‘Anything but that’, I cried, ‘in a woman married these five and twenty years!’ “I soon found the cause of her trouble and cured it or rather did away with it: that night she rested well and was her old gay, mutinous self when I called next day. “A little later she told me her story. [Illustration] “After the marriage”, she said, “Carlyle was strange and out of sorts, very nervous, he seemed, and irritable. When we reached the house we had supper and about eleven o’clock I said I would go to bed, being rather tired: he nodded and grunted something. I put my hands on his shoulders as I passed him and said “Dear, do you know that you haven’t kissed me once, all day—this day of days!” and I bent down and laid my cheek against his. He kissed me; but said: “You, women are always kissing—I’ll be up soon!” Forced to be content with that I went upstairs, undressed and got into bed: he hadn’t even kissed me of his own accord, the whole day! “A little later he came up, undressed and got into bed beside me. I expected him to take me in his arms and kiss and caress me.