Tenderness

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 Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. There were three reasons why the Angel appeared to Joseph with this message. First, that a just man might not be led into an unjust action, with just intentions. Secondly, for the honour of the mother herself, for had she been put away, she could not have been free from evil suspicion among the unbelievers. Thirdly, that Joseph, understanding the holy conception, might keep himself from her with more care than before He did not appear to Joseph before the conception, that he should not think those things that Zacharias thought, nor suffer what he suffered in falling into the sin of unbelief concerning the conception of his wife in her old age. For it was yet more incredible that a virgin should conceive, than that a woman past the age should conceive. CHRYSOSTOM. Or, The Angel appeared to Joseph when he was in this perplexity, that his wisdom might be apparent to Joseph, and that this might be a proof to him of those things that he spoke. For when lie heard out of the mouth of the Angel those very things that he thought within himself, this was an undoubted proof, that he was a messenger from God, who alone knows the secrets of the heart. Also the account of the Evangelist is beyond suspicion, as he describes Joseph feeling all that a husband was likely to feel. The Virgin also by this was more removed from suspicion, in that her husband had felt jealousy, yet took her home, and kept her with him after her conception. She had not told Joseph the things that the Angel had said to her, because she did not suppose that she should be believed by her husband, especially as he had begun to have suspicions concerning her. But to the Virgin the Angel announced her conception before it took place, lest if he should defer it till afterwards she should be in straits. And it behoved that Mother who was to receive the Maker of all things to be kept free from all trouble. Not only does the Angel vindicate the Virgin from all impurity, but shews that the conception was supernatural, not removing his fears only, but adding matter of joy; saying, That which is born in her is of the Holy Spirit. GLOSS. (ord.) To be born in her, and born of her, are two different things; to be born of her is to come into the world; to be born in her, is the same as to be conceived. Or the word born is used according to the foreknowledge of the Angel which he has of God, to whom the future is as the past.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  However, the existence of the hermaphrodite re veals, in intimidating exaggeration, the truth concerning eve!)' human being-which is why the hermaphrodite is called a freak. The human being does not, in general, enjoy being intimidated by what he/she finds in the mirror. The hermaphrodite, therefore, may make his/her living in side shows or brothels, whereas the merely androgynous are running banks or fi lling stations or maternity wards, churches, armies or countries. The last time you had a drink, whether you were alone or with another, you were having a drink with an androgynous human being; and this is true for the last time you broke bread or, as I have tried to suggest, the last time you made love. There seems to be a vast amount of confusion in the West ern world concerning these matters, but love and sexual ac tivity arc not synonymous: Only by becoming inhuman can the human being pretend that they are. The mare is not obliged to love the stallion, nor is the bull required to love the cow. They are doing what comes naturally. But this by no means sums up the state or the possibilities of the human being in whom the awakening of desire fuels imagination and in whom imagination fuels desire. In other words, it is not possible for the human being to be as simple as a stallion or a marc, because the human imagination is perpetually required to examine, control and redefine reality, 8! 4 FREAKS AND AMERICAN IDEAL OF MANHOOD 81 5 of which we must assume ourselves to be the center and the key. Nature and revelation are perpetually challenging each other; this relentless tension is one of the keys to human his tory and to what is known as the human condition. Now, I can speak only of the Western world and must rely on my own experience, but the simple truth of this universal duality, this perpetual possibility of communion and comple tion, seems so alarming that I have watched it lead to addic tion, despair, death and madness. Nowhere have I seen this panic more vividly than in my country and in my generation. The American idea of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American idea of masculinity. Idea may not be the precise word, for the idea of one's sexuality can only with great vio lence be divorced or distanced fr om the idea of the self. Yet something resembling this rupture has certainly occurred (and is occurring) in American life, and violence has been the American daily bread since we have heard of America.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  The second round was unspectacular at first; the St Albans boy was by no means unattractive, I decided, if of a rather slow-witted, suspicious expression—and he managed to place a couple of good body-shots under Alastair’s guard, shots that were rare in this kind of fight. Then Alastair sent through a vicious jab to the black boy’s face, where we heard not only the muffled smack of the glove but beneath it a strange, squinching little sound, as of the yielding of soft, adolescent bone and gristle. As the boy fell back Alastair followed up, before anyone could stop him, with a second blow of punitive accuracy. Cutting the air between them with his arm, the referee held Alastair off, gestured him away, and as he did so caught up his left glove in his hand. Across its blancoed surface, smeared by the impact of the second blow, was the bright trace of blood. Bill turned to me with a look of relief. ‘He’s done it,’ he said. ‘They’ll have to stop it now. Yes, he’s done it.’ The shouts in the hall were modified with a sympathy easily accorded to the loser, and Alastair, himself looking rather stunned, cheated somehow by his own victory, jogged about in the ring, punching the air, which was all that was left for him, and showing he had hardly noticed, he needed a fight. After brief deliberations between the ref and the officious, serious judges (this was their life, after all) the unanimous decision was announced. Then Alastair relaxed, hugged and patted his opponent with a careless fondness, and did his lively round of thanks and handshakes. I was moved by the propriety of this. Bill of course went off with his champion, and after I’d watched the opening of the next fight, which didn’t promise to go so well for Limehouse, I wondered what the hell I was doing and sloped off too through the audience and out by the swinging blue doors. Through another door on the right I heard the familiar fizz of showers and felt the familiar need to see what was going on in them. There was such an innocence to the place that they saw nothing suspicious in my presence there—nothing either in Bill’s, who, freed from adult prerogatives, absorbed himself with earnest complicity in this little manly world. The mood here also was one of pure sportsmanship, of candid bustle, like a chorus dressing room. Both teams shared the facilities, and Alastair and his opponent sat side by side on a bench, Alastair undoing, with patient, soldierly tenderness, the bandages that bound the black boy’s hands, and then offering his own hands to be undone, his wrists lying intimately on the other’s hairless thigh. The black boy wore a plaster woefully along his already puffing cheekbone.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  Joey felt a pang of incredulous affection. Could she actually be less competent than the other bums in the typing pool? Everyone in it was a bad worker, except Evelyn. Evelyn was the only other girl there. She was an energetic, square-jawed woman who would type eighty words a minute. She wore tight jeans and cowboy shirts and thick black eyeliner that gathered in blobs in the corners of her eyes. Her streaked blond hair hung in her face and made her look masked and brutal. She had a collection of books about various mass murderers on her desk, and she could tell you all their personal histories. The other three typists were fat, morose homosexuals who sat at their desks and ate from bags of cookies and complained. They had worked in the bookstore for years and they all talked desperately of “getting out.” Ariel had been around the longest. He was six feet three inches tall and had round, demure shoulders, big hips and square fleshy breasts that embarrassed him. He had a small head, a long, bumpy nose and large brown eyes that were by turns sweetly candid or forlorn, but otherwise had a disturbing blank quality. He had enjoyed a brief notoriety in punk rock circles for his electric piano music. He talked about his past success in a meek, wistful voice, and showed people old pictures of himself dressed in black, wearing black wing-tipped sunglasses. He was terribly sensitive, and Tommy took advantage of his sensitivity to make fun of him. “Ariel is the spirit of the typing pool,” Tommy would chatter as he ran from clerk to clerk with stacks of papers. “Whenever any of you are craving inspiration, just gaze on Ariel.” “Please, Tom, I’m on the verge of tears,” Ariel would answer funereally. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about!” Tommy would scream. — When Joey first noticed Daisy, he wondered why this pretty young woman had chosen to work in a filthy, broken-down store amid unhappy homosexuals. As time went on, it seemed less and less inappropriate. She was comfortable in the typing pool. She was happy to listen to the boys talk about their adventures in leather bars, where men got blow jobs in open wooden booths or pissed on other men. She told jokes about Helen Keller and sex. She talked about her boyfriends and her painting. She was always crouching at Evelyn’s desk, whispering and laughing about something, or looking at Evelyn’s back issues of True Detective magazine. She wore T-shirts with pictures of cartoon characters on them, and bright-colored pants. Her brown hair was bobbed in a soft curve that ended on either side of her high cheekbones. When she walked, her shoulders and long neck were erect in a busy, almost ducklike way, but her hips and waist were fluid and gently mobile.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  If he tried to be strict, she would tease and flatter him. The few times he lost his temper and punished her, she punished him with silence. When he dragged her up the stairs and spanked her, she ran away from home. She called a week later and spoke to Virginia, but she hung up when Jarold got on the phone. It was the first time that Virginia had seen Jarold cry. “Magdalen has real charm,” said Jarold to Lily. “She can charm the birds off the trees. You don’t have any of that. You don’t have any personality at all.” Virginia was surprised at the intensity of Jarold’s dislike for Lily. And, although Lily never expressed it openly, Virginia felt that Lily hated him too. Lily never argued with him; she barely acknowledged his presence. When she had to speak to him, her voice was clipped and subtly condescending, as though he were beneath defiance. One evening, Lily and Virginia were sitting together in lawn chairs in the back yard when Charles and Daniel approached them with a big piece of wood. The boys had shot four squirrels, skinned them and nailed the skins to it. They displayed the skins proudly, and Virginia praised them. Lily said nothing until they left. Then she said that she thought it was sick. “I know, it seems awful,” said Virginia. “But they’re little boys and it means something to them. They do it to impress their father.” Virginia was unnerved by the sudden look of contempt on Lily’s face. “I know,” she said. — Lily’s stay gradually became more and more unpleasant and eventually became a discomfiting memory that hung over the house for quite a while. But there were bright spots that stood out of the unpleasantness so vividly that they seemed to come from somewhere else altogether. Virginia would spend afternoons with Lily after school. They’d change into jeans and T-shirts and drive into the mountains where they’d gone the first day. Sometimes they’d stop at a Dairy Queen and buy pink-spotted cups of ice cream in melting puddles of syrup. They’d sit on the car hood, slowly swinging their legs and eating the ice cream with pink plastic spoons, talking about the bossy girl in Lily’s home ec class, or the boy she thought was “different.” Virginia spoke about her high school days, when she was beautiful and popular and all the girls tried to be friends with her. She’d give Lily social advice about how to choose her friends. When they’d get to the mountains, they’d leave the car and walk. They’d become quiet and concentrate on the walk. They’d find paths, then break branches from trees and use them to clear their way.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Paula’s wonderful care of her pet rabbit reflects this loss. In mothering the rabbit, she rediscovers and resurrects the loving mother she has lost. By identifying with the mother she loves, she rehearses the memory, keeping it fresh and alive. She is in her imagination the well-cared-for rabbit, and she is also the loving available mother whom she loved and lost when she was four years old. Of course, there are many millions of married mothers of young children who work full-time, but they have a husband to help them with the job of parenting when both return home in the evening. This joint support is critical for those who want or need to work while raising young children. Two parents can spell each other in daily routines and when children fall sick. Recent studies show that compared with fathers a decade ago, fathers in today’s two-income families spend more time with their young children. There really are four hands rather than two. Intact families with two people working also have higher incomes than single-parent families and can spend more on child care and other kinds of help. I recall one divorced mother who, having done one too many loads of laundry at 3 A.M., decided to hell with sleep, she would just stay up all night every night to get everything done. She pulled it off for three days and then collapsed. The parent who shares responsibility with the other parent works very hard but is not on permanent, continual overload with the full responsibility for making every decision alone, with taking care of every bill, with worrying about every needed repair. She can take time out even after a busy tiring day to sit on the floor and play with her toddler. She can enjoy the child, replenish her own emotional reserves, and allow herself a few happy hours to herself even once or twice a week. In our comparison group of intact families, most of the women reduced their work hours when their first child was very young. If they had more children, more than half dropped out of the workforce for a few years and went back when the youngest entered grade school. Unlike the single parent striving alone, these were choices they could afford to make. THIRTEENCourt-Ordered Visiting, the Child’s ViewShortly after her eighth birthday, Paula’s father reentered her life. Like many men after divorce, he eventually used the crisis to pull his life together and was now feeling chipper about himself and recovered from his financial debacle and humiliating betrayal by a trusted friend. Now he genuinely wanted to spend time with his children, to get to know them again, to be given a second chance.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Presently, it discovers it has you, and since it has already de cided it wants to live, it gives you a toothless smile when you come near it, gurgles or giggles when you pick it up, holds you tight by the thumb or the eyeball or the hair, and, having already opted against solitude, howls when you put it down. You begin the extraordinary journey of beginning to know and to control this creature. You know the sound-the mean ing-of one cry from another; without knowing that you know it. You know when it's hungry-t hat's one sound. You know when it's wet-that's another sound. You know when it's angry. You know when it's bored. You know when it's frightened. You know when it's suffering. You come or you go or you sit still according to the sound the baby makes. And you watch over it where I was born, even in your sleep, be cause rats love the odor of newborn babies and are much, much bigger. 356 NO NAM E IN THE STR EE T By the time it has managed to crawl under every bed, nearly sutfocate itself in every drawer, nearly strangle itself with string, somehow, God knows how, trapped itself behind the radiator, been pulled back, by one leg, from its suicidal in vestigation of the staircase, and nearly poisoned itself with everything-it s hand being quicker than your eye-it can possibly get into its mouth, you have either grown to love it or you have lef t home. I, James, in August. George, in January. Barbara, in August. Wilmer, in October, David, in December. Gloria, Ruth, Elizabeth, and (when we thought it was over!) Paula Maria, named by me, born on the day our father died, all in the summertime. The youngest son of the New Orleans branch of the fam ily-f amily, here, is used loosely and has to be; we knew al most nothing about this branch, which knew nothing about us; Daddy, the great good friend of the Great God Almighty, had simply fled the South, leaving a branch behind. As I have said, he was the son of a slave, and his youngest daughter, by his first marriage, is my mother's age and his youngest son is nine years older than I. This boy, who did not get along with his father, was my elder brother, as far as I then knew, and he sometimes took me with him here and there.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I squared my shoulders and tried to appear worthy. ‘He’s looking good.’ Nigel smiled at me slyly. ‘He was down here earlier on, splashing about, diving and that. Showing off. I wouldn’t mind a bit of that, I thought. Gave me a really fresh look too.’ ‘You little slut,’ I said, and flicked at him with my towel as I darted off. But I was reassured by how he had got it wrong, for though Phil was taken with his own body he almost stubbornly never tarted. His love was all bottled up and kept for me. I thought of him with such tenderness in the shower and the changing-room that I was hardly aware of the bustle around me. I had not been good enough to him. I had often been sarcastic, and used him as a kind of beautiful pneumatic toy. He was the only true, pure, simple thing I could see in my life at the moment, and I wished I was with him, and wanted to thank him, and say I was sorry. I decided I would go up to the Queensberry and hope to catch him before he went out. Then I would go to James, who was true and pure too of course in his way, and worrying about his looming court appearance. I went through the deeply familiar streets and squares, through the equally intimate cooling and soft-fingered evening. Then there were the high plane trees and the bold splashing fountains—my mood escaping all the while from its bleak morning pacings and ambling into a more romantic melancholy. I became somehow picturesque to myself, prone as ever to the aesthetic solution. I was about to go round to the side of the hotel, where I was well enough known now, but I was suddenly tired of my laundryman’s-eye view of life, and swung up the main shrub-flanked steps and into the hall. I had become so used to the back stairs that I was quite surprised to see svelte couples coming down for pre-dinner drinks, others checking in, their anxieties melting as uniformed boys magicked their monogrammed luggage away. One or two people, waiting to meet friends, half-concentrated on the lit showcases where scarves, watches, perfumes and china figurines were displayed, or revolved the squeaking postcard racks, soothed by the customary London views. I loitered too for a minute, charmed—or at least amazed—by all this bought pleasantness.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  He was terribly vulnerable, I now saw. A few days before, when I ran into him and he invited me to tea, he was feebly trying to open the wrong locker (it was the old confusion between 16 and 91). He clearly had no recollection of where he had left his clothes, and was wholly dependent on the little disc attached to his key. As he fumbled and muttered to himself the tenant of 16 came up, a trim little student I’d seen around. ‘No dear, you’re 91 and I’m 16,’ he said impatiently, and found himself equipped with a joke—‘give or take a year or two.’ Charles didn’t understand at first, and as 16 propelled him away I felt an unusual upsurge of kindness for him as against the sexy complicity with the boy that I would normally have encouraged. I came to Charles’s rescue, suspecting he would allow me to be gently protective. When he didn’t, at first, even recognise me, I knew that it was necessary. ‘I suppose the place must have changed a lot?’ I blandly hazarded. But he wasn’t with me; he even screwed up his eyes as he stared through me, perhaps reliving some hurtful episode. I let a few moments pass, looked over the spines of black-bound art folios— Donatello, Sandro Botticelli, Giovanni Bellini —which lay on the table beside me. My grandfather had them too, in the library at Marden, and I recalled childhood afternoons looking at their fine-toned sepia plates; they must have been a special series in the Thirties. ‘You’re not cold, are you, William?’ Charles suddenly asked. I assured him I was fine, though the sunless room was surprisingly cool after the glare of the streets. ‘We don’t get any sun here—only in the attic. Those houses block it out. We’re very cut off here, of course.’ It was an odd remark to make of a house almost in the precincts of St Paul’s Cathedral, but as I looked out of the window I knew what he meant. The ear picked up a constant faint rumble of traffic, but the little clock sounded far louder; no one passed by outside and it was hard to imagine a breeze ruffling the papers strewn about in the rich stuffy air of the room where we sat. ‘It’s a shady little street,’ he added. ‘In the old days it was known as Gropecunt Lane, where the lightermen and what-have-you used to come up for the whores. There’s a reference to it in Pepys—I can’t find it now.’ ‘It’s a beautiful house.’ ‘Do you like it? It’s a very special house, more special than you might think. I bought it at the end of the war—it was all knocked to hell round here of course by the bloomin’ Blitz.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  body around as they each pulled the pareo from the other’s body, and each fucked their cocks into the other’s mouth. Pali slid on top and, arching from the root, sent the tip of his prick beyond Gregg’s throat muscle, forcing him to control his breath. Gregg hummed into the head of Pali’s dick. They turned and turned back on the bed, again and again, without releasing each other. The Vikings game played out down stairs, and the Pastor tossed in his chair, thinking of yet an other guest one-on-one with Gregg. Gregg pushed Pali back on the bed, his knees on either side of Pali’s waist. He pressed his asshole onto Pali’s standing dick and took it slowly in. Gregg’s cock branched hard into Pali’s sliding fist. Each inner ring of his ass opened until Pali’s cock was buried deep inside. Pali’s stroking blurred. Gregg’s cum shot onto the wall beside the bed and ran down Pali’s wrist. Pali took Gregg’s legs in his arms and brought Gregg belly down onto the bed, arching his hips into Gregg’s clutching cheeks. Pali’s face was empty like a runner’s. Gregg’s groans carried into the living room. Pali came inside Gregg’s smooth, shaking ass. Then he kissed Gregg’s thick shoulders, pressed his face against Gregg’s, and closed his eyes. © “Our wives will be coming back from their shopping trip to Chicago tonight. It’s only been a weekend, but I miss the grandchildren!” said the Pastor at breakfast the next morning. Pali watched Gregg, who was working the Sunday crossword puzzle. Before you could say, Kafefe! Pali was back on the free way headed toward the towers of the Twin Cities. This time the Pastor himself drove him. Gregg stayed home, trying to repair a bicycle for one of his young daughters.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘You look tired,’ he said. ‘Too much sodomy, I should say.’ And then, as if in surgery, picking up my Guinness bottle: ‘Take this tonic twice a day and have a complete rest: we’ll soon have you back to normal.’ It was charming to see him, though looking (worthily, selflessly) tired himself. I didn’t comment on this, for his overwork and his unfairly long spells on call depressed him and were making him look older. He sat beside me with his drink, and I ran my hand over his head, bald now to half way back. He smiled, and put a kiss on my cheekbone. ‘How are the ill?’ I asked. ‘Oh, fine,’ he said. ‘Anything interesting?’ The bizarre things that people said and did in the consulting room were a staple of our conversation. ‘Not really. The woman with the stones came back. And I had a lad in this morning with the most enormous donger.’ James was obsessed by big cocks, many of which seemed to pass through his hands in his professional capacity—though all too few, I suspected, in his private one. ‘How big?’ I enquired. ‘Ooh …’ he gestured with his hands, like a fisherman—‘in its flaccid condition that is. Quite unbearably hideous youth, alas. He seemed to think there was something wrong with it—so I told him to go to the clinic.’ He took a deep draught of beer. ‘Fantastic cock, though,’ he added wistfully. I chuckled. ‘You’d have been proud of me the other day,’ I said, ‘when I did a very heroic deed and saved the life of a queer peer.’ And I related the incident in the Kensington Gardens bog. ‘It was all due to you, darling,’ I said. ‘I remembered what you do on trains.’ ‘I’m impressed and proud,’ James said. ‘But a Lord—a Baron, or something bigger do you suppose?’ ‘Looked like a Baron to me,’ I said—and with a silly smirk, ‘anyway you wouldn’t find a Viscount cottaging …’ ‘Not yet, you wouldn’t,’ James tartly rejoined. ‘Has he been in touch since?’ ‘He has not. A man just came along when the ambulance arrived and ran about saying “Oh dear, my Lord” and that kind of thing. I imagine we may never find out who it was.’ I looked at James. ‘But to think you do that all the time. God, I felt wonderful afterwards …’ ‘Yes; you get over that, you’ll find, should you ever do it again. But what about this boy? I suppose you’d better tell me.’

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  This evening, as he was much brighter, I sat with Taha in close & utterly irregular comradeship & had him tell me about his family. I even told him a bit about mine, until he said that being British I must know Mr Mills, a missionary apparently, who comes from New York, & I recognised that our understandings were a trifle out of kilter. Finally I told him the story of Prince Ahmed; it was the one I had learnt most recently to tell after dinner, & a strange amusement & entrancement came over his features to hear me recite to him in my painfully correct Arabic, as if he had been some dignitary. But then the story too held him like a revelation. I made use of various props for the three magical gifts of the princes: for the flying carpet the old rush mat on the floor, for the spying-tube which showed whatever one desired my field-glasses, & for the apple which cured all ills the lime on the tray with my drink. He laughed with that delight which children show at certain well-worn jokes whose very repetition is a guarantee of pleasure & security, & I capered around, squatting on the mat, peering out of the window through the binoculars—though I saw not the Princess Nural-Nihar but birds coming down into the nim-trees, a stupendous sunset above the rocks, a girl loping home with a dog at her heels—& then wafting the lime under my nose & rolling my eyes as if it smelt divine. But all the gifts were of equal wondrousness, I explained, sitting solemnly down on the edge of the bed: and then, as I went on about the shooting of the arrows, & how the Princess wd be given to him who shot the furthest, the most exquisite thing happened. Taha slid his hand shyly across the blanket & clasped my own. I scarcely faltered as I spoke of Ahmed’s arrow, which going so far was assumed to have vanished so that he lost the Princess to his brother Ali, but I felt a squeezing in my chest & throat & hardly dared look at him as, all unconsciously, I made our two hands more comfortable together, interweaving his long fingers with my own. By a simple gesture I wd never have dared to make & without words which neither of us cd have said, he conveyed his trust in me, & holding my hand held on to a simple faith that all wd be well with Ahmed, wretched though his current state now was. And when the others had all turned home, I went on, saying that the arrow wd never be found & that they must make haste for the wedding-feast of Prince Ali & the Princess Nur-al-Nihar, Ahmed went on alone & lo he encountered the radiant fairy Peri-Banou & fell in love with her & married her & lived in happiness with her all the days of his life. Then Hassan was scuffling & waiting at the door, & Taha with less than innocence drew his hand away—

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  AMBROSE. O great manifestation of Divine power, great discipline of virtue! Both the design of thy traitor is detected, and yet forbearance is not withheld. He shews whom it is Judas betrays, by manifesting things hidden; He declares whom he delivers up, by saying, the Son of man, for the human flesh, not the Divine nature, is seized. That however which most confounds the ungrateful, is the thought that he had delivered up Him, who though He was the Son of God, yet for our sakes wished to be the Son of man; as if He said, “For thee did I undertake, O ungrateful man, that which thou betrayest in hypocrisy. AUGUSTINE. The Lord when He was betrayed first said this which Luke mentions, Betrayest thou the Son of man with a kiss? next, what Matthew says, Friend, wherefore art thou come? and lastly, what John records, Whom seek ye? AMBROSE. Our Lord kissed him, not that He would teach us to dissemble, but both that He might not seem to shrink from the traitor, and that He might the more move him by not denying him the offices of love. THEOPHYLACT. The disciples are inflamed with zeal, and unsheath their swords. But whence have they swords? Because they had slain the lamb, and had departed from the feast. Now the other disciples ask whether they should strike; but Peter, always fervent in defence of his Master, waits not for permission, but straightway strikes the servant of the High Priest; as it follows, And one of them smote, &c. AUGUSTINE. He who struck, according to John, was Peter, but he whom he struck was called Malchus. AMBROSE. For Peter being well versed in the law, and full of ardent affection, knowing that it was counted righteousness in Phineas that he had killed the sacrilegious persons, struck the High Priest’s servant.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  He looked over at me, almost as though he were seeing me for the first time. "You really believe that, don't you?" I said, "I wish I didn't. But I'm afraid I do." "Well," he said, at last, "ifyou're black, you don't have to worry too much about where you stand. They've got that covered, I believe." Indeed, they do. And, therefore, people like the people in the Hollywood hills can be looked on as the highly problem atical leaven in the loaf. Instinctively, when speaking before them, one attempts to fan into a blaze, or at least into positive heat, their somewhat chilled apprehension of life. In attempt ing to lessen the distance between them and oneself, one is TO BE BAPTIZED 437 also, unconsciously and inevitably, suggesting that they lessen the distance between themselves and their deepest hopes and fears and desires; even that they dispense with that middleman they call doctor, who is one of their greatest, most infantile self-indulgences. One senses sometimes in their still faces an intense, speculative hesitation. Bobby Seale insists that one of the things that most afflict white people is their disastrous concept of God; they have never accepted the dark gods, and their fear of the dark gods, who live in them at least as surely as the white God does, causes them to distrust life. It causes them, profoundly, to be fascinated by, and more than a little fr ightened of the lives led by black people: it is this tension which makes them problematical. But, on the other hand, it must be becoming increasingly clear to some, at least, that all of us are standing in the same deep shadow, a shadow which can only be lifted by human courage and honor. Many still hope to keep their honor and their safety, too. No one can blame them for this hope, it is impossible indeed not to share it: but when queried as to the soundness of such a hope, for a people caught in a civilization in crisis, history fails to give any very sanguine answers. Eventually, Martin arrived, in a light blue suit, accompanied by Andrew Young, and they both looked very tired. We were very glad to see each other. We sat down in a relatively se cluded corner and tried to bring each other up to date. Alas, it would never be possible for us to bring each other up to date. We had first met during the last days of the Mont gomery bus boycott-and how long ago was that? It was senseless to say, eight years, ten years ago-it was longer ago than time can reckon. Martin and I had never got to know each other well, circumstances, if not temperament, made that impossible, but I had much respect and affection for him, and I think Martin liked me, too. I told him what I was doing in Hollywood, and both he and Andrew, looking perhaps a trifle dubious, wished me well.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  And this did not come about, by the way, merely because of the venom or villainy of the South. It could never have come about at all without the tacit consent of the North; and this consent robs the North, historically and actually, of any claim to moral superiority. The failure of the government to make any realistic provision for the edu cation of tens of thousands of illiterate former slaves had the effect of dumping this problem squarely into the lap of one man-who knew, whatever else he may not have known, that the education of Negroes had somehow to be accomplished. Whether or not Washington believed what he said is certainly an interesting question. But he did know that he could ac complish his objective by telling white men what they wanted to hear. And it has never been very difficult for a Negro in this country to figure out what white men want to hear: he takes his condition as an echo of their desires. There will be no more Booker T. Washingtons. And whether we like it or not, and no matter how hard or how long we oppose it, there will be no more segregated schools, there will be no more segregated anything. King is entirely right when he says that segregation is dead. The real question which taces the Republic is just how long, how violent, and how expensive the funeral is going to be ; and this question it MARTIN LUTHER KING is up to the Republic to resolve, it is not really in King's hands. The sooner the corpse is buried, the sooner we can get around to the far more taxing and rewarding problems of integration, or what King calls community, and what I think of as the achievement of nationhood, or, more simply and cruelly, the growing up of this dangerously adolescent country. I saw King again, later that same evening, at a party given by this same friend. He came late, did not stay long. I re member him standing in the shadows of the room, ncar a bookcase, drinking something nonalcoholic, and being patient with the interlocutor who had trapped him in this spot. He obviously wanted to get away and go to bed. King is some what below what is called average height, he is sturdily built, but is not quite as heavy or as stocky as he had seemed to me at first . I remember feeling, rather as though he were a younger, much-loved, and menaced brother, that he seemed very slight and vulnerable to be taking on such tremendous odds. I was leaving for Montgomery the next day, and I called on King in the morning to ask him to have someone fr om the Montgomery Improvement Association meet me at the air port. It was he who had volunteered to do this for me, since he knew that I knew no one there, and he also probably re alized that I was frightened.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I squared my shoulders and tried to appear worthy. ‘He’s looking good.’ Nigel smiled at me slyly. ‘He was down here earlier on, splashing about, diving and that. Showing off. I wouldn’t mind a bit of that, I thought. Gave me a really fresh look too.’ ‘You little slut,’ I said, and flicked at him with my towel as I darted off. But I was reassured by how he had got it wrong, for though Phil was taken with his own body he almost stubbornly never tarted. His love was all bottled up and kept for me. I thought of him with such tenderness in the shower and the changing-room that I was hardly aware of the bustle around me. I had not been good enough to him. I had often been sarcastic, and used him as a kind of beautiful pneumatic toy. He was the only true, pure, simple thing I could see in my life at the moment, and I wished I was with him, and wanted to thank him, and say I was sorry. I decided I would go up to the Queensberry and hope to catch him before he went out. Then I would go to James, who was true and pure too of course in his way, and worrying about his looming court appearance. I went through the deeply familiar streets and squares, through the equally intimate cooling and soft-fingered evening. Then there were the high plane trees and the bold splashing fountains—my mood escaping all the while from its bleak morning pacings and ambling into a more romantic melancholy. I became somehow picturesque to myself, prone as ever to the aesthetic solution. I was about to go round to the side of the hotel, where I was well enough known now, but I was suddenly tired of my laundryman’s-eye view of life, and swung up the main shrub-flanked steps and into the hall. I had become so used to the back stairs that I was quite surprised to see svelte couples coming down for pre-dinner drinks, others checking in, their anxieties melting as uniformed boys magicked their monogrammed luggage away. One or two people, waiting to meet friends, half-concentrated on the lit showcases where scarves, watches, perfumes and china figurines were displayed, or revolved the squeaking postcard racks, soothed by the customary London views. I loitered too for a minute, charmed—or at least amazed—by all this bought pleasantness.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  He could do. He’s full of energy, even though he’s so old and not, strictly speaking, all there.’ ‘He’s probably writing about you now—the peaches and cream of your complexion—soon to be restored—the well-knit frame.’ I aimed a swipe at him with a cushion, and then clutched at my ribs. ‘The subject describing his biographer … It all gets rather complicated and modern,’ he said, frowning and getting up to go. As usual he had been a corrective, and when Phil turned up later he found me aloof with a volume of the diaries, and hardly interested in his anecdotes about Pino and the hotel lift, and how there was a gay couple staying who had made a pass at him. He unpacked some veal, some ripe peaches, some wine and more bread. He seemed to believe in bread in some literal way as the staff of life. I watched him moving about, doing a little tidying, neatly stacking up Charles’s tumbled notebooks. For all his compact, self-contained ordinariness he was a shape-changer. He was exercising his ability to make himself bigger, stronger, and more beautiful. I could still summon up one image of him when he first came to the Corry—standard material, a bit overweight, uncommunicative. Now he grew better week by week. His whole gait was changing as his thighs became more massive, rubbing together as he walked and so pushing his knees apart and turning his toes slightly in. As a result his ass, even more than before, seemed to be proffered, thrust out ingenuously towards the admiring hand. Whilst I was Impotens he was a great consolation just to hold and touch—like those exhibitions of sculpture that are put on for the handicapped. Instead of the normal brutal rush our lovemaking was tentative and respectful—it was as if we were both of us afflicted by some cruel, slowing illness that made us think everything out from scratch. ‘Still reading those books?’ he said, with a hint of reserve, as he came and sat on the floor by my chair and activated the remote control of the TV. I don’t think he really knew what the books were, and looked on them as some tiresome academic pursuit to which I was snobbishly attached. ‘There’s no tennis,’ I said, as the still of the court welled up in the screen, accompanied by optimistic light music. ‘Do you fancy any of the tennis players?’ he asked. ‘I think tennis the least erotic of all sports,’ I lied firmly, ‘marbles and pigeon-fancying not excluded.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I took all my clothes off and after a few minutes went back into the sitting-room. I don’t know if it was just his confused readiness to take what I gave him, or if he really understood the absolute tenderness that I now felt for him as I picked him up and dumped him on the sofa; but he held me very tight as I lay down beside him. I was the only person he had; the very melodrama of the case had repelled me before, but for a while I allowed myself to accept it. I had been disgusted by his need for me, but now it moved me, and I burbled into his ear about how I loved him. ‘I love you too—darling,’ he said. It was a word that he could never have used before, and the tears poured down my face and smudged all over his, as we lay there and hugged, rocking from side to side. There were several occasions of this kind, when I was exposed by my own mindless randiness and helpless sentimentality. I made a point of going out to the baths each day, and while I was there, talking to friends, exercising, looking at other men, I could see with more detachment how these scenes weakened my authority. I was eight years older than Arthur, and our affair had started as a crazy fling with all the beauty for me of his youngness and blackness. Now it became a murky business, a coupling in which we both exploited each other, my role as protector mined by the morbid emotion of protectiveness. I saw him becoming more and more my slave and my toy, in a barely conscious abasement which excited me even as it pulled me down. The Corry featured in these days as a lucid interlude—with an institutional structure that time in the flat entirely lacked. I tended to stay late or go to a bar afterwards, not for sex, but for the company of strangers and for talk about sport or music. Walking back up the drive and feeling for my keys I even felt reluctance to plunge back into my private life, its unsterilised warmth in which sensation seemed both heightened and degraded. Yet going to the bathroom to hang up my wet towel and swimming trunks, I could be touched unexpectedly by the sight of Arthur’s few possessions, and his muddied cords, stiff where they had dried, tangled up with my silk shirt on the airing-cupboard floor, had me sighing and wincing at their pathos—even if, the next morning, I wished I had never seen them and that I had myself to myself. Perhaps we should have burnt them: the empty, crumpled tubes of his trousers, the blood-stained pink of the shirt, were evidence of a kind. We were such inexpert criminals.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  That’s how she is—just really thoughtful and giving and going the extra mile for you.” I thought to myself how much this consideration, that so many would have taken for granted, must have meant to this lonely man. “Our relationship started as a friendship over those dinners,” Larry said. “We shared things about our lives. She told me about her marriage—how she left when he wouldn’t quit smoking pot and he got violent. I told her about my parents and my dad’s violence. And even about me and how I’d started to hit my girlfriends and how ashamed I was of that part of me. I was afraid that would put her off—and I wouldn’t have blamed her. But she understood how hard I was trying to get that behind me, and she actually said that she appreciated that I’d seen the dark side, as she called it, and that I’d come out a better person for having confronted some of these things. Talking about this with her and getting her reaction was the first time that I’d felt whole, like I could accept all of who I was and even be kind of proud of everything I’d been through. We’re still each other’s best friends. I can tell her anything. It’s incredible. I never thought I’d be able to say this, but I trust her with everything.” “How did the romantic piece get added into your friendship with Grace?” I asked. “I guess it was about a year after we met. Grace went to Arizona to visit her folks for a month and I really missed her. I realized how much we had grown to share with each other and it also hit me how much lighter and more fun my life was when she was there. She’s a really optimistic, positive person and she has a great sense of humor. I started to think then that she might be the one for me. When she got back it turned out she’d missed me, too, and so we started to date more seriously. We were inseparable for about a year and then we moved in together.” “How did it come about that you decided to marry?” Larry’s response confirmed my expectation that commitment is really hard for these young men. He said, “It took a long time. There was no way I was going to take getting married lightly. And that caused some of our earliest friction. I realized I loved her and that she was important to me but I was unable to make a decision. I was afraid because of the divorce. I was afraid of being left and I think that is why I was afraid of making a commitment to her. Somehow that brought up the sadness I felt when I was seven. That same sadness came back every time I was about to say ‘Let’s do it.’

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Even in the Twenties and Thirties, which were quite wild in their way, it was still kind of underground, we operated on a constantly shifting code, and it was so extraordinarily moving and exciting when that spurt of recognition came, like the flare of a match! No one’s ever really written about it, I know what you mean, sex somehow becomes farcical in the past,’ Charles looked at me very tenderly. ‘Perhaps you will, my dear.’ ‘Are you finished, my Lord?’ Graham was enquiring in his complaisant basso. ‘Graham, yes, yes. Do clear away. And William, I must give you just before you go something else to read.’ I hopped up, alert to these covert stage directions in Charles’s talk, and helped him up too. He shuffled round his chair, and looked about for whatever it was. I was convinced he knew where to find it, and had politely and theatrically introduced this air of uncertainty. He handed me a document of several pages, the size of a pamphlet of poems, bound in black shot silk boards and tied legalistically with pink ribbon. ‘Don’t read it now,’ he cautioned. ‘Read it when you get home.’ Graham had gone out with the tray, and we followed a few moments afterwards, Charles’s hand on my shoulder. ‘Thanks so much,’ I said. ‘Thank you, my dear.’ He leant on me and—which he had never done before—kissed me on the cheek. I clumsily patted him on the back. On my way home I stopped at the Corry for a swim. It was that transitional half-hour before six o’clock, and the last of the afternoon customers—oldsters, college boys, the unemployed—were combing their hair and wringing out their trunks as the evening crowd, the workers, began to pour in and down the stairs. In twenty minutes every locker would be taken, and those who had been held up in traffic, late for their fitness classes or for a squash booking fast elapsing, would come cantering through the swing doors flushed and swearing. Like restaurants and Underground stations the Corry had its times of day, and to come in on a weekday afternoon or a Sunday evening was to find it in the unhindered possession of a small number of people—like a school at half-term, when only the masters and those boys who live abroad are left. The pool, the gym, the handball court had the grateful calm of places only briefly reprieved from habitual clamour. As I arrived the calm was yielding fast. I took advantage of the crowd, and of the need I always felt on leaving Charles to be childish and naughty. In the showers were a gaggle of Italian kids, in London on a language course.