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 Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  He gave a short laugh, and did not immediately lie down again. Outside, the first milkcart clinked out its tinkling carillon, and he made a vague movement in the direction of the avenue. The strawberry-coloured curtains were slit through by the cold blade of dawning day. Cheri turned back to look at Lea, and stared at her with the formidable intensity of a suspicious dog or a puzzled child. An undecipherable thought appeared in the depths of his eyes; their shape, their dark wallflower hue, their harsh or languorous glint, were used only to win love, never to reveal his mind. From sheets crumpled as though by a storm, rose his naked body, broad-shouldered, slimwaisted; and his whole being breathed forth the melancholy of perfect works of art. ‘Ah, you ...’ sighed the infatuated Lea. He did not smile, accustomed as he was to accepting personal praise. 4 Tell me, Nounoune. ‘What, my pretty?’ He hesitated, fluttered his eyelids, and shivered. ‘I’m tired ... and then to-morrow, how will you manage about —’ Lea gave him a gentle push and pulled the naked body and drowsy head down to the pillows again. ‘Don’t worry. Lie down and go to sleep. Isn’t Nounoune here to look after you? Don’t think of anything. Sleep. You’re cold, I’m sure. ... Here, take this, it’s warm. ...’ She rolled him up in the silk and wool of a little feminine garment, retrieved from somewhere in the bed, and put out the light. In the dark, she lent him her shoulder, settled him happily against her side, and listened till his breathing was in rhythm with her own. No desires clouded her mind, but she did not wish for sleep- “Let him do the sleeping; it’s for me to do the thinking,” she repeated to herself. “I’ll contrive our flight with perfect tact and discretion; I believe in causing as little suffering and scandal as possible. ... For the spring we shall like the south best- If there were only myself to be considered, I’d rather stay here, in peace and quiet; but there’s Ma Peloux and the young Madame Peloux. ...” The vision of a young wife in her nightgown, anxiously standing beside a window, checked Lea only long enough for her to shrug her shoulders with cold impartiality. “I can’t help that. "What makes one person’s happiness ...” The black silky head stirred on her breast, and her sleeping lover moaned in his dream. With a zealous arm, L£a shielded him against nightmares, and rocked him gently so that — without sight, without memory, without plans for the future — he might still resemble that ‘naughty little boy’ never born to her.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  He walked out into the street, erect, with shoulders squared. He went in his open motor to the jeweller’s, where he became sentimental over a slender little bandeau of burning blue sapphires invisibly mounted on blue steel, “so exactly right for Edmee’s hair,” and took it away with him. He bought some stupid, rather pompous flowers. As it had only just struck eleven, he frittered away a further halfhour, drawing money from the Bank, turning over English illustrated papers at a kiosk, visiting his scent-shop and a tobacconist’s that specialized in Oriental cigarettes. Finally, he got back into his motor, and sat down between his sheaf of flowers and a heap of little beribboned parcels. ‘Home.’ The chauffeur swivelled round on his basket-seat. ‘Monsieur? ... What did Monsieur say? ...’ ‘I said Home - Boulevard d’Inkermann. D’you require a map of Paris? ’ The motor went full speed towards the Champs-Elysees. The chauffeur drove much faster than usual and his thoughts could almost be read in his back. He seemed to be brooding uneasily over the gulf which divided the flabby young man of the past months — with his ‘ As you like ’, and his ‘ Have a glass of something, Antonin? ’ — from young Monsieur Peloux, strict with the staff and mindful of the petrol. ‘Young Monsieur Peloux’ leaned back against the morocco leather, hat on knees, drinking in the breeze and exerting ail his energy in an effort not to think. Like a coward, he closed his eyes between the Avenue Malakoff and the Porte Dauphine to avoid a passing glimpse of the Avenue Bugeaud, and he congratulated himself on his resolution. The chauffeur sounded his horn in the Boulevard d’lnkermann for the gate to he opened, and it sang on its hinges with a heavy musical note. The capped concierge hurried about his business, the watch-dogs barked in recognition of their returning master. Very much at his ease, sniffing the green smell of the newly mown lawns, Cheri entered the house and with a master’s step climbed the stairs to the young woman whom he had left behind three months before, much as a sailor from Europe leaves behind, on the other side of the world, a little savage bride. IE a sat at her bureau, throwing away photographs from the last trunk to be unpacked. “Heavens, how hideous people are! U The women who had the nerve to give me these! And they think I’m going to put them up in a row on the mantelpiece - in plated frames or little folding-cases. Tear them all up quick, and straight into the waste-paper basket!”

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  She did not want to go to her grandmother’s in West Hartford the next day, she had advised me when we got back to the Ambassador, she wanted to go to Detroit with the boys. So much for keeping our “private” life separate from our “working” life. In fact she was inseparable from our working life. Our working life was the very reason she happened to be in these hotels. When she was five or six, for example, we took her with us to Tucson, where The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean was shooting. The Hilton Inn, where the production was based during its Tucson location, sent a babysitter to stay with her while we watched the dailies. The babysitter asked her to get Paul Newman’s autograph. A crippled son was mentioned. Quintana got the autograph, delivered it to the babysitter, then burst into tears. It was never clear to me whether she was crying about the crippled son or about feeling played by the babysitter. Dick Moore was the cinematographer on The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean but she seemed to make no connection between this Dick Moore she encountered at the Hilton Inn in Tucson and the Dick Moore she encountered on our beach. On our beach everyone was home, and so was she. At the Hilton Inn in Tucson everyone was working, and so was she. “Working” was a way of being she understood at her core. When she was nine I took her with me on an eight-city book tour: New York, Boston, Washington, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago. “How do you like our monuments,” Katharine Graham had asked her in Washington. She had seemed mystified but game. “What monuments,” she had asked with interest, entirely unaware that most children who visited Washington were shown the Lincoln Memorial instead of National Public Radio and The Washington Post . Her favorite city on this tour had been Dallas. Her least favorite had been Boston. Boston, she had complained, was “all white.” “You mean you didn’t see many black people in Boston,” Susan Traylor’s mother had suggested when Quintana got back to Malibu and reported on her trip. “No,” Quintana said, definite on this point. “I mean it’s not in color.” She had learned to order triple lamb chops from room service on this trip. She had learned to sign her room number for Shirley Temples on this trip.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  He had lain awake for some little while, taking great care not to stir* Cheek on folded arms, he tried to guess the time. Under a clear sky, the avenue must be vibrating with heat too insistent for early morning, since no shadow of a cloud passed across the lambent rose-red curtains. “Ten o’clock, perhaps?” He was tormented by hunger; he had eaten little the previous evening. A year ago he would have bounded out of bed, roughly aroused Lea from sleep by ferocious shouts for cream-frothed chocolate and butter off the ice. He did not stir. He was afraid, did he move, of crumbling away what remained to him of his rapture, the visual pleasure he derived from the shining curtains and from the steel and brass spirals of the bed, twinkling in the coloured aura of the room. Last night’s great happiness had dwindled, it seemed, had melted, and sought refuge in the dancing iridescence of a cut-glass jug. On the landing. Rose trod the carpet with circumspect step; a discreet besom was sweeping the courtyard; and Cheri heard the tinkle of china coming from the pantry. “How the morning drags on,” he said to himself. “I’ll get up.” But he remained without moving a muscle, for, behind him, Lea yawned and stretched her legs. He felt the touch of a gentle hand on his back. He shut his eyes again, and, for no good reason, his whole body began to act a lie, feigning the limpness of sleep. He was aware of Lea leaving the bed and of her dark silhouette between him and the curtains, which she drew half apart. She turned round to look at him, and with a toss of the head smiled in his direction - in no sense a smile of triumph, but a resolute smile, ready to accept all dangers. She was in no hurry to leave the room, and Cheri kept watch on her through hardly parted eyelashes. He saw her open a railway time-table and run her fingers down the columns; then she seemed absorbed in some calculation, brow puckered and face upturned. Not yet powdered, a meagre twist of hair at the back of her head, double chin, and raddled neck, she was exposing herself rashly to the unseen observer. She moved away from the window, and, taking her cheque-book from a drawer, wrote and tore out several cheques. Then she put a pair of white pyjamas at the foot of the bed, and silently left the room. Alone, Cheri took several deep breaths, realizing that he had hardly dared to breathe since Lea had left the bed. He got up, put on the pyjamas, and opened a window. “It’s stifling in here,” he gasped. He had the vague uncomfortable feeling of having done something reprehensible. “ Because I pretended to be asleep? But I’ve watched L6a a hundred times just after she’s got out of bed. Only, this time, I made the pretence of being asleep.”

• From White Oleander (1999)

  Every day I came out of school hoping I would see his truck with the feathered roach clip hanging from the rearview mirror. Finally he had come. The development itself was bare as a scar, with torn and dusty streets of big new houses. Some were already roofed and sided, others finished to the insulation, some skeletal and open to the sky. Ray led me through the house where he was working, clean, the exterior finished, smelling of raw sawdust. He showed me the solid maple cabinetry in the eat-in kitchen, the bay window, the built-in bookcases, the backyard gazebo. I felt the sun glinting off my hair, knew how my mother felt that day long ago at the Small World bookstore, when she had seen my father and stood in the window, beautiful in the light. I let him show me around like a real estate agent—the living room’s two-story picture window, the streamlined toilets in the two and a half baths, the turned banister, the carved newel post. “I lived in a house like this when I was married,” he said, running his hand along the flank of the heavy banister, pushing against the solidity of the post. I tried to imagine Ray in a two-and-a-half-bath life, dinner on the table at six, the regular job, the wife, the kid. But I couldn’t. Anyway, even when he was doing it, he was going to the Trop instead of coming home, falling in love with strippers. I followed him upstairs, where he showed me the finish work, cedar-lined linen closets and window seats. In the master bedroom we could hear the hammering from the other houses and the sound of the bulldozer cutting a pad for a new one. Ray looked out the smudgy casement at the surrounding construction. I imagined what the room would look like once the people moved in. Lilac carpets and blue roses on the bedspread, white-and-gold double dresser, headboard. I liked it better the way it was, pink wood, the sweet raw smell. I watched the browns and greens of his Pendleton shirt, his hands spread on either side of the window frame, as he looked down into the unplanted yard. “What are you thinking?” I asked him. “That they won’t be happy,” he said quietly. “Who?” “People who buy these houses. I’m building houses for people who won’t be happy in them.” His good face looked so sad. I came closer to him. “Why can’t they?” He pressed his forehead to the window, so new there was still a sticker on it. “Because it’s always wrong. They don’t want to hurt anyone.” I could smell his sweat, sharp and strong, a man’s smell, and it was hot in the room with the new windows, heady with the fragrance of raw wood.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  In some she is wearing her plaid uniform jumper, also noted in the toast. In a few she is wearing a cashmere turtleneck sweater I brought her from London when we went that May to do promotion for the European release of The Panic in Needle Park. In a few she is wearing a checked gingham dress trimmed in eyelet, a little faded and a little too big for her, the look of a hand-me-down. In others she has on cutoff jeans and a denim Levi jacket with metal studs, a bamboo fishing pole against her shoulder, artfully arranged there (by her) in a spirit less of fishing than of styling, a prop to accessorize the outfit. The photographs were taken by one of her West Hartford cousins, Tony Dunne, who had arrived on leave from Williams to spend a few months in Malibu. He had been in Malibu only a day or two when she began to lose her first baby tooth. She had noticed the tooth loosening, she had wiggled the tooth, the tooth loosened further. I tried to remember how this situation had been handled in my own childhood. My most coherent memory involved my mother tying a piece of thread around the loose tooth, attaching the thread to a doorknob, and slamming the door. I tried this. The tooth stayed fixed in place. She cried. I grabbed the car keys and screamed for Tony: tying the thread to the doorknob had so exhausted my aptitude for improvisational caretaking that my sole remaining thought was to get her to the emergency room at UCLA Medical Center, thirty-some miles into town. Tony, who grew up with three siblings and many cousins, tried without success to convince me that UCLA Medical Center might be overkill. “Just let me try just this one thing first,” he said finally, and pulled the tooth. The next time a tooth got loose she pulled it herself. I had lost my authority. Was I the problem? Was I always the problem? In the note Tony included when he sent the photographs a few months ago he said that each image represented something he had seen in her. In some she is melancholy, large eyes staring directly into the lens. In others she is bold, daring the camera. She covers her mouth with her hand. She obscures her eyes with a polka-dotted cotton sun hat. She marches through the wash at the edge of the sea. She bites her lip as she swings from an oleander branch. A few of these photographs are familiar to me. A copy of one of them, one in which she is wearing the cashmere turtleneck sweater I bought her in London, is framed on my desk in New York. There is also on my desk in New York a framed photograph she herself took one Christmas on Barbados: the rocks outside the rented house, the shallow sea, the wash of surf.

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

  Share good memories, especially ones they may not even know about. If you didn’t know the person (or pet), you can say something like, “Though I didn’t know him, I can only imagine how wonderful he was because you are so wonderful.” Send a text or leave a message letting them know you’re thinking of them but that they don’t need to respond. And don’t take it personally if they don’t. Take cues from them. If they don’t want to talk, don’t push. If they drop off the map, go find them. I have a tendency to isolate myself like a sick animal when my pain hits a tipping point (thanks, trauma). My closest true-blue friend, Marie, always catches the scent when I’m up to shenanigans like this. “Hey, just send me a smoke signal and let me know you’re OK.” Proactively offer specific support (bring the lasagna, watch the kids, run errands, help with funeral arrangements—OMG, please help with those . . . that stuff is so hard). And don’t just offer to help the week the loss happens. If you can, keep going, or at least keep checking in. Once the postdeath preparations, funerals, and celebrations of life are over, everyone else goes back to normal. But there is no normal for those left behind. Continuing to acknowledge the milestone dates (death anniversaries, birthdays, graduations) is the very definition of kindness. Share and research resources, including the specific phone numbers and contact information (therapists, counselors, bodyworkers, or, if you’re my crew, psychic mediums on speed dial). Give advice when appropriate and invited, but don’t meddle or judge. Huh? But how am I supposed to know the difference? I get it. I’m a fountain of feedback, so this tip is really just for me (wink, wink). Butting in on other people’s business, when your participation isn’t wanted, rarely feels good to them. Sometimes it can come off as shaming, corrective, or even patronizing, as if the other person is a dummy for not knowing. Other times it might feel like you can’t slow down enough to tune in to the person you’re trying to help. Again, if you’re like me, giving unsolicited advice (even when it’s great!) is as automatic and involuntary as breathing. In that case, you might say something like, “Do you want advice right now, or do you want to brainstorm, or do you just want to get it off your chest?” Asking permission never hurts. Remember, pain needs to be witnessed, not polished. You can also be honest about your discomfort: “I don’t know how to act and I’m afraid to get it wrong, but I love you and I want to try. Please tell me if I mess up.” Then stay open to hearing what’s helpful and what really isn’t. ACCEPTING HELP (FOR THOSE WHO ARE GRIEVING) I don’t know about you, but I’m a master list maker.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  He wanted to take it from me, to tease me. I clung to it with all my strength while he crushed my hands, letting him hurt me. June was afraid that Henry would turn me against her. What does she fear? I said to her, “There is a fantastic secret between us. I only know about you through my own knowledge. Faith. What is Henry’s knowledge to me?” Then I met Henry accidentally at the bank. I saw that he hated me, and I was startled. June had said that he was uneasy and restless, because he is more jealous of women than of men. June, inevitably, sows madness. Henry, who thought me a “rare” person, now hates me. Hugo, who rarely hates, hates her. Today she said that when she talked to Henry about me she tried to be very natural and direct so as not to imply anything unusual. She told him, “Anaïs was just bored with her life, so she took us up.” That seemed crude to me. It was the only ugly thing I have heard her say. Hugo and I yield entirely to each other. We cannot be without each other, we cannot endure discord, war, estrangement, we cannot take walks alone, we do not like to travel without each other. We have yielded in spite of our individualism, our hatred of intimacy. We have absorbed our egocentric selves into our love. Our love is our ego. I do not think June and Henry have achieved that, because both their individualities are too strong. So they are at war; love is a conflict; they must lie to each other, mistrust each other. June wants to go back to New York and do something well, be lovely for me, satisfy me. She is afraid of disappointing me. We had lunch together in a softly lighted place which surrounded us with velvety closeness. We took off our hats. We drank champagne. June refused all sweet or tasteless food. She could live on grapefruit, oysters, and champagne. We talked in half-spoken abstractions, clear to us alone. She made me realize how she eluded all of Henry’s attempts to grasp her logically, to reach a knowledge of her. She sat there filled with champagne. She talked about hashish and its effects. I said, “I have known such states without hashish. I do not need drugs. I carry all that in myself.” At this she was a little angry. She did not realize that I achieved those states without destroying my mind. My mind must not die, because I am a writer. I am the poet who must see. I am not just the poet who can get drunk on June’s beauty.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  Lea drew the folds of her pink dressing-gown closer about her — the pink she called ‘indispensable.' She was lazily turning over ideas which she found tiresome, ideas that she decided to hurl, one by one, as missiles against Cheri’s assumed composure. ‘ Well, why are you marrying the child?' He put both elbows on the table and, unconsciously, assumed the composed features of his mother. ‘Well, you see, my dear girl ...' ‘ Call me Madame or Lea. I'm neither your housemaid nor a pal of your own age.' She sat straight up in her armchair and clipped her words without raising her voice. He panted to answer back. He looked defiantly at the beautiful face, a little pale under its powder, and at the frank blue light of her searching eyes. But he softened, and conceded, in a tone most unusual for him, ‘Nounoune, you asked me to explain.... It had to come to this in the end. And besides, there are big interests at stake.' ‘Whose?’ ‘Mine,* he said without a smile. ‘The girl has a considerable fortune of her own.' ‘From her father?' He rocked himself to and fro, his feet in the air. ‘ Oh, how do I know? What a question! I suppose so. You'd hardly expect the fair Marie-Laure to draw fifteen hundred thousand out of her own bank account, would you? Fifteen hundred thousand, and some decent family jewels into the bargain.’ ‘And how much have you?’ ‘ Oh, I've more than that of my own,’ he said with pride. ‘Then you don't need any more money?5 He shook his smooth head and it caught the light like blue watered silk. ‘Need ... need ...? You know perfectly well we don’t look at money in the same way. It’s something on which we never see eye to eye.5 ‘I’ll do you the justice to say that you’ve spared me any reference to it during the last five years.’ She leaned towards him and put her hand on his knee. ‘ Tell me, child, how much have you put by from your income in these five years? ’ He cavorted like a clown, laughed, and rolled at Lea’s feet, but she pushed him aside with her toe. ‘No, tell me the truth ... fifty thousand a year, or sixty? Tell me, sixty? Seventy? ’ He sat down on the carpet facing away from Lea, and laid his head back on her lap. ‘Aren’t I worth it, then?’

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  4“When Quintana was a little girl, we moved to Malibu, to a house overlooking the Pacific.” So began the toast John delivered in the Cathedral house at St. John the Divine on the afternoon she wove the stephanotis into her braid and cut the peach-colored cake from Payard. There were aspects of living in that house overlooking the Pacific that he failed to mention—he failed to mention for example the way the wind would blow down through the canyons and whine under the eaves and lift the roof and coat the white walls with ash from the fireplace, he failed to mention for example the king snakes that dropped from the rafters of the garage into the open Corvette I parked below, he failed to mention for example that king snakes were locally considered a valuable asset because the presence of a king snake in your Corvette was understood to mean (I was never convinced that it did) that you didn’t have a rattlesnake in your Corvette—but the following is what he did mention. I can quote what he mentioned exactly because after he mentioned it he wrote it down. He wanted her to have it in his words, his exact memory, in his exact words, of her childhood: The house didn’t have any heat—it had old baseboard heaters, but we were always afraid they’d burn the place up—and so we heated it from this huge walk-in fireplace in the living room. In the morning I’d get up and bring in wood for the day—we used about a cord of wood a week—and then I’d get Q up and make her breakfast and get her ready for school. Joan was trying to finish a book that year, and she would work until two or three in the morning, then have a drink and read some poetry before she came to bed. She always made Q’s lunch the night before, and put it in this little blue lunchbox. You should have seen those lunches: they weren’t your basic peanut butter and jelly school-box lunch. Thin little sandwiches with their crusts cut off, cut into four triangular pieces, kept fresh in Saran Wrap. Or else there would be homemade fried chicken, with little salt and pepper shakers. And for dessert, stemmed strawberries, with sour cream and brown sugar. So I’d take Q to school, and she’d walk down this steep hill. All the kids wore uniforms—Quintana wore a plaid jumper and a white sweater, and her hair—she was a towhead in that Malibu sun—her hair was in a ponytail. I would watch her disappear down that hill, the Pacific a great big blue background, and I thought it was as beautiful as anything I’d ever seen. So I said to Joan, “You got to see this, babe.” The next morning Joan came with us, and when she saw Q disappear down that hill she began to cry.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  Afterward we went to a student bar near the university and I got thoroughly, sloppily drunk, and threw up in the alley. Paul got me on the last train back to Berlin. Now I took Paul’s hand in the bed, his right in my left, laced my fingers through his, my hands large and pale as winter, my identity stitched in the whorls of their fingertips, Paul’s hands dark from graphite and fragrant with Drum and kebabs. Our palms were the same size but his fingers were two inches longer. His beautiful hands. I always thought if we ever had children, I hoped they’d have them. “So what happened with the printer?” I asked. “He wants cash,” Paul said. “Imagine.” I turned our hands, so we could examine them from each side. His fingers practically touched my wrists. I traced along the sinews of his hand, thinking how in less than a day I could be back in the States. I could be like my mother, like Klaus. It was my legacy, wasn’t it, to shed lives like snakeskin, a new truth for each new page, a moral amnesiac? But a disgrace. I’d rather starve. I knew how to do it, it wasn’t that hard. I looked around our flat, the rain-ruined walls, the few bits of furniture, battered pressboard chest we found in an alley, the dusty velvet curtain concealing our tiny kitchen. Paul’s drawing table, his papers and pens. And the suitcases, ranged against the wall, filling the rest of the floor. Our life. The phoenix must burn, my mother had said. I tried to imagine the flames, but it was too cold. “Maybe I’ll sell the museum,” I said. Paul traced the lacy dogbite scars on my hand. “I thought you told Oskar you wouldn’t.” I shrugged. I would never reach the end of what was in those suitcases, those women, those men, what they meant to me. These rooms were only the start. There were suitcases inside of suitcases I had not even begun to unpack. You want remember, so just remember. I slipped my hands up under the wool shirt I’d bought him at the flea market. He flinched with the cold, then allowed me to warm them against his skinny ribs. As we drew close, murmuring softly into each other’s necks, the Herald Tribune slid off the feather bed and fell to the floor in a soft cascade, burying my mother among her headlines, news of other crises and personages. We shed our jackets and our pants to make love, but kept our shirts and socks on. I knew I was making a choice.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I see the very frayed lapel under which I love to slip my hand, the tie I finger while he talks to me. I see the blond hair on his neck. I see the expression he has when he takes the garbage can away, surreptitious, half ashamed. Ashamed, too, of his orderliness, which forces him to wash the dishes, to tidy the kitchen. He says, “This is what June objected to—said it was unromantic.” I remember, from Henry’s notes, the royal disorder she affected. I don’t know what to say. They are both in me: the woman who acts as Henry does and the woman who dreams of acting like June. Some vague tenderness draws me to Henry, so seriously washing the dishes. I cannot taunt him. I help him. But my imagination is out of the kitchen. I only love the kitchen because Henry is there. I have even wished that Hugo would stay away much longer so that I could live in Clichy. It is the first time I have ever wished such a thing. “It is this way,” says Henry. “I have overdrawn the cruelty and evil of June because I was interested in evil. That is just the trouble; there are no really evil persons in the world. June is not really evil. Fred is right. She tries desperately to be. It was one of the first things she told me the night I met her. She wanted me to think her a femme fatale. I’m inspired by evil. It preoccupies me, as it did Dostoevsky.” The sacrifices June made for Henry. Were they sacrifices, or were they things she did to heighten her personality? It is I who question this. She makes no obscure sacrifices. Flamboyant ones, yes. Dramatic ones. I have made obscure sacrifices, whether small or big. But I prefer June’s prostitution, gold digging, comedies. In between, Henry can starve. She will serve him unreliably and fantastically or not at all. She urged Henry to leave his job. She wanted to work for him. (Secretly I have envisaged prostitution, and to say it is for Henry is only to find a justification.) So June has found a magnificent justification. She has made heroic sacrifices for Henry. And all of it has contributed to the personality of June. I say to Henry, “Why are you so savage about her defects? And why do you write less about the magnificence?” “That is what June says. She repeats, ‘And you forget this, and you forget that. You only remember the wrongs.’ The truth is, Anaïs, that I take goodness for granted. I expect everybody to be good. It is evil which fascinates me.” I remember a feeble effort at living out one of my own fantasies. I came back to Henry one afternoon after he had teased me, full of the devil. I told him that I was going out with a woman the next evening.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  It has usually been assumed that these Seven were the first “deacons.” It now seems more probable that the deacons were a later contrivance for the purpose of rendering subsidiary assistance to the bishops, and that the Seven were the first elders. In that case the original purpose of the presbyterate was not teaching, but organized helpfulness. The bishops of the early centuries were first of all great executive officers. They became teachers and theologians when doctrine and theology became so essential a part of church life. If these results of modern historical investigation are to any extent correct, they furnish a powerful proof of the fact that in the early Christian communities the administration of mutual helpfulness was a very important part of their existence, and that their common life must have extended far beyond their common religious worship. If we inquire in what directions this fraternal helpfulness manifested itself, our information is far richer about the third century than about the first and second. By that time the organization of the churches had been centralized and perfected, and the charitable help was administered through this machinery. In the first century the methods were crude and more spontaneous, but the spirit of it was probably purer than later, more democratic and less debased by the desire to win merit by ascetic almsgiving. From the outset widows and orphans were extensively cared for. The social conditions of the ancient world and the impulses inherited from Judaism laid this duty upon the churches. About a.d. 250, the church at Rome had fifteen hundred dependents of that kind under its care. When Christians were in prison for their faith or exiled to the mines, the churches cared for their needs and comfort, often in lavish degree. It was not uncommon to ransom Christians imprisoned for debt. The proper burial of the dead was even more important to the sentiments of the ancient world than to ours. Just as to-day, the poorer classes organized in societies which guaranteed their members an honorable burial. The churches performed this service for their members. In public calamities, like pestilence or the invasion of nomadic brigands, they stood by their members and sent aid to a distance. The duty of working was strictly urged in the primitive Church; holy idleness was the outgrowth of later asceticism. But if a man was out of work, the churches assumed the responsibility either of finding him a job or of caring for him. Thus the means of life were guaranteed him in either case. The church at Rome, living in the midst of vast pauperism, could boast that it had no beggar in its membership. The troubles coming upon them for their faith made Christians even more migratory than the rest of the city population of that day. But wherever they went, they were sure of Christian hospitality and the first aid needed to get a foothold in a strange place.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  On the other hand, the continued poverty may well have been due to other causes: to the general poverty of the lower classes in Palestine; to persecution and economic unsettlement; to the emigration of well-to-do and conspicuous members; to the separation of the Galilean Christians from their accustomed sources of earning; or to the amount of time devoted to religion and withdrawn from labor. It is at least hasty to charge a permanent situation to a single cause. Thus the church at Jerusalem was not quite as communistic as is usually supposed. On the other hand, the other churches were not as completely devoid of communistic features as is commonly assumed. The primitive churches as fraternal communicaties The disciples at Jerusalem had met in their homes and had eaten in common. The one act which might be called an act of distinctively Christian ritual at the beginning, the reminder of the Lord’s last meal with the disciples, was performed in connection with these common meals, and this insured the homeliness and simplicity of the rite. These common meals were so essential a part of the earliest church life that this custom was established wherever Christianity came. This in itself is a strong proof that the churches were more than organizations for worship. We know from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians that the Christians met in the evening, the time for the chief meal of the day, and dined together. Such common meals were frequent in the Greek fraternal associations, and Greeks could easily fall in with the custom. These love-feasts did not consist of eating a wafer as a religious symbol, as is done in some modern churches; it was a downright meal to which people came hungry, so that Paul advised them to get a bite at home to take the edge off their appetites, if they were too hungry to wait for one another. Now the assurance of one square meal means a great deal to a poor man physically. It means still more to his consciousness of human worth and his enjoyment of human intercourse to sit at a social function as the equal of all. To break bread in common brings men close to one another. At Corinth the social differences had obtruded themselves at the common meals. The well-to-do had drifted together in a coterie, had clubbed their well-filled baskets, and were in danger of getting hilarious together, while the poor brother sat on one side hungry and outside the pale of social enjoyment. Paul took this very seriously. It seemed to him a denial of the fundamental spirit of the churches. These common meals persisted for centuries, though changed in character. The ritual act of the “Lord’s Supper” became more ceremonial, mysterious, and awe-inspiring, and a meal where people were heartily satisfying their physical hunger did not seem the fit environment for the mystery of the eucharist. Hence that part was transferred to the morning service. But the evening meal continued.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  Hardly had he reached the floor when Edmee, without uttering a sound, threw herself down beside him. With one hand she supported his drooping head, and with the other held a bottle of smelling-salts to his nostrils, from which the colour was visibly ebbing. But two enfeebled arms pushed her away. ‘Leave me alone. ... Can’t you see I’m dying?’ He was not dying, however, and under Edmee’s fingers his pulse retained its rhythm. He had spoken in a subdued whisper, with the glib, emphatic sincerity of very young would-be suicides who, at one and the same moment, both court death and fight shy of it. His lips were parted over gleaming teeth and his breathing was regular; but he was in no haste to come right back to life. Safely ensconced behind his tightly shut eyes, he sought refuge in the heart of that green domain, so vivid in his imagination at the instant of his fainting fit — a flat domain, rich in strawberry-beds and bees, in pools of moonbeams fringed with warm stones. ... After he regained his strength, he still kept his eyes shut, thinking “If I open my eyes, Edmee will then see the picture in my mind.” She remained bowed over him on bended knee. She was looking after him efficiently, professionally. She reached out with her free hand, picked up a newspaper and used it to fan his forehead. She whispered insignificant but appropriate words, ‘It’s the storm. ... Relax. ... No, don’t try to move. ... Wait till I slip this pillow under you. ...’ He sat up again, smiling, and pressed her hand in thanks. His parched mouth longed for lemons or vinegar. The ringing of the telephone snatched Edmee away from him. ‘Yes, yes.... What? Yes, of course I know it’s ten. Yes. What?* From the imperious brevity of her replies, Cheri knew that it was someone telephoning from the Hospital. 4 Yes, of course I’m coming. What? In ..With a rapid glance she estimated Cheri’s term of recovery. ‘In twenty-five minutes. Thanks. See you presently.’ She opened the two glass doors of the french windows to their fullest extent, and a few peaceful drops of rain dripped into the room, bringing with them an insipid river smell. ‘Are you better, Fred? What exactly did you feel? Nothing wrong with your heart, is there? You must be short of phosphates. It’s the result of this ridiculous summer we’re having. But what can you expect? ’ She glanced at the telephone furtively, as she might at an onlooker. Cheri stood up on his feet again without apparent effort. ‘Run along, child. You’ll be late at your shop. I’m quite all right.’ ‘A mild grog? A little hot tea?* ‘Don’t bother about me.... You’ve been very sweet. Yes, a little cup of tea — ask for it on your way out. And some lemon.’

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  ‘You see,9 Madame Peloux said reproachfully, ‘he’s got no appetite to speak of and yet he9s asking for langoustines.9 ‘Shut up!’ Cheri snapped. ‘Lea, are you off to the shady woods with Patron?9 ‘Certainly not, my noy. Patron and I are merely friends. I’m going on my own.9 ‘Nice to be so rich!9 Cheri threw out. ‘I’ll take you with me, if you like: there’ll be nothing to do but eat and drink and sleep. ...’ ‘Where is this place of yours?9 He had risen to his feet and was standing over her. ‘ Yop. know Honfleur — the C6te de Grace — don’t you? Sit down; you’re green in the face. Now as you go down the Cdte de Grace, you know those farm gates where we always say, in passing, your mother and I ...’ She turned round to where Madame Peloux was sitting. Madame Peloux had disappeared. The discretion with which she had faded away was something so unlike the normal Charlotte Peloux, that they looked at each other and laughed in surprise. Cheri sat down close to Lea. ‘I’m tired,9 he said. ‘You*re ruining your health/ He drew himself up in his chair, with offended vanity. ‘Oh! I’m still in good enough fettle, you know/ ‘ Good en ough! For others perhaps ... but not ... not for me, I’d have you kn ow/ ‘Too green?’ ‘The very word I was looking for. So why don’t you come down to the country? No nonsense, of course. Ripe strawberries, fresh cream, cakes, grilled spring chicken ... that’s just what you need — and no women/ He let himself snuggle up to Lda’s elbow and shut his eyes. ‘No women ... grand ... Lea, tell me, you’re my pal? You are? Then let’s be off. Women indeed! I’m fed up with ’em. Women! I’ve seen all they’ve got to show/ These vulgarities were muttered in a drowsy voice. Lea listened to his soft tone, and felt his warm breath against her ear. He had taken hold of her long string of pearls and was rolling the larger ones between his fingers. She slipped her arm under his head and so accustomed was she to treating the boy in this way that, almost without thinking, she pulled him towards her and rocked him in her arms. ‘How comfy I am!1 he sighed. * You xe a good pal. I’m so comfy.’ Lea smiled, as though hearing praise she valued intensely. Cheri seemed to be ready to drop off to sleep. She looked very closely at his glistening, almost dewy, eyelashes sunk flat against the cheeks, and then at the cheeks themselves, hollowed by his joyless dissipation. His upper lip, shaved that morning, was already bluish, and the pink lampshades lent his mouth an artificial colour. ‘No women!* Cheri exclaimed, as though dreaming. ‘Then ... kiss meF Taken by surprise, Lea made no movement. ‘Kiss me! I tell you!’

• From What We Lost in the Swamp: Poems (2023)

  just one prayer. Please, oh lord, persuade me to believe not in you but myself. THE YEAR I VOLUNTEERED AT A HOSPICE CAREI visited again today. (The empty space because legally, I cannot give the name of a person in hospice.) What I can say, though, is how beautifully strange it is to sit with someone dying, how every sunny Sunday I come to read her poems, play her music from my phone, but mostly, I’m there to hold the space, her hand, if heavy eyes decide to weep or sleep. She cannot speak or understand the words I say, so the only things I know about her are her name, her age, the fact that she is dying. It sounds so strange, but it took until today’s visit for me to finally realize that could be the most I ever get. I will probably never know her favorite color, favorite food, all the places she’s been to, if she likes to dance & if she does, with whom? How did you meet the love of your life? I whisper into the ether, as if my softer tone might work, might slip those words beneath the closed door between us. Of course, I never get an answer, but I take in all the things I can: long silver hair, crooked bottom teeth, how her sea-green eyes seem to smile back at me. I’m well aware this final page is all I’ll read, but if I just capture all these smaller things, the bits & pieces I can see, if heaven’s a collection of other people’s memories, then hers, hers will be a little bigger. LIVING ROOM WITH A VIEWWhen you look out our front bay window (the one that streams), ​all you see is green: the many emerald leaves of the tall hedge wall that surrounds us, the lime, the pickle, the deep seaweed of the succulents sprouting by the fountain. Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the towering beauty of the single cypress tree. Its sage & slender silhouette the only thing you can see beyond the wall. I have yet to decide whether or not I think it’s possible to fall in love with a color, with its many faces, the protection it provides. You see, it’s all those looming ​other times, afternoons when I am looking out & cannot tell the feeling, cannot decipher whatever’s teetering beneath my skin, when the comfort turns to question: Is this safe? Or am I caged within the hedge maze? HOW THE CONSTELLATIONS CAN SAVE USDoes the sin stay? burning ball & chain a sun in the sky that won’t set? Always hot & harsh & unforgiving, so anywhere we go in life is blistering, so everything we touch melts our skin? What if, instead of drought, instead of pain ​& endless days of scorched flesh, regret, we saw our sins not as suns, but as stars in the night? Distant fixtures of things forgiven, flickers

• From Henry and June (1986)

  He, too, lacks confidence. He is uneasy in certain social situations if they are the least bit chic. He is not sure of my love. He believes that I am extremely sensual and therefore I could easily leave him for another man and still another. At this I laugh. Yes, of course I would love to be fucked five times a day, but I would have to be in love. That is certainly a drawback, an inconvenience. And I can only love one man at a time. “I want you to stop with me,” Henry says. “I love your not being promiscuous. I was terribly worried when you were interested in Montparnasse.” And then he begins to kiss me. “You’ve got me, Anaïs.” He has playful, almost childish caresses for me sometimes. We rub noses, or he chews my eyelashes, or runs his thumb over the outlines of my face. And I then see a sort of gnomelike Henry, a little Henry, so tender. Fred is sure Henry is hurting me fearfully. But Henry cannot hurt me any more. Even his faithlessness could not hurt me. Besides, I require less tenderness. Henry is toughening me. When I find out he does not like my perfume because it is too delicate, at first I am a bit offended. Fred loves Mitsouko, but Henry likes acrid, powerful perfumes. He always demands assertion, potency. It is like his asking me to change my hair style because he likes wildness in hair. When he uttered the word “wildness” I responded to it, as though it were something I had been wanting. Wild hair. His stocky, firm hands go through my hair. My hair is in his mouth when we sleep. And when I clasp my hands behind my head, raising my hair, in a Grecian way, he exclaims, “That is the way I love it.” I feel at home in Clichy. Hugo is not necessary to me. I only bring to him my weariness from sleepless nights, a joyful weariness. Early in the morning when I slip out of Henry’s apartment, the Clichy workmen are awake. I carry away my red journal, but that is only a habit, for I carry away no secrets; Henry has read my journals (this one, not yet). I also carry away a few pages of Fred’s book, delicate as a watercolor, or a few pages from Henry’s book, which are like a volcano. The old pattern of my life is shattered. It hangs around me in shreds. Great things are going to happen from all this. I feel the fermentation. The train which takes me home to Louveciennes shakes phrases in my mind like dice in a dice box. My journal writing breaks down, because it was an intimacy with myself. Now it is interrupted constantly by Henry’s voice, his hand on my knee. Louveciennes is like a casket, petal-lined, carved, golden,

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

  99 13. Martín de Porres: Healer of Peru Martín’s Work at El Rosario After several years of medical apprenticeship, Martín entered the Dominican convent of Our Lady of the Rosary, known as El Rosario, as a lay servant and took vows there 9 years later. El Rosario was strictly segregated by rank and by ethnicity. Only those with “pure blood” (that is, European blood) were allowed to study to be ordained as priests and friars, and they occupied the main cloister. The convent could not have operated without the labor of many lay servants and enslaved men. Many worked on El Rosario’s hacienda, a farm outside the city overseen by lay brothers. The extent to which the Catholic Church not only accepted but participated in and enabled the slave trade and abuse of enslaved peoples is shocking to modern eyes, but nonetheless true. The Dominican order, like the rest of the church, purchased enslaved people to work on their lands and used terrible violence against them. Their preachers encouraged and spread racist caricatures and ideas that sought to justify the treatment of Africans and Afro-Peruvians as people of lesser intelligence and worth. As a lay servant, Martín performed only basic tasks: sweeping f loors, cleaning bedpans, and counting linens. In recognition of his lifelong performance of these humble duties, he is often depicted with a broom. From the beginning, Martín found ways to make his warmth and kindness felt by those around him. Young novices, who later rose to eminent positions, recalled his kindness to heartsick boys. El Rosario was more than a monastery; it housed a school and an orphanage, provided sanctuary for the odd fugitive, and hosted local religious and social organizations called confraternities. It also operated what we today would call a food bank, soup kitchen, and free clinic. Patients told stories of how, when they were feeling down, Martín would produce an orange from his sleeves with a flourish to make them smile.

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

  But it was not till I was over forty and had made my second journey round the world that I learned in India and Burmah, all the high mysteries of sense and the profounder artistry of the immemorial East. I hope to tell it all in a third volume, together with my vision of European and world-politics. Then I may tell in a fourth volume of my breakdown in health and how I won it back again and how I found a pearl of women and learned from her what affection really means, the treasures of tenderness, sweet-thoughted-wisdom and self-abnegation that constitute the woman’s soul. Vergil may lead Dante through Hell and Purgatory: it is Beatrice alone who can show him Paradise and guide him to the Divine. Having learned the wisdom of women—to absorb and not to reason—having experienced the irresistible might of gentleness and soul-subduing pity, I may tell of my beginnings in literature and art and how I won to the front and worked with my peers and joyed in their achievements, always believing my own to be better. Without this blessed conviction how could I ever have undergone the labor or endured the shame or faced the loneliness of the Garden, or carried the cross of my own Crucifixion; for every artist’s life begins in joy and hope and ends in the shrouding shadows of doubt and defeat and the chill of everlasting night. In these books as in my life, there should be a crescendo of interest and understanding: I shall win the ears of men first and their senses, and later their minds and hearts and finally their souls; for I shall show them all the beautiful things I have discovered in Life’s pilgrimage, all the sweet and lovable things too and so encourage and cheer them and those aftercomers, my peers, whose sounding footsteps already I seem to hear, and I shall say as little as may be of defeats and downfalls and disgraces save by way of warning; for it is courage men need most in life, courage and lovingkindness. Is it not written in the book of Fate that he who gives most receives most and do we not all, if we would tell the truth, win more love than we give: Are we not all debtors to the overflowing bounty of God? Frank Harris. _The Catskills Mts., this 25th day of August 1922._ -------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ● Transcriber’s Notes: ○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected. ○ Typographical errors were silently corrected. ○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only when a predominant form was found in this book. ○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_). *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MY LIFE AND LOVES, VOL. 1 (OF 4) *** Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will be renamed.