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.

Page 88 of 145 · 20 per page

• From Bluets (2009)

  104. I do not feel my friend’s pain, but when I unintentionally cause her pain I wince as if I hurt somewhere, and I do. Often in exhaustion I lay my head down on her lap in her wheelchair and tell her how much I love her, that I’m so sorry she is in so much pain, pain I can witness and imagine but that I do not know. She says, if anyone knows this pain besides me, it is you (and J, her lover). This is generous, for to be close to her pain has always felt like a privilege to me, even though pain could be defined as that which we typically aim to avoid. Perhaps this is because she remains so generous within hers, and because she has never held any hierarchy of grief, either before her accident or after, which seems to me nothing less than a form of enlightenment. 105. There are no instruments for measuring color; there are no “color thermometers.” How could there be, as “color knowledge” always remains contingent upon an individual perceiver? This didn’t stop a certain Horace Bénédict de Saussure, however, from inventing, in 1789, a device he called the “cyanometer,”with which he hoped to measure the blue of the sky. 106. When I first heard of the cyanometer, I imagined a complicated machine with dials, cranks, and knobs. But what de Saussure actually “invented” was a cardboard chart with 53 cut-out squares sitting alongside 53 numbered swatches, or “nuances,” as he called them, of blue: you simply hold the sheet up to the sky and match its color, to the best of your ability, to a swatch. As in Humboldt’s Travels (Ross, 1852): “We beheld with admiration the azure colour of the sky. Its intensity at the zenith appeared to correspond to 41° of the cyanometer.” This latter sentence brings me great pleasure, but really it takes us no further—either into knowledge, or into beauty. 107. Many people do not think the writing of Gertrude Stein “means” anything. Perhaps it does not. But when my students complain that they want to throw Tender Buttons across the room, I try to explain to them that in it Stein is dealing with a matter of pressing concern. Stein is worried about hurt colors , I tell them. “A spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing,” I read aloud, scanning the room for a face that also shows signs of being worried about hurt colors. “Enthusiastically hurting a clouded yellow bud and saucer.” “A cool red rose and a pink cut pink.” As if color could be further revealed by slitting .

• From Henry and June (1986)

  He said he wanted to be buried there, never to be sent away, to be metamorphosed into a bear who would come in through my bedroom window when anyone was making love to me. He became child, lulled by my tenderness. I had never seen him so small and frail. There is the weirdest contrast between his drunkenness, when he sits flushed, combative, destructive, sensual, all instinct, a man whose animal vitality lures and subjugates women; and his soberness, when he can sit before a woman and read to her from books, talk to her in an almost religious tone, become wistful, pale, holy. It is an amazing transformation. He can sit in the garden like a gentle Eduardo of fifteen years ago, and then a few hours later, bite with great ferocity and utter the most obscene words while we lie convulsed with pleasure. Yet great tenderness wells up in me when Hugo returns. I want to give him joy, I force myself, and I begin to sincerely respond to his passion. I remember that one evening when Henry and I were lying on the couch in my studio, a string of Hugo’s guitar snapped, the deepest string, resonant like his voice. It terrorized me, a foreboding of a finality I do not desire. I went to Allendy Monday, and I refused to be analyzed because, I said, I had begun to lie to him. So we sat and talked, and he was aware of my hostility. When I first came in I evaded his kiss. What I felt was that he was destroying my relationship with Henry; he was making fissures in it. I resented his strong influence, his domination of me. He answered wisely. Suddenly I again wanted to obey him. I said I was ready for analysis, that I would not lie any more, that I had exaggerated the dangers of my flight with Henry only to see how concerned he was about my life. His strange blue eyes fascinated me. I got up and walked around in my usual way, arms raised behind my head. He stretched out his arms. He has a big, overwhelming body, like John’s. He holds me so tightly I almost suffocate. His mouth is not as voluptuous as Henry’s, and we don’t understand each other. But I stay in his arms. He says, “I will teach you to play, not to take love so tragically, not to pay such a heavy price for it. You have made it too dramatic and intense a thing. This will be pleasant. I have such a strong desire for you.” Detestable wisdom. Oh, I hate him. While he talks I bow my head and smile. He shakes me, wanting to know what I am thinking. I really want to weep. I had aspired to this sort of relationship, and now I have it. Allendy is poised, powerful, but I have upset him.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I was glad it was Henry who was staying at Louveciennes—warm, soft, human Henry. He was in such a chastened, helpless mood. We sat in the garden. He said he wanted to be buried there, never to be sent away, to be metamorphosed into a bear who would come in through my bedroom window when anyone was making love to me. He became child, lulled by my tenderness. I had never seen him so small and frail. There is the weirdest contrast between his drunkenness, when he sits flushed, combative, destructive, sensual, all instinct, a man whose animal vitality lures and subjugates women; and his soberness, when he can sit before a woman and read to her from books, talk to her in an almost religious tone, become wistful, pale, holy. It is an amazing transformation. He can sit in the garden like a gentle Eduardo of fifteen years ago, and then a few hours later, bite with great ferocity and utter the most obscene words while we lie convulsed with pleasure. Yet great tenderness wells up in me when Hugo returns. I want to give him joy, I force myself, and I begin to sincerely respond to his passion. I remember that one evening when Henry and I were lying on the couch in my studio, a string of Hugo’s guitar snapped, the deepest string, resonant like his voice. It terrorized me, a foreboding of a finality I do not desire. I went to Allendy Monday, and I refused to be analyzed because, I said, I had begun to lie to him. So we sat and talked, and he was aware of my hostility. When I first came in I evaded his kiss. What I felt was that he was destroying my relationship with Henry; he was making fissures in it. I resented his strong influence, his domination of me. He answered wisely. Suddenly I again wanted to obey him. I said I was ready for analysis, that I would not lie any more, that I had exaggerated the dangers of my flight with Henry only to see how concerned he was about my life. His strange blue eyes fascinated me. I got up and walked around in my usual way, arms raised behind my head. He stretched out his arms.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  He looked so serious. He had received a letter from June, in pencil, irregular, mad, like a child’s, moving, simple, cries of her love for him. “Such a letter blots out everything.” I felt the moment had come for me to release my June, to give him my June, “because,” I said, “it will make you love her more. It’s a beautiful June. Other days I felt you might laugh at my portrait, jeer at its naïveté. Today I know you won’t.” I read him all I had written in my journal about June. What is happening? He is deeply moved, torn apart. He believes. “It is in that way I should have written about June. The other is incomplete, superficial. You have got her, Anaïs.” But wait. He has left softness, tenderness out of his work, he has written down only the hate, the violence. I have only inserted what he has left out. But he has not left it out because he doesn’t feel it, or know it, or understand (as June thinks), only because it is more difficult to express. So far his writing has only issued from violence, it has been whipped out of him, the blows have made him wail and curse. And now he sits and I confide in him completely, in the sentient, profound Henry. He is won. He says, “Such a love is wonderful, Anaïs. I do not hate or despise that. I see what you give each other. I see it so well. Read, read—this is a revelation to me.” I read, and I tremble as I read, up to our kiss. He understands too well. Suddenly he says, “Anaïs, I have just realized that what I give you is something coarse and plain, compared to that. I realize that when June returns . . .” I stop him. “You don’t know what you have given me! It is not coarse and plain! Today, for example . . .” I am choking with feelings that are too entangled. I want to tell him how much he has given me. We are oppressed by the same fear. I say, “You see a beautiful June now.” “No, I hate her!” “You hate her?” “Yes, I hate her,” Henry says, “because I see by your notes that we are her dupes, that you are duped, that there is one pernicious, destructive direction to her lies. Insidiously, they are meant to deform me in your eyes, and you in my eyes. If June returns, she will poison us against each other. I fear that.” “There is something between us, Henry, a tie which is not quite possible for June to comprehend or to seize.” “The mind,” he murmured. “For that she will hate us, yes, and she will combat with her own tools.” “And her tools are lies,” he said. We were both so acutely aware of her power over us, of the new ties which bound us together.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  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. I remember the Christmas she took that picture. We had arrived on Barbados at night. She had gone immediately to bed and I had sat outside listening to a radio and trying to locate a line I believed to be from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques but was never able to find: “The tropics are not exotic, they are merely out of date.” At some point after she went to sleep news had come on the radio: since our arrival on Barbados the United States had invaded Panama. When the first light came I had woken her with this necessary, or so it seemed to me, information. She had covered her face with the sheet, clearly indicating no interest in pursuing the topic. I had nonetheless pressed it. I knew “exactly yesterday” we were going to invade Panama last night, she had said. I asked how she had known “exactly yesterday” we were going to invade Panama last night. Because all the SIPA photographers were stopping by the office yesterday, she said, picking up credentials for the Panama invasion. SIPA was the photo agency for which she then worked. She had again burrowed beneath the sheet. I did not ask why she had not thought the invasion of Panama worth a mention on the five-hour flight down. “For Mom and Dad,” the inscription on the photograph reads. “Try to imagine the seductive sea if you can, love XX, Q.” She had known exactly yesterday we were going to invade Panama last night. The tropics were not exotic, they were merely out of date. Try to imagine the seductive sea if you can. Even in those Malibu photographs which are unfamiliar, I recognize certain elements: the improvised end table by a chair in the living room, one of my mother’s “Craftsman” dinner knives on the table we identified as “Aunt Kate’s,” the straightbacked wooden Hitchcock chairs my mother-in-law had painted black-and-gold to send to us from Connecticut. The oleander branch on which she swings is familiar, the curve of the beach on which she kicks through the wash is familiar. The clothes of course are familiar. I had for a while seen them every day, washed them, hung them to blow in the wind on the clotheslines outside my office window. I wrote two books watching her clothes blow on those lines. Brush your teeth, brush your hair, shush I’m working. So read the list of “Mom’s Sayings” that she posted one day in the garage, an artifact of the “club” she had started with a child who lived down the beach. What remained until now unfamiliar, what I recognize in the photographs but failed to see at the time they were taken, are the startling depths and shallows of her expressions, the quicksilver changes of mood.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  The religious history and the ceremonial worship of Israel were the only bond of national unity that survived. Jeremiah began the turn toward individual piety. The nation was breaking up about him. His prophetic activity had failed; the people refused to believe that his words were the word of Jehovah. But he heard the insistent inner voice of God, and the consciousness of this personal communion with Jehovah was his stay and comfort. Through his very failure and sufferings a tender personal relation developed between the soul of the prophet and his God. Other choice spirits were in the same situation. The influence of Jeremiah’s writings reproduced in others that personal piety which was the outcome of his peculiar experience. For religious experience has a remarkable capacity for perpetuating and reproducing its type; witness the Confessions of Saint Augustine and the mysticism of Saint Bernard. Jehovah had been the God of the nation, and the God of the individual in so far as he was part of the nation. Now the nation was gone, and the righteous and lowly in their suffering and isolation stretched the lonely hand of faith to him and found him near with a personal touch of love and comfort. Thus the death-pangs of the national life were the birth-pangs of the personal religious life. This was a wonderful triumph of religion, an evidence of the indestructibility of the religious impulse. It was fraught with far-reaching importance for the future of religion and of humanity in general. The subtlest springs of human personality were liberated when the individual realized that he personally was dear to God and could work out his salvation not as a member of his nation, but as a man by virtue of his humanity. The value of this religious achievement has so impressed the students of Hebrew religious history that they have frequently assumed that this change in religion was pure gain. The real edifice of religion in the individual soul was now ready to stand for itself, they say, and the scaffolding of political and social religion could be torn down and its planking abandoned. It is assumed that Jeremiah and those who followed him recognized that the external means of realizing the ideal theocracy had failed, and they now set themselves deliberately to build a new religious community of regenerate souls. They turned their back on the Jewish nation and created the Jewish church. That seems to me a misleading construction of the historical situation. It is true that the progress of religion toward spirituality was sure to make religion more personal. But every new religious synthesis should contain all that was good and true in the old. If the religious value of the individual was being discovered, why should the religious value of the community be forgotten? As a matter of fact, this concentration of religious life in the individual was not a deliberate step of progress, freely taken, but was forced upon these men by dire necessity.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  It didn’t go quite that way: Neither Brooke nor her boyfriend of seven months had a car, for one thing, so there was no way to get to the beach. Plus, it was winter. Anyway, what if someone walked by and caught them? In the end, they lost their mutual virginity in a fairly mundane fashion: in his bunk bed during a weekend when his family was out of town. She brought the condoms, which she had spent ages choosing at a nearby Walgreens, and the lube; she also, for reasons she can’t remember, brought over a batch of home-baked cookies. “The truth is, losing your virginity is about the least sexy sexual act there is,” she said. “It’s awkward, especially when losing it to another virgin. Putting on the condom is the opposite of smooth. Things don’t seem like they’re going to fit together. You don’t know how much of your weight to put on the other person. It’s a little sweaty. And it doesn’t feel good.” After a minute or so, they felt like they had “done it” enough to say they had (both to themselves and to their friends), so they just . . . stopped. “But, you know,” Brooke added, “it was a very positive experience for me. We bonded over the awkwardness, and that was fun. And even though the sex was lackluster, I felt totally comfortable with the situation and with him, and I’m grateful for that.” They slept together a few more times before breaking up; Brooke kept their first condom wrapper as a souvenir, inscribing it with the date she used it.

• 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.