Yearning

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 Fear of Flying (1973)

  I wish I could say that I did it charmingly or insouciantly or even bitchily. Sheer bitchiness can be a sort of style. It can have élan in its own right. But I’m a failure even as a bitch. I sniveled. I groveled. I deliberated. I analyzed. I was a bore even to myself. I agonized over lunch in the Volksgarten with Bennett. I agonized over my agonizing. I agonized in the American Express office where, at 2 p.m., we stood trying to decide whether to get two tickets for New York or two for London or one or none. It was all so dismal. Then I thought of Adrian’s smile and the possibility of never seeing him again and the sunny afternoons we’d spent swimming and the jokes and the dreamy drunken rides through Vienna and I raced out of American Express like a mad woman (leaving Bennett standing there) and ran through the streets. I clattered over the cobblestones in my high-heeled sandals, twisting my ankle a couple of times, sobbing out loud, my face contorted and streaked with makeup. All I knew was that I had to see him again. I thought of how he had teased me about always playing it safe. I thought of what he had said about courage, about going to the bottom of yourself and seeing what you found. I thought of all the cautious good-girl rules I had lived by—the good student, the dutiful daughter, the guilty faithful wife who committed adultery only in her own head—and I decided that for once I was going to be brave and follow my feelings no matter what the consequences. I thought of Dr. Happe saying: “You’re not a secretary, you’re a poet—why do you expect your life to be uncomplicated?” I thought of D. H. Lawrence running off with his tutor’s wife, of Romeo and Juliet dying for love, of Aschenbach pursuing Tadzio through plaguey Venice, of all the real and imaginary people who had picked up and burned their bridges and taken off into the wild blue yonder. I was one of them! No scared housewife, I. I was flying. My fear was that Adrian had already left without me. I ran harder, getting lost in back streets, going around in circles, dodging traffic. I had been in such a daze during all the time in Vienna that I scarcely knew the way from one landmark to another though I’d been back and forth on these streets dozens of times. In my panic I saw no street signs, but raced forward looking for buildings I recognized. All those damned rococo palaces looked alike! Finally I spotted an equestrian statue which looked familiar. Then there was a courtyard and a passageway (I was gasping for breath) and then another courtyard and another passageway (I was dripping with sweat) until finally I came into a courtyard filled with cars and spotted Adrian leaning coolly on his Triumph and leafing through a magazine.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘You must miss your wife so much,’ said Kiki zealously. She would have been shocked to be accused of emotional vampirism here, for she meant only to show this bereaved man that she empathized, but, either way, Monty did not oblige her. He said nothing and passed Kiki her overcoat. They left the house. Together they walked along the thin strip of sidewalk the neighbourhood’s snow shovels had collectively unearthed. ‘You know . . . I was interested in what you were saying, back there, about it being a ‘‘demoralizing philosophy’’,’ said Kiki, and at the same time carefully scanned the ground before her for any black ice. ‘I mean, I certainly wasn’t done any favours in my life – nor was my mother, nor was her mother . . . and nor were my children . . . I always gave them the opposite idea, you know? Like my mamma said to me: You gotta work five times as hard as the white girl sitting next to you. And that was sure as hell true. But I feel torn . . . because I’ve always been a supporter of affirmative action, even if I personally felt uncomfortable about it sometimes – I mean, obviously my husband has been heavily involved in it. But I was interested in the way you expressed that. It makes you think about it again.’ ‘Opportunity,’ announced Monty, ‘is a right – but it is not a gift. Rights are earned. And opportunity must come through the proper channels. Otherwise the system is radically devalued.’ A tree in front of them shuddered a shelf of snow from its branches on to the street. Monty held a protective arm out to stop Kiki passing. He pointed to a runnel between two ice banks, and they walked along this into the open road, only rejoining the sidewalk at the fire station. ‘But,’ protested Kiki, ‘isn’t the whole point that here, in America – I mean I accept the situation is different in Europe – but here, in  On Beauty this country, that our opportunities have been severely retarded, backed up or however you want to put it, by a legacy of stolen rights – and to put that right, some allowances, concessions and support are what’s needed? It’s a matter of redressing the balance – because we all know it’s been unbalanced a damn long time. In my mamma’s neighbourhood, you could still see a segregated bus in . And that’s true. This stuff is close . It’s recent.’ ‘As long as we encourage a culture of victimhood,’ said Monty, with the rhythmic smoothness of self-quotation, ‘we will continue to raise victims. And so the cycle of underachievement continues.’

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I saw literature as a fantasy, no less absorbing for all its irrelevance—a parallel life, as dreams shadow waking but never intersect it. I thought that to write of my own experiences would require a translation out of the crude patois of actual slow suffering—mean, scattered thoughts and transfusion-slow boredom—into the tidy couplets of brisk, beautiful sentiment, a way of at once elevating and lending momentum to what I felt. At the same time I was drawn to … What if I could write about my life exactly as it was? What if I could show it in all its density and tedium and its concealed passion, never divined or expressed, the dull brown geode that eats at itself with quartz teeth? The library downtown had been built as an opera house in the last century. Even in grade school I had haunted the library, which was in the same block as my father’s office. The library looked up like a rheumy eye at a pitched skylight over which pigeons whirled, their bodies a shuddering gray haze until one bird settled and its pacing black feet became as precise as cuneiform. The light seeped down through the stacks that were arranged in a horseshoe of tiers: the former family balcony, the dress circle, the boxes, on down to the orchestra, still gently raked but now cleared of stalls and furnished with massive oak card files and oak reading tables where unshaved old men read newspapers under gooseneck lamps and rearranged rags in paper sacks. The original stage had been demolished, but cleats on the wall showed where ropes had once been secured. The railings around the various balconies still described crude arabesques in bronze gone green, but the old floors of the balconies had been replaced by rectangular slabs of smoked glass that emitted pale emerald gleams along polished, beveled edges. Walking on this glass gave me vertigo, but once I started reading I’d slump to the cold, translucent blocks and drift on ice floes into dense clouds. The smell of yellowing paper engulfed me. An unglued page slid out of a volume and a corner broke off, shattered—I was destroying public property! Downstairs someone harangued the librarian. Shadowy throngs of invisible operagoers coalesced and sat forward in their see-through finery to look and listen. I was reading the bilingual libretto of La Bohème . The alternating columns of incomprehensible Italian, which I could skip, made the pages speed by, as did the couple’s farewell in the snow, the ecstatic reconciliation, poor little Mimi’s prolonged dying. I glanced up and saw a pair of shoes cross the glass above, silently accompanied by the paling and darkening circle of the rubber end of a cane. The great eye of the library was blurred by tears. Across the street the father of a friend of mine ran a bookstore.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘Not bad-looking either, huh?’ said Kiki and watched Carl’s retreating figure turn a corner. Howard stood on the other side of the road, one hand on the open mini-van door, the other sweeping from the ground to the sky, ushering his family inside.  kipps and belsey  The Saturday of the Belseys’ party arrived. The twelve hours before a Belsey party were a time of domestic anxiety and activity; a watertight excuse was required to escape the house for the duration. Luckily for Levi, his parents had provided him with one. Hadn’t they gone on and on about his getting a Saturday job? And so he had got one, and so he was going to it. End of discussion. With joy in his heart he left Zora and Jerome polishing doorknobs and set off for his sales associate position in a Boston music mega-store. The job itself was no occasion for joy: he hated the corny baseball cap he had to wear and the bad pop music he was compelled to sell; the tragic loser of a floor manager who imagined he was the king of Levi; the moms who couldn’t remember the name of the artist or the single, and so leaned over the counter to tunelessly hum a little bit of the verse. All it was good for was giving him a reason to get out of the toy-town that was Wellington and a bit of money to spend in Boston once he got there. Every Saturday morning he caught a bus to the nearest T-stop and then the subway into the only city he had ever really known. It was not New York, sure, but it was the only city he had, and Levi treasured the urban the same way previous generations worshipped the pastoral; if he could have written an ode he would have. But he had no ability in that area (he used to try – notebook after notebook filled with false, cringing rhymes). He had learned to leave it to the fast-talking guys in his earphones, the present-day American poets, the rappers. Levi’s shift finished at four. He left the city reluctantly, as always. He got back on the subway and then the bus. He looked out with dread at Wellington as it began to manifest itself outside the grimy windows. The pristine white spires of the college seemed to him like the watchtowers of a prison to which he was returning. He sloped towards home, walking up the final hill, listening to his music. The fate of the young man in his earphones, who faced a  On Beauty jail cell that very night, did not seem such a world away from his own predicament: an anniversary party full of academics.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I had a cup of hot flavorless coffee, bought a bunch of bananas for my monkey, and spent another ten minutes or so in a delicatessen store. At least an hour and a half must have elapsed when this homeward-bound little pilgrim appeared on the winding road leading to Chestnut Castle. The girl I had seen on my way to town was now loaded with linen and engaged in helping a misshapen man whose big head and coarse features reminded me of the “Bertoldo” character in low Italian comedy. They were cleaning the cabins of which there was a dozen or so on Chestnut Crest, all pleasantly spaced amid the copious verdure. It was noon, and most of them, with a final bang of their screen doors, had already got rid of their occupants. A very elderly, almost mummy-like couple in a very new model were in the act of creeping out of one of the contiguous garages; from another a red hood protruded in somewhat cod-piece fashion; and nearer to our cabin, a strong and handsome young man with a shock of black hair and blue eyes was putting a portable refrigerator into a station wagon. For some reason he gave me a sheepish grin as I passed. On the grass expanse opposite, in the many-limbed shade of luxuriant trees, the familiar St. Bernard dog was guarding his mistress’ bicycle, and nearby a young woman, far gone in the family way, had seated a rapt baby on a swing and was rocking it gently, while a jealous boy of two or three was making a nuisance of himself by trying to push or pull the swing board; he finally succeeded in getting himself knocked down by it, and bawled loudly as he lay supine on the grass while his mother continued to smile gently at neither of her present children. I recall so clearly these minutiae probably because I was to check my impressions so thoroughly only a few minutes later; and besides, something in me had been on guard ever since that awful night in Beardsley. I now refused to be diverted by the feeling of well-being that my walk had engendered—by the young summer breeze that enveloped the nape of my neck, the giving crunch of the damp gravel, the juicy tidbit I had sucked out at last from a hollow tooth, and even the comfortable weight of my provisions which the general condition of my heart should not have allowed me to carry; but even that miserable pump of mine seemed to be working sweetly, and I felt adolori d’amoureuse langueur, to quote dear old Ronsard, as I reached the cottage where I had left my Dolores.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  They might have had a duel in the Vienna woods using volumes of Freud and volumes of Laing as shields. They might have dueled with words at least. One word from Bennett and I would have stayed. But nothing was forthcoming. Bennett assumed it was my right to go. And I had to seize that right even if by now it sickened me. “You’ve been over an hour, ducks,” Adrian said, putting my suitcase into the trunk of the car, which he called “the boot.” And we beat it out of Vienna like a couple of exiles escaping from the Nazis. On the road past the airport I wanted to say “Stop! Leave me there! I don’t want to go!” I thought of Bennett standing alone in his red turtleneck, waiting for some plane or other to some place or other. But it was too late. I was in this adventure for better or worse and I had no idea where it would land me. FIFTEEN Travels with My Antihero I want! I want! —William Blake I told Adrian everything. My whole hysterical history of searching for the impossible man and finding myself always right back where I started: inside my own head. I impersonated my sisters for him, my mother, my father, my grandparents, my husband, my friends…. We drove and talked and drove and talked. “What’s your prognosis?” I asked, ever the patient in search of the perfect doctor. “You’re due for a bit of a reshuffle, ducks,” Adrian kept saying. “You have to go down into yourself and salvage your own life.” Wasn’t I already doing that? What was this crazy itinerary if not a trip back into my past? “You haven’t gone deep enough yet,” he said. “You have to hit rock bottom and then climb back up.” “Jesus! I feel like I already have!” Adrian smirked his beautiful smirk with the pipe tucked between his curling pink lips. “You haven’t hit rock bottom yet,” he said, as if he knew some of the surprises in store. “Are you going to take me there?” I asked. “If you insist, love.” It was his magnificent indifference which infuriated me, turned me on, made me wild with frustration. Despite his cuddling and ass-grabbing, Adrian was so cool. I used to stare and stare at that beautiful profile wondering what in the world was happening in his head and why I couldn’t seem to fathom it. “I want to get inside your head,” I said, “and I can’t. It’s driving me crazy.” “But why do you want to get inside my head?

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  And what about those other longings which marriage stifled? Those longings to hit the open road from time to time, to discover whether you could still live alone inside your own head, to discover whether you could manage to survive in a cabin in the woods without going mad; to discover, in short, whether you were still whole after so many years of being half of something (like the back two legs of a horse outfit on the vaudeville stage). Five years of marriage had made me itchy for all those things: itchy for men, and itchy for solitude. Itchy for sex and itchy for the life of a recluse. I knew my itches were contradictory—and that made things even worse. I knew my itches were un-American—and that made things still worse. It is heresy in America to embrace any way of life except as half of a couple. Solitude is un-American. It may be condoned in a man—especially if he is a “glamorous bachelor” who “dates starlets” during a brief interval between marriages. But a woman is always presumed to be alone as a result of abandonment, not choice. And she is treated that way: as a pariah. There is simply no dignified way for a woman to live alone. Oh, she can get along financially perhaps (though not nearly as well as a man), but emotionally she is never left in peace. Her friends, her family, her fellow workers never let her forget that her husbandlessness, her childlessness—her selfishness, in short—is a reproach to the American way of life. Even more to the point: the woman (unhappy though she knows her married friends to be) can never let herself alone. She lives as if she were constantly on the brink of some great fulfillment. As if she were waiting for Prince Charming to take her away “from all this.” All what? The solitude of living inside her own soul? The certainty of being herself instead of half of something else? My response to all this was not (not yet) to have an affair and not (not yet) to hit the open road, but to evolve my fantasy of the Zipless Fuck. The zipless fuck was more than a fuck. It was a platonic ideal. Zipless because when you came together zippers fell away like rose petals, underwear blew off in one breath like dandelion fluff. Tongues intertwined and turned liquid. Your whole soul flowed out through your tongue and into the mouth of your lover. For the true, ultimate zipless A-1 fuck, it was necessary that you never get to know the man very well. I had noticed, for example, how all my infatuations dissolved as soon as I really became friends with a man, became sympathetic to his problems, listened to him kvetch about his wife, or ex- wives, his mother, his children.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Pim watched Pippa suck in the concoction. J’ai toujours admiré I’oeuvre ormonde du sublime Dublinois. And in the meantime the rain had become a voluptuous shower. “Look,” she said as she rode the bike beside me, one foot scraping the darkly glistening sidewalk, “look, I’ve decided something. I want to leave school. I hate that school. I hate the play, I really do! Never go back. Find another. Leave at once. Go for a long trip again. But this time we’ll go wherever I want, won’t we?” I nodded. My Lolita. “I choose? C’est entendu?” she asked wobbling a little beside me. Used French only when she was a very good little girl. “Okay. Entendu. Now hop-hop-hop, Lenore, or you’ll get soaked.” (A storm of sobs was filling my chest.) She bared her teeth and after her adorable school-girl fashion, leaned forward, and away she sped, my bird. Miss Lester’s finely groomed hand held a porch-door open for a waddling old dog qui prenait son temps. Lo was waiting for me near the ghostly birch tree. “I am drenched,” she declared at the top of her voice. “Are you glad? To hell with the play! See what I mean?” An invisible hag’s claw slammed down an upper-floor window. In our hallway, ablaze with welcoming lights, my Lolita peeled off her sweater, shook her gemmed hair, stretched towards me two bare arms, raised one knee: “Carry me upstairs, please. I feel sort of romantic to-night.” It may interest physiologists to learn, at this point, that I have the ability—a most singular case, I presume—of shedding torrents of tears throughout the other tempest. 15 The brakes were relined, the waterpipes unclogged, the valves ground, and a number of other repairs and improvements were paid for by not very mechanically-minded but prudent papa Humbert, so that the late Mrs. Humbert’s car was in respectable shape when ready to undertake a new journey. We had promised Beardsley School, good old Beardsley School, that we would be back as soon as my Hollywood engagement came to an end (inventive Humbert was to be, I hinted, chief consultant in the production of a film dealing with “existentialism,” still a hot thing at the time). Actually I was toying with the idea of gently trickling across the Mexican border—I was braver now than last year—and there deciding what to do with my little concubine who was now sixty inches tall and weighed ninety pounds. We had dug out our tour books and maps. She had traced our route with immense zest.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  “Freedom is an illusion,” Bennett would have said (agreeing for once with B. F. Skinner) and, in a way, I too would have agreed. Sanity, moderation, hard work, stability…I believed in them too. But what was that other voice inside of me which kept urging me on toward zipless fucks, and speeding cars and endless wet kisses and guts full of danger? What was that other voice which kept calling me coward! and egging me on to burn my bridges, to swallow the poison in one gulp instead of drop by drop, to go down into the bottom of my fear and see if I could pull myself up? Was it a voice? Or was it a thump? Something even more primitive than speech. A kind of pounding in my gut which I had nicknamed my “hunger-thump.” It was as if my stomach thought of itself as a heart. And no matter how I filled it—with men, with books, with food, with gingerbread cookies shaped like men and poems shaped like men and men shaped like poems—it refused to be still. Unfillable—that’s what I was. Nymphomania of the brain. Starvation of the heart. What was this pounding thing inside of me? A drum? Or a whole percussion section? Was it all air in a stretched skin? Was it an auditory hallucination? Was it maybe a frog? Wasn’t he thumping about a prince? Wasn’t he thinking he was a prince? Was I doomed to be hungry for life? At the end of the paper about artists, we all applauded from our rickety gold-backed chairs and politely stood and yawned. “I must have a copy of that paper,” I said to Bennett. “You don’t need it,” he said. “It’s the story of your life.” I may have neglected to report another aspect of the paper on artists (whose author, as I recall, was a certain Dr. Koenigsberger). This concerned the love life of the artist, particularly the tendency of artists to latch on (with considerable ferocity) to quite unsuitable “love objects” and idealize them wildly like the idealized parents they thought they never had. This unsuitable “love object” was mostly a projection on the part of the artist-lover. In fact, the object of passion was often quite ordinary in the eyes of others. But to the artist-lover, the beloved became mother, father, muse, the epitome of perfection. Sometimes the epitome of bitchy perfection or evil perfection, but always a deity of sorts, always omnipotent. What was the creative purpose of these infatuations, Dr. Koenigsberger wanted to know. We bent our heads forward in eager anticipation. By recreating the quality of the Oedipal infatuation, the artist could recreate his “family romance” and thus recreate his idealized childhood world. The numerous and often rapidly changing infatuations of artists were designed to keep the illusion alive. A new, strong sexual infatuation was the closest approximation one had in adult life to the passion of the small child for the parent of the opposite sex.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  There was something so aimless about our days, our driving, our drinking. I didn’t even know what day of the week it was. I hadn’t seen a newspaper since Vienna. I had hardly even bathed, or changed my clothes. And what I missed most of all was my writing. I hadn’t written a poem in weeks and I began to feel that I never would be able to again. I thought of my used red electric typewriter sitting in New York, and a pang of yearning went through me. That was who I loved! I could see myself going back to Bennett for the sake of having custody of the typewriter. Like people who stay together “for the children” or because they can’t decide who’ll get the rent-controlled apartment. — That night we found a real campsite rather than a roadside. (Le Camping, as they say in France.) It wasn’t fancy, but it had a swimming hole, a snack bar, a place where you could shower. I was dying for a shower and as soon as Adrian had staked out our parcel of ground, I made off to the shower house. As the dirt was rolling off me, I spoke to Bennett telepathically. “Forgive me,” I said to him wherever he was (and to myself, wherever I was). When I got back to the tent, Adrian had made a friend. Two friends, in fact. An American couple. She, coarsely pretty, red-haired, freckled, bosomy, Jewish, with a Brooklyn accent. He, bearded, brown-haired, fuzzy, fattish, with a Brooklyn accent. He was a swinging stockbroker who dabbled in hallucinogens. She was a swinging housewife who dabbled in adultery. They had a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, a Volkswagen camper, three kids in camp, and the fourteen-year itch. Adrian was wowing the wife (Judy) with his English accent and Laingian theories (which had already worn thin with me). She looked just about ready to tent down with him. “Hi,” I said brightly to my compatriots and coreligionists. “Hi,” they said in one voice. “Now what?” said Adrian. “Bed first or booze?” Judy giggled. “Don’t mind me,” I said. “We don’t believe in possessiveness or possession.” I thought I was doing a pretty good imitation of Adrian. “We’ve got a steak we were about to grill,” the husband (Marty) offered nervously. “Would you like to join us?” When in doubt, eat. I knew his type. “Super,” said Adrian. The man who came to dinner. I could see he was really turned on by the prospect of screwing Judy with her husband looking on. That was his thing. Since Bennett was off the scene, he’d somewhat lost interest in me. We sat down to steak and the story of their lives.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Last year, when Zora was a freshman, sophomores had seemed altogether a different kind of human: so very definite in their tastes and opinions, in their loves and ideas. Zora woke up this morning hopeful that a transformation of this kind might have visited her in the night, but, finding it hadn’t, she did what girls generally do when they don’t feel the part: she dressed it instead. How successful this had been she couldn’t say. Now she stopped to examine herself in the window of Lorelie’s , a campy fifties hairdressers on the corner of Houghton and Maine. She tried to put herself in her peers’ shoes. She asked herself the extremely difficult question: What would I think of me? She had been gunning for something like ‘bohemian intellectual; fearless; graceful; brave and bold’. She was wearing a long boho skirt in a deep green, a white cotton blouse with an eccentric ruff at the neck, a thick brown suede belt of Kiki’s from the days when her mother could still wear belts, a pair of clumpy shoes and a kind of hat. What kind of hat? A man’s hat , of green felt, that looked like a fedora, a little, but was not one. This was not what she had meant when she left the house. This was not it at all. Fifteen minutes later Zora peeled it all off again in the women’s locker room of Wellington’s college pool. This was part of the new Zora Self-Improvement Programme for the fall: wake early, swim,  On Beauty class, light lunch, class, library, home. She crushed her hat into the locker and pulled her bathing-cap down low over her ears. A naked Chinese woman who looked eighteen from the back now turned and surprised Zora with her crumpled face, in which two little obsidian eyes struggled under the pressure of folded skin from above and below. Her pubic hair was very long and straight and grey, like dead grass. Imagine being her , thought Zora vaguely, and the thought puttered along for a few seconds, collapsed, vanished. She pinned her locker key to the black fabric of her own functional costume. She walked the long edge if the pool, her flat feet meeting the ceramics with a wet slap. Up beyond the stadium seating, at the very top of this giant room, a glass wall let the autumn sun in and shot it across the room, like the searchlights in a prison yard.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  But nothing came of anything. I would go home instead, and write poems to the man I really loved (whoever he might be). After all, I had screwed enough guys to know that one prick wasn’t that different from the next. So what was I looking for? And why was I so restless? Maybe I resisted consummating any of these flirtations because I knew that the man I really wanted would continue to elude me and I would only wind up disappointed. But who was the man I really wanted? All I knew was that I had been desperately searching for him from the age of sixteen on. When I was sixteen and called myself a Fabian socialist, when I was sixteen and refused to pet with boys who liked Ike, when I was sixteen and cried into the Rubaiyat , when I was sixteen and cried into the sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay—I used to dream of a perfect man whose mind and body were equally fuckable. He had a face like Paul Newman and a voice like Dylan Thomas. He had a body like Michelangelo’s David (“with those rippling little marble muscles,” as I used to tell my best friend, Pia Wittkin, whose favorite male statue was Discobolus; we were both avid students of art history). He had a mind like George Bernard Shaw (or, at least, what my sixteen-year-old mind conceived of as George Bernard Shaw’s mind). He loved Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto and Frank Sinatra’s “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning” above all other mortal music. He shared my passion for unicorn tapestries, Beat the Devil , the Cloisters, Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex , witchcraft, and chocolate mousse. He shared my contempt for Senator Joe McCarthy, Elvis Presley, and my philistine parents. I never met him. At sixteen, my not meeting him seemed unbearable. Later I learned to take the cash and let the credit go, nor heed the rumble of a distant drum. The contrast between my fantasies (Paul Newman, Laurence Olivier, Humphrey Bogart, Michelangelo’s David ) and the pimply faced adolescent boys I knew was laughable. Only I cried. And so did Pia. We commiserated in her parents’ gloomy apartment on Riverside Drive. “I imagine him as being very—you know—sort of a cross between Laurence Olivier in Hamlet and Humphrey Bogart in Beat the Devil —with very savage white teeth, and an absolutely fantastic body—sort of like the Discobolus.” She indicated her own rather well-upholstered belly. “What are you wearing?” I asked. “I see it as a sort of—you know—medieval wedding. I have this pointed white hat with a chiffon veil floating from it—and a red velvet dress—maybe wine—and very pointed shoes.” She drew the shoes for me with her black-inked Rapidograph pen. Then she drew the whole outfit—an empire-waisted gown with a very low neck and long tight sleeves.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Suddenly we realized that we were talking about ourselves again. There was no topic neutral enough for conversation that afternoon. Everything came back to us. After lunch we went to the Hofburg once more to hear a paper on the psychology of artists. This paper posthumously analyzed Leonardo, Beethoven, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Donne, Virginia Woolf, and an unknown, unnamed woman artist who had been treated by the analyst. All his evidence proved overwhelmingly that artists were, as a group, weak, dependent, childlike, naive, masochistic, narcissistic, poor judges of character, and hopelessly immersed in Oedipal conflicts. Due to their extreme sensitivity as children and their greater-than-average need for mothering, they always felt deprived no matter how much mothering they in fact got. In adult life, they were doomed to look for mothers everywhere, and not finding them (ever, ever) they sought to invent their own ideal mothers through the artifice of their work. They sought to remake their own histories in an idealized image—even when this idealization came out seeming more like a brutalization than an idealization. Nobody’s family, in short, was as transcendentally evil as the modern autobiographical novelist (or poet) imagined his family to be. To excoriate one’s family was ultimately the same thing as to idealize. It showed how fettered one still was to the past. Through fame, too, the artist sought to compensate himself for the sense of early deprivation. But it never quite worked. Being loved by the world is no substitute for having been loved by one person when you were small, and besides the world is a lousy lover. So fame too was a disappointment. Many artists turned in despair to opium, alcohol, homosexual lechery, heterosexual lechery, religious fervor, political moralizing, suicide, and other palliatives. But these never quite worked either. Except suicide—which always worked, in a way. At that point I remembered an epigram by Antonio Porchia which the analyst had not wit enough to quote: I believe that the soul consists of its sufferings for the soul that cures its sufferings dies. So too with artists. Only more so. Throughout the whole description of the artist’s weakness, dependency, naiveté, etc., Bennett squeezed my hand and shot me knowing glances. Come back home to Daddy. All is understood. How I longed to come back home to Daddy! But how I also longed to be free!

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I had him marry the little girl’s sick mother who soon died, and after a thwarted attempt to take advantage of the orphan in a hotel room, Arthur (for that was his name) threw himself under the wheels of a truck. I read the story one blue-papered wartime night to a group of friends—Mark Aldanov, two social revolutionaries, and a woman doctor; but I was not pleased with the thing and destroyed it sometime after moving to America in 1940. Around 1949, in Ithaca, upstate New York, the throbbing, which had never quite ceased, began to plague me again. Combination joined inspiration with fresh zest and involved me in a new treatment of the theme, this time in English—the language of my first governess in St. Petersburg, circa 1903, a Miss Rachel Home. The nymphet, now with a dash of Irish blood, was really much the same lass, and the basic marrying-her-mother idea also subsisted; but otherwise the thing was new and had grown in secret the claws and wings of a novel. The book developed slowly, with many interruptions and asides. It had taken me some forty years to invent Russia and Western Europe, and now I was faced by the task of inventing America. The obtaining of such local ingredients as would allow me to inject a modicum of average “reality” (one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes) into the brew of individual fancy, proved at fifty a much more difficult process than it had been in the Europe of my youth when receptiveness and retention were at their automatic best. Other books intervened. Once or twice I was on the point of burning the unfinished draft and had carried my Juanita Dark as far as the shadow of the leaning incinerator on the innocent lawn, when I was stopped by the thought that the ghost of the destroyed book would haunt my files for the rest of my life. Every summer my wife and I go butterfly hunting. The specimens are deposited at scientific institutions, such as the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard or the Cornell University collection. The locality labels pinned under these butterflies will be a boon to some twenty-first-century scholar with a taste for recondite biography. It was at such of our headquarters as Telluride, Colorado; Afton, Wyoming; Portal, Arizona; and Ashland, Oregon, that Lolita was energetically resumed in the evenings or on cloudy days. I finished copying the thing out in longhand in the spring of 1954, and at once began casting around for a publisher.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  “No—Edusa Gold—the gal who coaches us.” “I was not referring to her. Who exactly concocted that play?” “Oh! Yes, of course. Some old woman, Clare Something, I guess. There was quite a crowd of them there.” “So she complimented you?” “Complimented my eye—she kissed me on my pure brow”—and my darling emitted that new yelp of merriment which—perhaps in connection with her theatrical mannerisms—she had lately begun to affect. “You are a funny creature, Lolita,” I said—or some such words. “Naturally, I am overjoyed you gave up that absurd stage business. But what is curious is that you dropped the whole thing only a week before its natural climax. Oh, Lolita, you should be careful of those surrenders of yours. I remember you gave up Ramsdale for camp, and camp for a joyride, and I could list other abrupt changes in your disposition. You must be careful. There are things that should never be given up. You must persevere. You should try to be a little nicer to me, Lolita. You should also watch your diet. The tour of your thigh, you know, should not exceed seventeen and a half inches. More might be fatal (I was kidding, of course). We are now setting out on a long happy journey. I remember—” 16I remember as a child in Europe gloating over a map of North America that had “Appalachian Mountains” boldly running from Alabama up to New Brunswick, so that the whole region they spanned—Tennessee, the Virginias, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, appeared to my imagination as a gigantic Switzerland or even Tibet, all mountain, glorious diamond peak upon peak, giant conifers, le montagnard émigré in his bear skin glory, and Felis tigris goldsmithi, and Red Indians under the catalpas. That it all boiled down to a measly suburban lawn and a smoking garbage incinerator, was appalling. Farewell, Appalachia! Leaving it, we crossed Ohio, the three states beginning with “I,” and Nebraska—ah, that first whiff of the West! We travelled very leisurely, having more than a week to reach Wace, Continental Divide, where she passionately desired to see the Ceremonial Dances marking the seasonal opening of Magic Cave, and at least three weeks to reach Elphinstone, gem of a western State where she yearned to climb Red Rock from which a mature screen star had recently jumped to her death after a drunken row with her gigolo. Again we were welcomed to wary motels by means of inscriptions that read: “We wish you to feel at home while here. All equipment was carefully checked upon your arrival. Your license number is on record here. Use hot water sparingly. We reserve the right to eject without notice any objectionable person. Do not throw waste material of any kind in the toilet bowl. Thank you. Call again. The Management. P.S. We consider our guests the Finest People of the World.”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  A Midwesterner, as her late husband had also been, she had lived in coy Ramsdale, the gem of an eastern state, not long enough to know all the nice people. She knew slightly the jovial dentist who lived in a kind of ramshackle wooden chateau behind our lawn. She had met at a church tea the “snooty” wife of the local junk dealer who owned the “colonial” white horror at the corner of the avenue. Now and then she “visited with” old Miss Opposite; but the more patrician matrons among those she called upon, or met at lawn functions, or had telephone chats with—such dainty ladies as Mrs. Glave, Mrs. Sheridan, Mrs. McCrystal, Mrs. Knight and others, seldom seemed to call on my neglected Charlotte. Indeed, the only couple with whom she had relations of real cordiality, devoid of any arrière-pensée or practical foresight, were the Farlows who had just come back from a business trip to Chile in time to attend our wedding, with the Chatfields, McCoos, and a few others (but not Mrs. Junk or the even prouder Mrs. Talbot). John Farlow was a middle-aged, quiet, quietly athletic, quietly successful dealer in sporting goods, who had an office at Parkington, forty miles away: it was he who got me the cartridges for that Colt and showed me how to use it, during a walk in the woods one Sunday; he was also what he called with a smile a part-time lawyer and had handled some of Charlotte’s affairs. Jean, his youngish wife (and first cousin), was a long-limbed girl in harlequin glasses with two boxer dogs, two pointed breasts and a big red mouth. She painted—landscapes and portraits—and vividly do I remember praising, over cocktails, the picture she had made of a niece of hers, little Rosaline Honeck, a rosy honey in a Girl Scout uniform, beret of green worsted, belt of green webbing, charming shoulder-long curls—and John removed his pipe and said it was a pity Dolly (my Dolita) and Rosaline were so critical of each other at school, but he hoped they would get on better when they returned from their respective camps. We talked of the school. It had its drawbacks, and it had its virtues. “Of course, too many of the tradespeople here are Italians,” said John, “but on the other hand we are still spared—” “I wish,” interrupted Jean with a laugh, “Dolly and Rosaline were spending the summer together.” Suddenly I imagined Lo returning from camp—brown, warm, drowsy, drugged—and was ready to weep with passion and impatience.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  In my relations with Richard, I was always trying to set the record "straight," to "settle" the account. This is but another way of saying that I wanted Richard to sec me, not as the youth I had been when he met me, but as a man. I wanted to feel that he had accepted me, had accepted my right to my own vision, my right, as his equal, to disagree with him. I nourished fo r a long time the illusion that this day was coming. One day, Richard would turn to me, with the light of sudden understanding on his ALAS, POOR RICHARD 259 face, and say, "Oh, that)s what you mean." And then, so ran the dream, a great and invaluable dialogue would have begun. And the great value of this dialogue would have been not only in its power to instruct all ofyou, and the ages. Its great value would have been in its power to instruct me, its power to instruct Richard: fo r it would have been nothing less than that so universally desired, so rarely achieved reconciliation be tween spiritual father and spiritual son. Now, of course, it is not Richard's fault that I fe lt this way. But there is not much point, on the other hand, in dismissing it as simply my fault, or my illusion. I had identified myself with him long before we met: in a sense by no means meta physical, his example had helped me to survive. He was black, he was young, he had come out of the Mississippi nightmare and the Chicago slums, and he was a writer. He proved it could be done-proved it to me, and gave me an arm against all those others who assured me it could not be done. And I think I had expected Richard, on the day we met, somehow, miraculously, to understand this, and to rejoice in it. Perhaps that sounds fo olish, but I cannot honestly say, not even now, that I really think it is foolish. Richard Wright had a tremen dous effect on countless numbers of people whom he never met, multitudes whom he now will never meet. This means that his responsibilities and his hazards were great. I don't think that Richard ever thought of me as one of his respon sibilities-bien au contraire!-but he certainly seemed, often enough, to wonder just what he had done to deserve me. Our reconciliation, anyway, never took place. This was a great loss for me.

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

  Besides. Whatever is in motion towards an end, has a natural desire to be established and at rest therein: hence a body does not move away from the place towards which it has a natural movement, except by a violent movement which is contrary to that appetite. Now happiness is the last end which man desires naturally. Therefore it is his natural desire to be established in happiness. Consequently unless together with happiness he acquires a state of immobility, he is not yet happy, since his natural desire is not yet at rest. When therefore a man acquires happiness, he also acquires stability and rest; so that all agree in conceiving stability as a necessary condition of happiness: hence the Philosopher says (1 Ethic. x.): We do not look upon the happy man as a kind of chameleon. Now, in this life there is no sure stability; since, however happy a man may be, sickness and misfortune may come upon him, so that he is hindered in the operation, whatever it be, in which his happiness consists. Therefore man’s ultimate happiness cannot be in this life. Moreover. It would seem unfitting and unreasonable for a thing to take a long time in becoming, and to have but a short time in being: for it would follow that for a longer duration of time nature would be deprived of its end; hence we see that animals which live but a short time, are perfected in a short time. But, if happiness consists in a perfect operation according to perfect virtue, whether intellectual or moral, it cannot possibly come to man except after a long time. This is most evident in speculative matters, wherein man’s ultimate happiness consists, as we have proved: for hardly is man able to arrive at perfection in the speculations of science, even though he reach the last stage of life: and then in the majority of cases, but a short space of life remains to him. Therefore man’s ultimate happiness cannot be in this life. Further. All admit that happiness is a perfect good: else it would not bring rest to the appetite. Now perfect good is that which is wholly free from any admixture of evil: just as that which is perfectly white is that which is entirely free from any admixture of black. But man cannot be wholly free from evils in this state of life; not only from evils of the body, such as hunger, thirst, heat, cold and the like, but also from evils of the soul. For no one is there who at times is not disturbed by inordinate passions; who sometimes does not go beyond the mean, wherein virtue consists, either in excess or in deficiency; who is not deceived in some thing or another; or at least ignores what he would wish to know, or feels doubtful about an opinion of which he would like to be certain. Therefore no man is happy in this life.

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

  This movement of recoil and approach on the part of the free will means abhorrence and yearning. Hence in his exposition of John 10:13, “ the hireling fleeth, ” Augustine says: “ our feelings are the movements of our souls; joy is the soul ’ s overflowing; fear is its flight; when you yearn, the soul advances; when you fear, it flees ” (Tract. in Joan. 46). The justification of the ungodly thus requires a twofold movement of the free will. It must yearn for the justice which is of God. It must also abhor sin. On the first point: it is by the same virtue that we strive towards one contrary and recoil from its opposite. It is thus by charity that we delight in God, and by charity also that we abhor the sins which separate us from God. On the second point: when a man has put things behind him, he should not revert to them out of love for them. Rather should he forget them, lest he be drawn to them. But he ought to take note of them in thought as things to be abhorred, for thus does he forsake them. On the third point: in the period before justification, a man must feel a loathing for the sins which he remembers having committed. From such preliminary meditation there ensues in the soul a movement of general loathing for all sins committed, including those which are buried in the past. For a man in this state would repent of the sins which he does not remember, if they were present to his memory. This movement contributes to his justification. ARTICLE SIX Whether the Remission of Sins should be Numbered with the things reequired for the Justification of the Ungodly1. It seems that the remission of sins should not be numbered with the things required for the justification of the ungodly. For the substance of a thing is not numbered with the things required for it. A man, for example, should not be numbered together with his soul and his body. Now it was said in the first article that the justification of the ungodly itself is the remission of sins. The remission of sins should not therefore be numbered with the things required for it. 2. Again, infusion of grace and remission of sin are the same thing, just as illumination and the dispelling of darkness are the same thing. But what is identical should not be numbered together with itself. Remission of guilt should not then be numbered together with infusion of grace.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  The weather had turned breezy and hot, ideal September days, the pale-backed leaves quivering and glinting like spring, and I would have left town too, given the chance—joined my pupil at the beach in the flimsy pretence of studying a book. But I had the other one to see and my living to earn. It was hard to identify the impulse to work among the other sensations of merely being on holiday. I wrote a letter to my old friend Edie, telling her all about my rapid new start with Cherif but skirting round the blunt humiliation of the rendezvous at Wanne's bar. Also to my mother, but sticking more closely to matters of weather and diet. I felt them both in their different ways watching for me, half-hiding their concern at what I'd suddenly done. And once or twice I thought of them all, and the pub and the common and the whole suburban sprawl—half a map, half a picture, like the tourist hand-out here but infinitely draggled and banal—with a sudden heart's thump or two of longing.