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 Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  338 Lecture 50: Jean Racine from Euripides’s play Hippolytus (428 B.C.) but has changed the focus of the plot from Hippolytus to Phaedra, as the change in title indicates. While Euripides shows us Hippolytus destroyed by Aphrodite because he refuses to fall in love, Racine concentrates on Phaedra and her incestuous love for her stepson. Euripides makes Phaedra another victim of Aphrodite’s power, whereas in Racine, Phaedra’s obsession with her stepson is the “monstrous” refl ection of her mother’s own obsession with a white bull, from which encounter the monstrous Minotaur is born. Thus, Euripides’s play is about the relationship of the human world to the world of the gods, whereas Racine’s play, undermining the Renaissance belief in reason, is about the essentially human and arbitrary nature of passion. Racine is also concerned in this preface to reconcile the subject of his play to his Jansenist faith and argues that his plays are as worthy as their classical sources to teach virtue. Racine relies on his audience’s knowledge of the story of Theseus and the Minotaur. Minos, king of Crete, had boasted that the gods would grant him any wish; he prayed to Poseidon that a bull would emerge from the sea. Miraculously, a beautiful white bull swam ashore. Instead of sacri fi cing this gift, Minos sacrifi ced a different one from his herd instead. Poseidon avenged the insult by causing Minos’s queen, Pasiphaë, to fall madly in love with the white bull, then give birth to the Minotaur, a creature with a man’s body but a bull’s head. Minos con fi ned the Minotaur to the center of the Labyrinth, where he is killed by Theseus with a sword supplied by Ariadne, Minos’s daughter. After fl eeing Crete with Ariadne, Theseus abandons her and takes up with her sister, Phaedra. Now we will explore the structure of the play. The play traces the course of two versions of “the love that dares not speak its name”—the fi rst is Hippolytus’s for a woman his father hates; the second is Phaedra’s for her stepson, Hippolytus. Throughout the play, Theseus’s reputation as a slayer of monsters and a philanderer is invoked repeatedly. Racine asks an essentially modern question: What is the nature of the monstrous? Racine’s relationship with Molière deteriorated rapidly after he switched theatrical troupes, even as Molière’s troupe was rehearsing Alexander the Great.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Lasebikan, from Nigeria, spoke that afternoon on the tonal structure of Youriba poetry, a language spoken by five million people in his country. Lasebikan was a very winning and unassuming personality, dressed in a most arres ting cos tume. What looked like a white lace poncho covered him from head to f(>nt; beneath this he was wearing a very subdued but very ornately figured silk robe, which looked Chinese, and he wore a red velvet toque, a sign, someone told me, that he was a Mohammedan. The Youriba language, he told us, had only become a writ ten language in the middle of the last century and this had been done by missionaries. His face expressed some sorrow at this point, due, it developed, to the fact that this had not already been accomplished by the Youriba people. However and his f.x e brightened again-he lived in the hope that one day an excavation would bring to light a great literature writ ten by the Youriba people. In the meantime, with great good nature, he resigned himself to sharing with us that liter ature which already existed. I doubt that I learned much about the tonal structure of Youriba poetry, but I fo und myself fasci nated by the sensibility which had produced it. M. Lasebikan spoke first in Youriba and then in English. It was perhJps because he so clearly loved his subject that he not only suc ceeded in conveying the poe try of this extremely strange ian- PRINCES AN D PO WER S 149 guage, he also conveyed something of the style of life out of which it came. The poems quoted ranged from the devotional to a poem which described the pounding of yams. And one somehow felt the loneliness and the yearning of the first and the peaceful, rhythmic domesticity of the second. There was a poem about the memory of a battle, a poem about a faithless friend, and a poem celebrating the variety to be found in life, which conceived of this variety in rather startling terms: "Some would have been great caters, but they haven't got the food; some, great drinkers, but they haven't got the wine." Some of the poetry demanded the use of a marvelously ornate drum, on which were many little bells. It was not the dru m it once had been, he told us, but despite whatever mishap had befallen it, I could ha\'e listened to him play it for the rest of the afternoon. He was followed by Leopold Senghor. Senghor is a very dark and impressive figure in a smooth, bespectacled kind of way, and he is very highly regarded as a poet. He was to speak on West Mr ican writers and artists. He began by invoking what he called the "spirit of Ban dung."

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Anyone surviving these mean streets knows something about that moment. It is not a moment which the film can afford, for it conveys, too vividly, how that victim, the black, yet refuses to be a victim, has another source of sustenance: Billie's morality, at that moment, indeed, threatens the very foundations of the Stock Exchange. The film does not suggest that the obsolete and vindictive narcotics Jaws had anything to do with her fate: does not pick up the challenge implicit in her statement: When I was on, I was on, and nobody bothered me. . . . I got into trouble when I tried to get off. Neither does it suggest that the distinction between Big Business and Organized Crime is lik e the old ad, CHAPTER THREE which asks, Which twin has the Toni? The film lea ves us with the impression, and this is a matter of choices coldly and de liberately made, that a gifted, but weak and self -indulgent woman, brought about the murder of her devoted Piano Man because she was not equal, either to her gifts, or to the society which had made her a star, and, as the clos ing sequence proves, adored her. There was a rite in our church, called pleading the blood. When the sinner fell on his face before the altar, the soul of the sinner then found itself locked in battle with Satan : or, in the place of Ja cob, wrestling with the angel. All of the forces of Hell rushed to claim the soul which had just been aston ished by the light of the love of God. The soul in torment turned this way and that, yearning, equally, for the light and for the darkness: yearning, out of agony, for reconciliation and for rest: for this agony is compounded by an unimagin able, unprecedented, unspeakable fatigue. Only the saints who had passed through this fire-the incredible horror of the fainting of the spirit-had the power to intercede, to "plead the blood," to bring the embattled and mortally endangered soul "through." The pleading of the blood was a plea to who soever had loved us enough to spill his blood for us, that he might sprinkle the soul with his love once more, to give us power over Satan, and the love and courage to live out our days.

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  344 Lecture 51: Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz In her reply to Sor Filotea, Sor Juana asserts that she wishes to defer to Church authority, but she also wishes study in order to understand God. She is confl icted between the demands of the religious life and her thirst for knowledge, an inclination that she considers either “a gift or a punishment from Heaven.” The intent of her “Reply” is to show that neither her religious vocation nor her gender bars her from the pursuit of learning. She has to situate her learning in relationship to God’s wishes, and she has to represent herself both as a woman (and, therefore, not usurping men) but also as an intellectual woman. The very act of questioning God’s will might be seen as sacrilegious, but Sister Juana insists that it is the very intelligence that God has given her that allows her to question its value to God. Arguing from the authority of biblical and classical sources, Sister Juana confesses that she has often turned to secular matters because she dared not defy gender, age, and above all, custom. She does not wish to teach, nor to write—except when commanded to do so—but only to study. Sister Juana refuses to repudiate her studies, claiming them as appropriate to God’s work but recognizing that they distract her from the spiritual life of the convent. To emphasize the naturalness of her desire for learning, Sister Juana tells the story of her early life. She keeps the two competing claims in balance: The desire to learn is not to be condemned because it was natural, but at the same time, her own desire drove her to acquire more knowledge and, perhaps, to become “unnatural” in her desire. Sister Juana’s account of her progress as a scholar emphasizes this contrast between the natural and the unnatural located in her body: She wished to be dressed in boy’s clothing and sent to study in Mexico City; not learning Latin quickly enough, she cut her hair as punishment. Entering religious orders, Sor Juana fi nds that convent life has its own distractions and that wherever she goes, her desire to learn accompanies her. The very act of questioning God’s will might be seen as sacrilegious, but Sister Juana insists that it is the very intelligence that God has given her that allows her to question its value to God.

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  345 She must understand sacred theology, but also she must learn all the other disciplines: logic, rhetoric, physics, music, arithmetic, architecture, civil law and canon law, history, astrology. The torment of desiring to study, yet also desiring to be part of her community condemns her to struggle against herself, like St. Jerome. Despite her great acclaim, she has been subject to the most painful persecution from those who love her and wish to save her soul. She is martyred to her own excellence, just as Christ was. To be forbidden her books, she insists, cannot dampen her natural curiosity. Even the kitchen and the preparation of food is to her a laboratory for experimental science. Had Aristotle had to prepare food, she claims, he would have written more. In the second half of her “Reply,” Sister Juana turns to history to support her claim that knowledge is appropriate for a woman, citing women from the Old Testament, from classical history and texts, as well as contemporary women scholars. To deny women learning just because they are women is to believe that men are wise just because they are men. All who are not capable of wisdom should be prevented from studying, writing, and teaching. What objection can exist, says Sister Juana, to letting older women teach young girls? The claim that biblical authorities support the prohibition against women teaching is the interpretation of the historical ignorant. Sister Juana comes to the Atenagórica letter itself, insisting it was written with the permission of the Church. She disagreed with the Jesuit teacher, but his opinion is not a revelation that must be accepted blindly, and others may disagree with her. Even her verses, she claims, are not heretical but follow the model of verses in the Bible and classical texts. She describes her work as if it were her child and laments that it has arrived like an orphan at the doors of Sister Filotea, who has had to name it. It has other blemishes born out of haste, illness, and want of guidance, and thus, she has failed to include important evidence. Sister Juana’s struggle is unrelenting and unresolvable. Despite her wish to be obedient and to curtail her intellectual inquiries, the scholar will out— even as she regrets that she wrote the letter, she wishes she had written a better one! This is the same Sister Juana who, within two years, would sell her entire library and renounce the use of pen and ink; the same Sister Juana

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  After supper I said, "I'll just make that call now, Mum", and went and did it so quickly that the adrenalin only caught up with me at the moment someone answered: a girl, rather sultry and bored. He must have sisters. They were all out, she said. Or put it another way, she was there all by herself. She almost sounded as if she'd like me to come round and fuck her instead. She said she'd tell Ralphie that I'd rung, and repeated my number sluttishly wrongly before she got it right. Then I set out into the high-summer wastes of longing. Dawn never rang back. I missed him on the customed hill, all right. I missed him everywhere. Some days it was as if nothing had ever happened; on others I felt ruined, I'd been given a sip of some marvellous elixir and then had it snatched away. I knew it was absurd to fall in love after ten minutes' breathless smooching, but that only added an element of hysterical determination to my passion. Everyone noticed I was moping, but there were larger glooms about the house that rendered mine unimportant. My great-aunt Tina was very ill; Charlie kept deferring his visit to Lisanne's parents (who weren't at all sure it was a good idea) and tinkered pointlessly with circuitry in his room; and though nothing was said to me, it was obvious my father was doing less work and that there was a new caution about money. He had begun to cancel engagements. He was pale and withdrawn. I would ask him if he was okay, and he would push out his chest as if about to sing and say, "I'll be all right—a bit out of sorts." But our fortnight at Kinchin Cove was off that year; and the trading-in of our rusting Humber Snipe, a suffocating monster which, if never entirely new in our experience, had been a sign of prosperity six years before, was again deferred: it began to resemble one of the broken-voiced old hulks on the forecourt at the Flats. I had always been thrilled by cars and was deflated and embarrassed. I was told that my school-fees cost more than a car, and knew that I wasn't allowed to complain. After the first week, I took to ringing Dawn's number two or three times a day from a phone-box in town, though there was never any reply. They must have gone on holiday: he was somewhere different entirely, showing off on a beach, chasing his sisters, picking them up and spanking them, being clumsily macho for their protesting fun.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  We camped out at the house, eating floury apples and pate and olives from ajar. Matt escaped a couple more times and swam again in the late afternoon when even he admitted that the sea was hurtingly cold. I liked having the house to myself and lay about in the diffused light of the sunroom, blindfolded with daydreams and drifting into sleep. I made a slight adjustment to the angle of the slats and from time to time looked through. Once the long windows on to the porch were open, and towels and trunks had appeared on the line: I had missed their return. Later the doors were closed and lights reached out across the lawn; but we were at too obtuse an angle to be able to see in. Later still, at one or two, I went out along the beach myself and loitered by the white palings of their fence. There were no lights now, but a hazy half-moon picked up the glimmer of the dunes, the small vanishing lines of the wave-crests, and, when I turned, the white villa itself and the hanging towels and the dim, sea-bleached hydrangeas. Here was the gate, jammed open in the sand, and then the stunted thorns, clipped by the wind into arrows pointing at the darkened windows. Why not step in? Suddenly I knew the house would not be locked, and that I could ghost through it and hover over each sleeping face, him with her or him. But I didn't, I wouldn't. I kicked and stumbled back through the dunes, my heart spurting with longing. I had left a candle burning in the kitchen and shielded it upstairs with its dumbshow of shadows and startlements to where Matt was already snoring and striking a sympathetic echo from the old cupboards and bare floors. I hovered over him for a minute, his arms pinned in a camphory cocoon of blankets, his beautiful, cynical face agape and faintly senile. Then I stole across the landing and lay down fully clothed in Julien's room. For a long time I watched the candle burning, the flame tugged away by a harmless draught. When I blew it out and saw the thin-walled cup of wax at the tip cool into darkness I thought how for centuries the world had fallen asleep with that sweet singed smell in its nostrils.

• 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.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  This was an older house than the others, maybe the first that had been built out on the dunes below the village. It was shuttered and weather boarded, and at the bottom of the neglected garden another gate under a rustic arch gave on to the beach. Matt had moved the car to the park, where it looked fractionally less conspicuous and almost sensible—a fun-truck, a beach-buggy high on testosterone. Anyone who saw it there would know at once that it belonged to some sporty young fools miles down the beach with a ghetto-blaster and a badminton set. And here we were, stalking through the prickly shrubbery, peering into the back garden of Les Goelands. There seemed to be a whitewashed wall in the way, and nearer the house a dark shed with a tarred roof. You just couldn't see in, and you couldn't hear anything, either. I gave Matt as accurate a description as I could of the little group. "They're all beautiful," I said. "Sibylle is small and self-contained, with glossy reddish-brown hair, and Patrick is stocky and square-faced and unhurried, with short dark hair that sprouts out at different angles; and Luc . . . well, I've told you all about Luc." "You certainly have," said Matt, with a stylish little sarcasm he didn't normally rise to. I sat at the end of the garden whilst he cruised off down the beach in his black swimming-shorts and a singlet. It was like teaching, in a way, knowing how to catch his imagination, to set him tasks he might take to for the pleasure of them. Now he was my eyes, he had to find and recount for me, and my mind's eye followed him over the loose horizon of the sandhills and into the field of play I absurdly couldn't enter. I kicked around in a low-walled patio overgrown with grass and bindweed, with built-in benches warped by sun, and the black griddle of a barbecue that might have been used quite recently: maybe parties stole in from the beach—there were beer-bottles tumbled in a corner and holding their slant few inches of rain. I smoked a cigarette and fizzed the stub into one of them. It was very still, with the lull and whisper of the sea nearby but out of view, and hot sunshine that was a miracle in which the Three uncannily took part: they had known of it in advance, and known, almost without thinking, what to do. I unbuttoned my shirt and lay on one of the benches, breathing the seedy vanilla smell of a bush on which half a dozen late bees still dropped and toppled.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  " Aren't your friend Patrick's parents worried about leaving their house unattended?" I was brooding on the dream-mirage of yesterday's sunshine on white stucco, a door left open, and he was adding and taking away, smuggling Sibylle out of the picture, touching in the stratospheric clouds that I had never looked up to see. "They aren't worried. My friend's father, Mr Roger Dhondt, goes there quite often. He is a writer and, well, he does his writing there." "So your friend Patrick's surname is Dhondt?" "Yes, have you heard of him? Roger Dhondt has had published books about nature and— ecologie . . . " "Ecology. No, I've never heard of him." "You know he used to be at Het Zwin, with the wild fowl. He is very interested in birds." I glanced at Luc, and saw he was troubled by my frown. "In fact," he said encouragingly, "their house is called Sea-Gulls." "I know, I know," I felt like mumbling, as even the vacant charm of that boarding-house, blue-skied name tarnished. "Sometimes in the summer there are people living on the sand. But they are bums and we are not worried about them." He grinned like a child who has no access to his parents' puzzling sadness and tries to entertain them, while they exchange a stony intimate look. "Sometimes they go into another house there, which has been empty for many years. We know they sometimes go into the garden, which is fine, okay, and make a fire and have a party. Now, my friend Patrick thinks there are people living in the house, but I don't know." "And why would he think that?" I said vaguely. "I mean, has he seen people there?" Luc was vaguer still. "He said he heard noises in the house, which is next to ours, to his. There was, you know, a guy around, that we kept seeing; he was a stranger, but I think he was a nice good-looking guy, quite rich, and not a bum who would break open the house." I stared at him, and saw him stir himself again—but as though not certain it was worth the effort—to a further pleasantry. "My friend Patrick says he could hear the sound of someone snoring, in fact, coming out of the house. But I think it was only the sound of the sea." It was on the journey back from St Ernest that Matt told me he would be going out of town for a week or two. He said it in so casual a way that I knew it must be something important, into which I shouldn't enquire. "I'll miss you," I said, and was surprised by the truth of my words.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I had not read Pope since I was a child myself, but I had a sudden keen yearning for his order and lucidity, which was connected in my mind with a vision of eighteenth-century England, and rides cut through woodland, and Polesden and all my literate country origins. The book contained the ‘Epistle to a Lady’ and various other shorter poems; of the longer works it gave only ‘The Rape of the Lock’ complete, and I fastened on this poem, and on Mr Niven’s account of how it had been designed to laugh two families out of a feud, as the flashings and gleams of a civilised world, where animosities were melted down and cast again as glittering artefacts. I determined to learn it all by heart, and put away twenty lines a day. The discipline, and the brilliance of the work itself, were a kind of invisible enrichment to me—though, lest I should feel like an actor learning a great part with no prospect of a performance, I had Bill hear my lines each time I mastered a new canto; and he seemed to enjoy it. Tempting though it was to retire into this inner world, there were always visits to look forward to—and to regret, for their cruel brevity and for the new firmness with which, afterwards, the door was shut, the walls of the cell confined one. The visitors carried their horror of the place about them and for a while after they had gone left one with an anguished vacancy of a kind I had never known before. All one’s little accommodations were laid bare. My first visit was from Taha—a ‘box-visit’, a reunion conducted through glass. I was wildly shaken to see him, so that I could not think of much to say. He smiled and was solicitous, and I looked at him closely, masochistically, for signs that he was ashamed of me. It was extraordinary how his confidence was undimmed: he spoke very quietly, so as not to be overheard by the guards or the other prisoners, and told me a score of sweet, inconsequential things. The second time he came, a few weeks later, we were allowed to sit at a table together: he had his little boy with him now, who seemed very excited at being allowed into a prison but frightened too of being left behind. Taha told him to hang on tight to my hand, and as he himself was holding my other hand we sat linked in a triangle, as if conducting a seance. The day before had been Taha’s birthday—and of course I had nothing to give him. He was forty-four! I can honestly say that he was no less beautiful to me than he had been when I saw him first, twenty-eight years ago.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I thought with yearning of the Hopes, whom I did not know, forced to contain their anger, contempt and hurt in such a world. It would be best to see Arthur on common ground—in a bar or club or out in the open air which I now re-entered gratefully. In view of the horror of the case it had been rather reckless to go to his home, and I was glad I had got away with it. Ideally, I suppose, I wanted to help, to give money to the friend or consolation to the grieving mother: though I was always hoping, expecting even, to see him, there was an assumption dully gaining ground in my mind that he was dead. In the charmless passage between the buildings there were at least the skinheads to look forward to. I had once spent a weekend with a skinhead I picked up at a dance-hall in Camden Town; he called himself Dash, though that was not among the qualities of that ugly, passionate boy. I preferred to see it as a polite euphemism for one of the stronger words that were always hypnotically on his lips. They were a challenge, skinheads, and made me feel shifty as they stood about the streets and shopping precincts, magnetising the attention they aimed to repel. Cretinously simplified to booted feet, bum and bullet head, they had some, if not all, of the things one was looking for. I came by easily, and shot a glance at the big one I had noticed before. He was leaning against the wall, by the entrance to one of the rubbish bays, his ankles crossed, and looking straight at me. ‘Got the time,’ he said neutrally, hardly as a question. I virtually stopped, referred to my old gold watch. ‘It’s 4.15,’ I said. ‘Let me see,’ he said, grabbing my wrist and giving me a strange, private smile. There was a swastika tattoo on the back of his hand, very badly done, almost as though it had been drawn on with a biro. Another of the group was across the alleyway, his eyes shifting with amazing speed, as if he was mad. ‘Give us your watch!’ he said, with extreme, petulant vehemence, though never looking at me for a second together. But the sexy one tossed my arm away from him, I gave a nervous gasp of a laugh, and decided I was in control of things. I stepped forward, and around the big boy, who had moved out to block my passage; the other one said, ‘Where do you think you’re going?

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I went straight to Phil that night, though he was not expecting me. I had not been at the Queensberry for weeks, and as I got out of the taxi a new boy on the door—very thin and formal, not at all my kind of thing—asked me if he could help. I looked in on the staff TV room, where one of the receptionists was watching the news and a commis chef, fast asleep, had fallen half out of his chair. In the corridor I ran into Pino, who was fantastically pleased to see me and shook my hand between both of his, insisting on a complete account of the injuries Phil had told him about. He was keen too not to keep me from my friend. ‘You go to see Phil? Is upstairs. Is gettin is beauty-sleep.’ We shook hands again before he left me, and I heard him laugh aloud with pleasure as he went on his way. Up under the roof, in the hot, shadowy corridor, outside Phil’s door … distant traffic and a creaking floorboard making no impression on the silence, residual, anticipatory … dream echoes of childhood evenings, going up to fetch a book, drawn to the open window and the stillness of the elms … or at school, waiting for Johnny, knees under my chin on the sill of a gothic dormer, heart thumping, swallows plunging into the darkening court below … pushing open the rattling, leaded panes at Corpus Christi, the sky precipitating its blues, its darker blues … the surprising, secret moistness of the twilight, sloping down to the Swimming-Pool Library, the faint, midsummer-night illumination of a glowing cigarette … exquisite, ancient singleness in moments just before whispers, the brush of lips and love … I felt it all again, the romance of myself, for three or four seconds squeeze urgently about me, and my mouth went dry. I barely knocked, tapped with the backs of my nails. It seemed like a cowardly knock, hoping not to be heard. If he were awake he might just hear, and I listened for an answering rustle or call. But what I wanted was to come upon him as he was, to stream through the keyhole, to be with him without any prosaic ado. One morning, weeks before, when he was asleep I had pinched his key and had it copied in a heel and key bar at the station. Phil was so orderly and cautious that he always dropped the catch, and I envisaged some picaresque occasion when I might need to get in, some about-turn in a sex comedy that called for a surprise entry.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I could have told him, god knows. It was a dingy, patched-up little place on the edge of town, close to where Matt lived; I passed it every day and never saw a sign of life. Only the most insatiable antiquary could ever have dreamt of going there by choice. I could have impressed him, even gently squashed him with my knowledge, which wasn't even monk-knowledge, just a part of the accusing streetscape of the morning after. But my mouth was as dry as cloth and my features had a rubbery stiffness, as if I had been terribly wounded by an old friend and didn't know what to say. Luc glanced sideways at me, but thought perhaps I was merely angry, and that he was in for a difficult hour. I was on the brink of tears just to be walking beside him in the real world, the two of us in' our black jeans and smart today with light sports-jackets, though his was costly and Scottish whilst mine was American and second-hand. "So whatever did happen to your glasses?" Luc asked with new informality as we sat down in our regular places at the dining-room table. I fingered the cracked bridge and the side-hinges stiffly fixed with tape. I wanted to tell him how when he had finally gone into the house and left nothing but the silvered oblong on the grass where his towel had been spread I had stood up and wandered desolately over the half-seen floor, treading on the spectacles that I had discarded to make love to him and inflicting the damage he could now see. "I fell off my bicycle," I said absurdly: "or more accurately I was knocked off." "I hope you weren't hurt, Edward," he said with eager sympathy, almost more eager than sympathetic, but he was only seventeen and what did he know? "Everybody rides bicycles and I think they can be very dangerous." I shrugged to show that I was fine. "I didn't know you had a bicycle," he said. "It wasn't actually my bicycle," I admitted. "It was a friend's." I could see myself being pressed further and further into deceit rather as a lying quick answer to a barber's question, incuriously followed by a further question, can lead in minutes to a crazy-house of invention and non-sequitur. "I won't be riding it again," I emphasised. "It was a complete write-off." "A write-off. Yes. Anyway, I think of you as a walker," he said. (So he thought of me.) "I have often seen you walking along this street, when I am working in the evening, and it reminds me to work even harder." He had seen me . . . And was there controlled anger in his cool delivery, a new tone in our affairs? I lobbed the blame clumsily back—"You can't have been working very hard if you were looking out of the window"—and heard what a leaden censorious jerk I sounded, and grinned to deflect his hatred.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Charlie let me know that it was what he called "the full scene", and came into my room unnecessarily to extol the virtues of Lisanne's breasts and the miracle of the pill. I didn't care about them, but being made to think of them only worsened my holiday blues, the sense of being sundered from the boys I felt and thought so much about. It was hot and tedious at home; my father was out of sorts and depressed and seemed withdrawn from us in a new and unaccountable way; the few friends who lived in the town had been whizzed off to Skye or Montpellier or Corfu with their families. I went up the hill a lot, semi-spying on sunbathers semi-hidden in the long grass, and thinking of Mawson and Turlough and El-Barrawi transforming whatever holiday thing they were doing just by being their enviable selves. My favourite time was soon after sunset, when I liked to catch the first sight of the evening star, suddenly bright, high in the west above the darkening outlines of the copses. It was a solitary ritual, wound up incoherently with bits of poetry said over and over like spells: sunset and evening star, the star that bids the shepherd fold, her fond yellow hornlight wound to the w e s t . . . It intensified and calmed my yearnings at the same time, like a song. In one poem I'd seen that first star referred to as the folding star, and the words haunted me with their suggestion of an embrace and at the same time a soundless implosion, of something ancient but evanescent; I looked up to it in a mood of desolate solitude burning into cold calm. I lingered, testing out the ache of it: I had to be back before it was truly dark, but in high summer that could be very late. I became a connoisseur of the last lonely gradings of blue into black.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The world that mainly frequents white nightclubs seems af flicted with a strange uncertainty as to whether or not they are really having fun-they keep peeping at each other in order to find out. One's aware, in an eerie way, that there are barriers which must not bc...c � sed, and th - at oy these_�ible barriers everyone is mesmerized. But it is gulieTrnj)ossible to disc()vcr\Vhcre, inaction,-tfi-cse oarriers are to be found: noth ing matches ti1e abandon of-thoscstruggling to be free of ,invisible chains, who wish, at the same time, to remain socially safe. And nothing matches that joylessness, either. In an uptown club, the invisible chains are mighty and the barriers are innumerable. But everyone in the club lives too intimately with impassable barriers of all kinds to need to watch them. They know exactly where the barriers are and COLOR 6 75 they would like, simply, for a little while, to forget them. Again, they are threatened in so many ways that they cannot conceivably be threatened by anything that happens at the club. Violence is always a possibility, of course, but the point is that lt�Sali vays a posSioillty, and one has had to learn to live with it. It is almost impossible to be threatened by social or sexual insult, the very style of Harlem Negroes being a kind of distillation and transcendence of all the insults they daily receive. And t�<:_necessit:y of �p�r�onal s_tvle, no mattg __ __how u�<:!_ting, is too well undergood tor anrom:_m __ be_ mocked for their clothes, or their man!ler-unless of course, either of these is considered too slavish an imitation of white people. � .b r l'Jeg � es in_;bi§_£9_U!1!9'j�) i � a�·� �!!-e ���QJ?!!;., but everything depends on the manner and intention, and the degree of hardheadedness. A girl wearing a mink-or, more probably, a minkette-is ad mired for having achieved it in the first place. One assumes it could not have been easy. But she is pitied and despised-if she supposes her minkette is herpassp_��t out of the black world. Girls who have ceased doing whatever it is that Ai11ericail - Ne gro girls do to their hair and allowed it to resume its natural texture are very strongly admired in some circles, but looked on with some nen•ousness in most. Such a girl is no longer merely colored,.J:>tt�_!�mewher.£. else, and-she poses in her pres ence, by all that triumphantly kinky hair, the great problem o� ]pho the At�erican .ti egn;>_ is, and \_0lat_hj§_fl!_t�� to �- Women are able�-ofcmirse, to say, "Well, I like it on her.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Edie raised an eyebrow and I wondered again, as I had in dense hours of meditating on that picture, just who had taken it and at which of his friends that complex gaze of Luc's had been directed. "That must have been rather difficult." "Terribly easy. I've stolen lots of things. I'm wearing a pair of his pants at the moment, and one of his vests and one of his socks." I stuck out my feet beyond the tablecloth and she looked with concern at my one blue and one green ankle. "The blue one's Luc's." "Darling—I mean . . . You do seem to have gone completement bonkers." I tolerated this remark, I wasn't sure if it contained a hint of congratulation. I drank a cup of coffee in quick insistent sips, and Edie kept looking at the photos. "Are the others any good?" she said. "There are some others I wasn't going to bore you with." "Bore? I love other people's photographs. They're the only ones that aren't disappointing." I gave her the packet. "There are those rather odd ones, where they're acting or something. That one where Patrick has a sheet over his head, and Luc's waving a poker round like a sword. Most peculiar," I said, drily and enviously. Edie frowned over the print. "It isn't that peculiar. They're only larking about. Just because you can only imagine them gazing into each other's eyes and having sex all day long, you seem to have forgotten that they're only kids, who still do childish, rather kooky kind of things, and like dressing up and being silly. You may not have heard about it, it's called fantasy." "You haven't even met them." She held my hand across the table. "You haven't said what you think of Luc." "Well, he's lovely, darling. . . Odd-lovely, wouldn't you say? His upper lip is very large and over-luscious." "When you see the point of him it's the upper lip you love most of all. You go from disliking it to accepting it to . . . adoring it." "The other thing I think", said Edie, "is that he's too young for you." "Well, of course he's too young for me," I said in sudden miserable annoyance. "Still, it happens, it happens."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Not like that," he said. "And not like this." I turned and saw what he meant. "Oh," I mildly protested. And really his invalidish look touched me in a new way. He was pale, sore-eyed, bothered by his cold but perhaps finding something luxurious in his achy passivity, in the enormous woolly, chequered neckscarf and baggy old corduroys he was slumming in; he was more glamorous for looking shitty, like Garbo playing a tramp. His hair was dark and greasy and stood in thick furrows when he ran his hand through it. "Don't come near me," he said humourlessly as he pulled out a chair at the far end of the table from where I had left my music-case. "All right," I agreed with a pained laugh. "So what does your L stand for?" he said, with a nod at the gilt-stamped initials on the black leather. "It's not my L," I said. "It was my father's bag for his music, I think I told you he was a singer. I've just brought it back with me from England." My mother had suggested, with some emotion, that I might like to use it. "Edward Lewis Manners. ELM, a kind of tree we don't have any more in England, thanks to some beetles from Holland." "So you don't have a middle name?" "Yes, I do actually." There was a pause. "Is it a secret?" "Yes. No, don't be silly. It's, it's Tarquin, in fact. I always think it sounds like a horse," I added hysterically. "I'm quite pleased I don't have a middle name," said Luc. Mrs Altidore tumbled in with my coffee and a lemony drink for her son. He hunched over it sniffing, cross and negative. "LA stands for Los Angeles," he said. "It also stands for Library Association." I knew everything it stood for, not all of it repeatable to LA himself. "I'd like to go to Los Angeles." "I don't think you'd like it when you got there," I warned him, "it's extremely violent and the air's poisonous." "It's also a long way away." "I'm not sure that's necessarily in its favour." "Oh, I think it is," he said, nodding and staring past me out of the window. I undid my case in the chilly silence that followed. He'd exposed me to his anger before, and it scared me, mortified me, even though I knew I was not its object, merely the listener who was there when it chanced to be expressed. There was something mad and unsocialised in it. "Let's not talk about the William Wordsworth today," he said, as I opened the book. "Okay." "I'm not ready to talk about it yet." So he hadn't looked at it, I thought. "I'm not quite well, you know, we can just talk." "Okay." Sure, whatever you like. I started looking for an uncontentious subject, as he sniffed the vapour from his mug; but I was clueless with unhappiness. "So you have had to go back to England?"

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "You haven't said what you think of Luc." "Well, he's lovely, darling. . . Odd-lovely, wouldn't you say? His upper lip is very large and over-luscious." "When you see the point of him it's the upper lip you love most of all. You go from disliking it to accepting it to . . . adoring it." "The other thing I think", said Edie, "is that he's too young for you." "Well, of course he's too young for me," I said in sudden miserable annoyance. "Still, it happens, it happens." Edie was a hit in the Cassette and shook hands with people and made funny conversation, much of which was over their heads. She wore black shoes and tights, a thick short bunched red skirt that stuck out, a black leather jacket and her hair pulled up inside her black cap: she looked like an interesting young man during that brief phase when skirts for men were considered a possibility. She wasn't a fag-hag (if anything, she claimed, it was I who was a hag-fag), but an emotional aloofness, the afterspace of several short, obscurely unhappy affairs, made her at home among gay men; they wete abruptly intimate yet made no deep demands on her, and she followed their doings with close attention and a kind of caustic merriment, as at some gratifying old melodrama. She would go into the George IV at lunchtime, but never at night, when she thought the boys should be left to make their own mischief, which she could hear about next day. She was kind, too, when she needed to be: she had looked after friends of ours who were dying. Dawn was one of them. She and Gerard took to each other and had a long lively talk, while I sat it out on a bar-stool and made occasional interjections implying a closer relationship with Gerard than was really the case. I suppose their witty chat, with Edie like a louche minor royal showing a radiant fullness of interest in her interlocutor's stories, stirred some clumsy jealousy—and I remembered Gerard's old ambiguity, the early marriage, and didn't quite trust him. I bought us all another drink and he dropped the subject of Burgundian court music like a flash and said, "How's it going with Matt, then?" "Fine!" I said. Gerard looked around the room and said, "Yes, a lot of people were quite surprised when you went off with him." "Too hot for me, you mean?" "Well . . . And then he's not very interested in the things you like." "I'm sorry", I said, "but we seem to have quite enough in common to be getting on with. Perhaps you believe in the narcissist theory of gay attraction; I've always loved it with people who are different from me." I was sounding cross and turned cosy for a moment. "He's been away for a couple of weeks, should be back tomorrow."

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I wondered why they had been forced up to twenty storeys or so when they could easily have spread across the empty ground which they now overshadowed, where the streets which they replaced must once have run. With surreal bookishness the three towers had been named Casterbridge, Sandbourne and Melchester. To get to Sandbourne I wandered across the worn-out grass on a natural path eroded by feet and children’s bikes. In the odorous stillness of the day I thought of the tracks that threaded Egdon Heath, and of benign, elderly Sandbourne, with its chines and sheltered beach-huts. Away to the left a group of kids were skateboarding up the side of a concrete bunker. I somehow expected them to shout obscenities, and was glad I had come ordinarily dressed, in a sports shirt, an old linen jacket, jeans and daps. The buildings, prefabricated units slotted and pinned together, showed a systematic disregard for comfort and relief, for anything the eye or heart might fix on as homely or decent. Rainwater and the overflow pipes of lavatories had dribbled chalky stains across the blank panels, and above the concrete rims of the windows weeds and grass grew from the slime. The only variation came from the net curtains, some plain, some gathered back, a few fringed and archly raised in the middle like the hoop of a skirt. Behind them lay hundreds of invisible dwellings, very small and stuffy, despite the open windows from which, here and there, the thump and throb of pop music could be heard. I found myself sweating with gratitude that I did not live under such a tyranny, dispossessed in my own home by the insistent beat of rock or reggae. Casterbridge, which I came to first, was connected to Sandbourne by a serviceway with, on one side, a double row of garages with buckled up-and-over doors, and on the other a six-foot wall screening, in various compartments, a generator and a number of institutional dustbins on wheels, large enough to dump a body in. At the end of this alley a group of skinheads were playing around, kicking beercans against the wall and kneeing each other in spasmodic mock-fights. One of them, slobbish, with moronic sideburns, and braces hoisting his jeans up around a fat ass and a fat dick, was very good. I looked at him for only a second; a phrase from the Firbank I had just been reading came back to me: ‘Très gutter, ma’am.’ Perhaps it was he and his friends who had smashed the glass of one of the doors into Sandbourne: it was now blind with hardboard.