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 The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  To the left at the bottom stylised fish shapes, like an emblem of Pisces, could be made out, sliding past each other; and to the right, and above, the upper parts of two figures could be seen, the one in front turning to the one behind with open, choric mouth as they dissolved into the nothingness beyond the broken edge of the pavement. ‘Nobody is quite agreed on what the figures are,’ Charles conceded hospitably. ‘The chappie at the back could be Neptune but he could be the Thames god with an urn or whatever. Then these are little fishes, évidemment ; and here are these young boys going swimming.’ I nodded. ‘Swimming, you think, do you? Isn’t it a bit hard to tell?’ ‘Oh no, swimming. That’s the whole point. This is the floor of a swimming-bath, do you see. There used to be a great baths here, in the very early days. There were springs. The water soaked through the gravel and what-have-you until it hit the London clay and then out it came!’ He seemed delighted at this trick of geology, as if it had operated for his special benefit. ‘And what’s happened to it now?’ ‘Stuck it in a pipe,’ he replied with breezy contempt. ‘Led it away. Buried it. Whatever. This little bit of the baths is all that’s left to show how all those lusty young Romans went leaping about. Imagine all those naked legionaries in here …’ I did not have to look far to do so. The scenes around the walls were as graphic an imagining as Petronius could have come up with. ‘I think your friend has given us his impression,’ I said. ‘Eh? Oh, Henderson’s pictures, yes.’ He laughed hollowly. ‘They’re a trifle embarrassing, I’m afraid—when eggheads come to look at the floor, you know. They think they’re going to get caught up in an orgy.’ We both looked up at the section nearest us, where a gleaming slave was towelling down his master’s buttocks. In front of them two mighty warriors were wrestling, with legs apart, and bull-like genitals swinging between. ‘Quite amusing though, too, n’est-ce pas? ’ He looked down pointedly at my crotch. ‘They used to fairly turn me on. But needless to say it was a long time ago.’ I didn’t want to pursue this vein, and strolled reflectively along to where the two boys ran, as Charles saw it, towards the water. Or perhaps they were already standing in water, lapping round their long-eroded legs. They were intensely poignant. Seen close to, their curves were revealed as pinked, stepped edges, their moving forms made up of tiny, featureless squares. The boy in full-face had his mouth open in pleasure, or as an indication that he was speaking, but it also gave a strong impression of pain. It was at once too crude and too complex to be analysed properly. It reminded me of the face of Eve expelled from Paradise in Masaccio’s fresco.

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

  CHRYSOSTOM. We may remark that this blessing is given not simply, but with great force and emphasis; it is not simply, ‘who have grief,’ but who mourn. And indeed this command is the sum of all philosophy. For if they who mourn for the death of children or kinsfolk, throughout all that season of their sorrow, are touched with no other desires, as of money, or honour, burn not with envy, feel not wrongs, nor are open to any other vicious passion, but are solely given up to their grief; much more ought they, who mourn their own sins in such manner as they ought to mourn for them, to shew this higher philosophy. 5:66. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled. AMBROSE. (ubi sup.) As soon as I have wept for my sins, I begin to hunger and thirst after righteousness. He who is afflicted with any sore disease, hath no hunger. JEROME. It is not enough that we desire righteousness, unless we also suffer hunger for it, by which expression we may understand that we are never righteous enough, but always hunger after works of righteousness. PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. All good which men do not from love of the good itself is unpleasing before God. He hungers after righteousness who desires to walk according to the righteousness of God; he thirsts after righteousness who desires to get the knowledge thereof. CHRYSOSTOM. He may mean either general righteousness, or that particular virtue which is the opposite of covetousness. (ἡ καθόλου ἀρετή.) As He was going on to speak of mercy, He shews beforehand of what kind our mercy should be, that it should not be of the gains of plunder or covetousness, hence He ascribes to righteousness that which is peculiar to avarice, namely, to hunger and thirst. HILARY. The blessedness which He appropriates to those who hunger and thirst after righteousness shews that the deep longing of the saints for the doctrine of God shall receive perfect replenishment in heaven; then they shall be filled. PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. Such is the bounty of a rewarding God, that His gifts are greater than the desires of the saints. AUGUSTINE. (ubi sup.) Or He speaks of food with which they shall be filled at this present; to wit, that food of which the Lord spake, My food is to do the will of my Father, that is, righteousness, and that water of which whoever drinks it shall be in him a well of water springing up to life eternal. CHRYSOSTOM. Or, this is again a promise of a temporal reward; for as covetousness is thought to make many rich, He affirms on the contrary that righteousness rather makes rich, for He who loves righteousness possesses all things in safety. 5:77. Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "I see." "She had always had something of a reputation, though it's not clear to me that Orst ever knew that." "He became her—client, do you call it?" "He saw her one day coming from the market-place. She got on to a tram, and he immediately followed her. The thing was that she looked uncanmly like Jane Byron; rather statuesque, with of course the amazing red hair— orange was his word, I think quite literal." "He surely didn't tell you about all this." "No, no. Mad though he often was he was never indiscreet. But much later on he told his sister, and he started to keep a journal, just under the force of the new emotion, which no one but she and I have ever read." "You are incredibly protective," I said rudely, with a short laugh, in unchecked exasperation; he paled, looked aside as if others might have heard the accusation, but didn't retaliate. In fact, no one seemed to care that we were talking. "Go back to the tram," I said softly. Paul paused a moment longer. "He followed her on the tram, and followed her when she got off. He felt he was seeing an apparition, as if the image he had been painting over and over for the past twenty years had suddenly come to life—come back to life, as it were. He noted which house she turned into, wrote it in his pocketbook, then wandered on bemusedly and got lost. He didn't know this part of town, despite having lived here all his life. He had to get right back to the other side, to the new suburbs where the Villa Hermes so incongruously was. "Like many rather severe people he was actually quite shy. You know he spent the years of the Great War in England"—again, I just smiled and shook my head—"and he had cut himself off so much at the Villa, and in effect denied the present so successfully, that he didn't know how to go about meeting an ordinary girl again." "But he must have been much older," I objected. "Surely too old, too self-conscious, if he didn't know what sort of woman she was, to go chasing after her." " He was in his mid-fifties, that's all." Paul did look rather piqued at this. "Besides he was infatuated, so age was hardly a consideration he would let stand in his way." And he gave me a complex little smile that referred perhaps to me, perhaps to his own past, I couldn't tell. "So he came to the church."

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  But already that purely military project was proving an aid to peace and to development of prosperity in that part of Britain; villages sprang up, and there was a general movement of settlers toward our frontiers. The trench-diggers of the legion were aided in their task by native crews; the building of the wall was for many of these mountain dwellers, so newly subdued, the first irrefutable proof of the protective power of Rome; their pay was the first Roman money to pass through their hands. This rampart became the emblem of my renunciation of the policy of conquest: below the northernmost bastion I ordered the erection of a temple to the god Terminus. Everything enchanted me in that rainy land: the shreds of mist on the hillsides, the lakes consecrated to nymphs wilder than ours, the melancholy, grey-eyed inhabitants. I took as a guide a young tribune of the British auxiliary corps, a fair-haired god who had learned Latin and who spoke some halting Greek; he even attempted timidly to compose love verses in that tongue. One cold autumn night he served as interpreter between me and a Sibyl. We were sitting in the smoky hut of a Celtic woodcutter, warming our legs clad in clumsy, heavy trousers of rough wool, when we saw creeping toward us an ancient creature drenched and disheveled by rain and wind, wild and furtive as any animal of the wood. She fell upon the small oaten loaves which lay baking upon the hearth. My guide coaxed this prophetess, and she consented to examine for me the smoke rings, the sudden sparks, and those fragile structures of embers and ashes. She saw cities a-building, and joyous throngs, but also cities in flames, with bitter lines of captives, who belied my dreams for peace; there was a young and gentle visage which she took for the face of a woman and in which I refused to believe; then a white spectre, which was perhaps only a statue, since that would be an object far stranger than any phantom for this denizen of forest and heath. And vaguely, at a distance of some years, she saw my death, which I could well have predicted without her. There was less need for my presence in prosperous Gaul and wealthy Spain than in Britain. Narbonensian Gaul reminded me of Greece, whose graces had spread that far, the same fine schools of eloquence, the same porticoes under a cloudless sky. I stopped in Nîmes to plan a basilica to be dedicated to Plotina and destined one day to become her temple. Some family ties endeared this city to the empress and so made its clear, sun-warmed landscape the dearer to me. But the revolt in Mauretania was flaming still.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I looked around my untidy bedroom, and was surprised to find I missed the invitation that the Nantwich book had offered for the past few weeks. I had played hard to get without ever envisaging an outcome such as this. ‘I’d love to see you, too. We must all get together. Now that I’m not writing a book I’ll have so much more time.’ Gavin made a miraculous little humming sound, in which sympathy and scepticism were perfectly combined. ‘He must have known gay people—he was a cultured man. What did he think he was playing at?’ ‘Well I’m too young to know. But I suspect it really was a different world—not only the law, of course, but political pressures, and we just don’t know. It’s Uncle Will. Yes, you can. Hold on, Will, I’ve got your nephew here to speak to you. Very important, right … See you soon, my dear!’ There was a plonk and a series of rustlings and a protest of ‘Daddy’ before Rupert came on the line: ‘Hello, this is Rupert,’ in his serious treble. ‘Roops, how nice to hear you. How are things.’ ‘All right, thank you. I’ve got to wait before Daddy goes out of the room.’ This took a while, as apparently he came back for something, and was, as I pictured it, being expelled from his own study and his important work on Romano-British drains. ‘It must be jolly secret,’ I said encouragingly. ‘It’s that boy,’ he hissed. ‘Arthur, you mean? Have you seen him then?’ And looking across the empty bed and out into the hazy sky, chimneypots among still trees, I felt a sudden plunging need for him, a Straussian phrase sweeping from the top to the bottom of the orchestra. ‘Yes, I have. It was in the road, yesterday.’ ‘It was jolly clever of you to spot him.’ ‘Well, I’ve been keeping my eyes peeled for him, you know.’ ‘What a good spy you are. What was he doing, did he recognise you?’ I tried to repress my eagerness and anxiety: to think of him being so close to here … ‘I saw him walking along the road first of all, and I thought it was him, so I followed him.’ ‘Good boy! Now what did he have on?’ ‘Um—trousers. And a shirt.’ ‘Terrific.’ I wanted to know if his tight cords cut into the crack of his bum, if you could make out his nipples through his T-shirt; but I made do with the more general answer. ‘Go on.’ ‘Well, he went along our road, and then turned right, and when I went round the corner he was coming back again. So I went into a house and hid behind the hedge, I was pretending that it was my house, you see. I’m sure he didn’t recognise me. Then he shouted when he was just outside the hedge, and there was another man.’ ‘Did you see him?’

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

  Reply to Objection 3: These six denote the steps whereby we ascend by means of creatures to the contemplation of God. For the first step consists in the mere consideration of sensible objects; the second step consists in going forward from sensible to intelligible objects; the third step is to judge of sensible objects according to intelligible things; the fourth is the absolute consideration of the intelligible objects to which one has attained by means of sensibles; the fifth is the contemplation of those intelligible objects that are unattainable by means of sensibles, but which the reason is able to grasp; the sixth step is the consideration of such intelligible things as the reason can neither discover nor grasp, which pertain to the sublime contemplation of divine truth, wherein contemplation is ultimately perfected. Reply to Objection 4: The ultimate perfection of the human intellect is the divine truth: and other truths perfect the intellect in relation to the divine truth. Whether in the present state of life the contemplative life can reach to the vision of the Divine essence?Objection 1: It would seem that in the present state of life the contemplative life can reach to the vision of the Divine essence. For, as stated in Gn. 32:30, Jacob said: “I have seen God face to face, and my soul has been saved.” Now the vision of God’s face is the vision of the Divine essence. Therefore it would seem that in the present life one may come, by means of contemplation, to see God in His essence. Objection 2: Further, Gregory says (Moral. vi, 37) that “contemplative men withdraw within themselves in order to explore spiritual things, nor do they ever carry with them the shadows of things corporeal, or if these follow them they prudently drive them away: but being desirous of seeing the incomprehensible light, they suppress all the images of their limited comprehension, and through longing to reach what is above them, they overcome that which they are.” Now man is not hindered from seeing the Divine essence, which is the incomprehensible light, save by the necessity of turning to corporeal phantasms. Therefore it would seem that the contemplation of the present life can extend to the vision of the incomprehensible light in its essence. Objection 3: Further, Gregory says (Dial. ii, 35): “All creatures are small to the soul that sees its Creator: wherefore when the man of God,” the blessed Benedict, to wit, “saw a fiery globe in the tower and angels returning to heaven, without doubt he could only see such things by the light of God.” Now the blessed Benedict was still in this life. Therefore the contemplation of the present life can extend to the vision of the essence of God.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  Julia : Does that sound even vaguely familiar to you?” “Gi, maybe this is the place I remember that had the willow tree and all the kids.” “When?” “When you were really little.” “Maybe Cookie and Paul were just deadbeats, and so Julia and Frank took us in—” “Gi, it’s possible that this Accerbi is no relation to Paul.” “But she mentioned Paul . . . and why is she calling herself my aunt?” “We probably just called them aunt and uncle, and that’s how she’s signing her letters. Plenty of our foster parents did that. That is the only logical explanation—Gi, please don’t get your hopes up.” I pause. “She wrote her number in the card. I’m going to call her and go out there.” “How will you get there?” Camille asked. “I’ll rent a car in Manhattan and drive.” Ninety minutes is nothing after waiting thirty-one years for answers. “Then I’ll come to see you afterward and fill you in on what happened. Unless, of course,” I prod gently, “you want to join me?” Camille sighs, considering what to do for my sake, but already I know her decision. She has no desire to revisit our past and has worked hard to create a new existence with Frank and their kids. Once in awhile I can get her to join me on my melancholy drives to Saint James Elementary School, Cordwood Beach, or the Saint James General Store. I try to remember how we frolicked at these places, how they provided our only space to be carefree kids, but Camille remembers what an older sister would: the turbulence, the abuse, the starving, and the heartache. We were a hapless group of savvy street-smart kids trying to build a home out of nothing; and just because I may get some answers about my past doesn’t make Camille excited to go there, too. “You go,” she finally says. “With three kids, I have enough going on. She wrote to you—go see her. Then come here afterward.” “Okay. Love you, sweetie.” “Love you, too, bug.” She pauses. “Regina?” “Yeah?” “Remember what I said: Please be careful.” 12 A Child at Any Age Winter 1998 to 2003 SITTING IN THE parked rental car, I turn up the heat and rest back to absorb the details of the panorama in front of me. The weeping willow in the front yard is the first thing that catches me; its huge, sad branches swaying in the early February chill. My eyes wander to the chain-linked fence encasing the property when a memory comes rushing at me: I’m tiny, standing on the inside of the fence, giggling madly as a boy much bigger stretches his fingers through the metal triangles and tries to tickle my belly. Shifting my gaze to the garden, I fix on a statue of the Virgin Mary sheltered by a ceramic clamshell.

• 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.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Here is what lines the driveway: all the boys who liked you as a girl. Colin, the dentist’s son, who told you in a soft voice that your dress was beautiful. You looked down to confirm for yourself, and then skipped merrily away. (A diva, even then! Your mother told you this story; you were so young you did not remember it on your own.) Seth, who, in sixth grade, bought you the brand-new Animorphs book—the one where Cassie transmogrifies into a butterfly on the cover—and had his mother drive him to your house so he could give it to you. Adam, your beloved friend who worked at the local movie theater and brought home garbage bags of day-old popcorn so you could watch movies your parents would never let you see: Memento and Dancer in the Dark and Pulp Fiction and Mulholland Drive and Y Tu Mamá También. Adam burned you so many CDs. Some of them were too weird for you. There was one band who just destroyed instruments into microphones, and you rolled your eyes and said, “This is stupid.” But then Adam’s mom took both of you to Philadelphia in January to see a Godspeed You! Black Emperor concert. The band started late, and you huddled together in a shared hoodie. The music was byzantine, kaleidoscopic, inexpressibly beautiful. You didn’t know how to even talk about the mix of audio and sound, the way the symphony of it washed over you, vibrated every part of your body. Once, Adam wrote a story about you and later, a song, when you went away to college. You did not know what to do with Adam’s love, the steady and undemanding affection of it. Then, Tracey, who had a twin brother, Timmy. They were Mormon and sweet, and you had a crush on Timmy, but Tracey had a crush on you. You once ordered a free Book of Mormon from the internet and ended up having a two-hour-long conversation with a young guy—he sounded so handsome—who was calling from Salt Lake City to gauge your interest in their religion. You couldn’t say, “I ordered it because I am in love with one half of a set of Mormon twins and the other half has a crush on me.” So instead, you bantered about theology for two hours before you regretfully got off the phone. Anyway, those boys. You were suspicious of their feelings because you had no reason to love yourself—not your body, not your mind. You rejected so much gentleness. What were you looking for?

• From Sin: The Early History of an Idea (2012)

  Ignorance of the Father thus seems not culpable in and of itself, but it does lead to sin. Valentinus, as we have seen, conceives this ignorance not merely on a human scale but also on a cosmic one, thereby catching as well an important dimension of Paul’s message. The word that I left untranslated in italics above, Pleroma, means “fullness” or “the all.” For Valentinus it indicates an immaterial, spiritual region, an invisible heaven above the visible heavens, whose ultimate source is, again, the Father. In this, too, we see the ways that Valentinus narrativizes certain Platonic ideas. In Platonism, the lower, material world—the world where humans dwell—is an inferior image of the spiritual world, an upper immaterial world of ideas, which is its source. What is invisible is real; what is visible (embodied, material) is, by comparison, unreal. To state the same idea differently, for Plato, the One—purely transcendent and immaterial—is superior to and precedes the many (the material world). Gospel of Truth relates these principles through its story. Events or situations in the (spiritual, upper) Pleroma correspond to events or situations in the human world: in both, Error acts; ignorance of the Father, thick as fog, causes fear and anxiety; Christ is crucified by mistake; his eucharistic manifestation conveys redemptive knowledge. Ultimately, both the “aeons” above (those entities/mental states populating the Pleroma) and the human believer below, freed from the disturbances of ignorance, are gathered up into the unity of knowledge, to the One (XXV, 1–XXVIII, 1).17 Who are these aeons? For a fuller answer, we must turn to those fragments from Valentinus and his followers preserved by proto-orthodox heresiologists. According to Irenaeus, the aeons of the Valentinian Pleroma proceeded from the One in linked male-female pairs (“syzygies,” as in the modern Hebrew zug, a “couple”; Greek nouns, like French or German ones, have gender; English does not). Thus depth (Bythos, a masculine noun) linked with Silence (Sige, a feminine noun) together formed the first gendered pair to emanate from the Father. From them in turn another sygygy emanated, Nous and Aletheia (“Mind” and “Truth”), who in turn produced Logos and Zoe (“Life”), and so on: these ideas or entities or mental states give the Pleroma its complex structure (Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 1.1, 1–1.2, 2). The last or youngest of the female aeons produced was Sophia, (“wisdom”). She conceived a passion to know the Father more intimately than she could, and it drove her to wander from her proper place in the Pleroma, seeking him: This passion is said to be the search after the Father, for she wished . . . to comprehend his greatness. Since she was unable to do this, . . . she was in very deep distress, because of the greatness of the depth of the unfathomableness of the Father and because of her love for him.

• From Untrue (2018)

  It all begged a number of questions about our world and the bonobo world, which we might think of as the original hookup culture. If human females lived under these conditions—a world that was female bonded, female affiliative, and female dominant, and where females had the freedom to be blatantly pleasure focused—then sex on college campuses would look very different indeed. It certainly wouldn’t be about women serving men’s needs at the expense of having their own fulfilled, as Peggy Orenstein discusses in her book Girls and Sex. Affirmative consent, analyzed so thoroughly by Vanessa Grigoriadis in Blurred Lines and familiar to millions of teens in the US thanks to a video comparing it to offering someone tea, would not be an issue—men would not dream of assaulting women in a world where sex happens publicly, women are there to watch it all happen, and “Girl Power” is the actual order of things, not some abstract motto about how things might be. More generally, Parish’s work is richly suggestive of other possibilities: What if human sexuality is more like bonobo sexuality than chimp sexuality? Specifically, what if human female sexuality is as much informed by our bonobo sisters as it is by comparatively abject chimp females (who risk violence when they themselves have multiple, rapidly sequential consorts during and also outside of estrus)? What if all our presumptions of alpha males being dominant adventurers in sexual conquest, and women as passive recipients seeking a single dominant male’s attention, come from the long shadow cast by the plough, not from how we evolved? What if women are in fact “wired” at some level to be sexually dominant and promiscuous, and to use sex for pleasure and building social bonds with other women—and it is primarily environment that has resulted in our behaving otherwise? In short, what if bonobo-ness is one of the drivers of women’s deepest longings: the powerful, polymorphous, perverse fantasies on display in Meredith Chivers’s lab; the sexual ennui of the long-partnered, low-desiring women who participate in Marta Meana’s research and the unexpected sexual autonomy of those who told Meana that, hell yes, they’d have sex with themselves; and the wide and unambiguous swerves from the script of sexual reticence and longing for partnered security seen in Alicia Walker’s study participants?

• From The Songs of Bilitis (1894)

  Nymphs of the woods and fountains, sweetest of friends, I am here. Hide not, but come to my aid for I am burdened with many flowers. I would choose, from all the forest, a poor hamadryad with raised arms and in her hair, the color of the leaves, I will place my heaviest rose. See: I have taken so many from the fields that I cannot carry them away unless you help me make a garland. If you refuse, beware: She of you with the orange hair, I saw her yesterday embraced like a beast by the satyr Lamprosathes and I will denounce the shameless one. XI IMPATIENCE I threw myself into her arms and wept and for a long time she felt my hot tears slip over her shoulders; then, when my sorrow let me speak: “Alas, I am only a child; the young men never look at me. When will I have, like thee, a young woman’s breasts to raise my robe and entice kisses? “There are no curious eyes if my tunic slips; no one gathers up the flower that falls from my hair, nor does anyone threaten to kill me if my mouth is given to another.” She replied to me tenderly: “Bilitis, little virgin, thou criest like a cat at the moon and thou art troubled without reason. The girls who are most impatient are not the soonest chosen.” XII COMPARISONS Bergeronnet, bird of Kypris, sing with our first desires! The fresh bodies of young girls bloom with flowers like the earth. The night of all our dreams approaches and we talk of it among ourselves. Sometimes we compare, all together, the differences in our beauties, our hair already long, our young breasts still small, our puberties round like shells and hidden under the nascent down. Yesterday I competed with Melantho, my elder sister. She was proud of her breasts which had grown in a month, and pointing to my straight tunic, she called me “Little Child.” No man could see us, we placed ourselves naked before the girls, and if she vanquished me on one point, I far surpassed her on all others. Bergeronnet, bird of Kypris, sing with our first desires! XIII THE FOREST RIVER I bathed myself, alone, in the forest river. I am sure I frightened the naiads for I divined them moving anxiously far within the dark water. I called them. To resemble them better, I plaited upon my neck irises black as my hair and branches of yellow gilliflowers. Of a long floating grass I made myself a green girdle and, to see it, I pressed up my breasts and inclined my head a little. And I called: “Naiads! naiads! play with me, be kind.” But the naiads are transparent, and perhaps, without knowing, I have caressed their delicate arms. XIV COME, MELISSA

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  We meet the story of Paphnutius and the virgin in the Conferences of John Cassian, a later contemporary of Augustine who did more than anyone to translate the lessons of eastern asceticism into a western tradition of cenobitic monasticism. Although Foucault’s work on ancient Christianity was cut short by his death, it is evident from the published fragments that he intended to treat Cassian’s thought as the quintessence of late antique sexual morality. This would have been both a canny and an idiosyncratic choice. Cassian outlines, with the prescriptive clarity of an institutional founder, the place of sexual austerity within a communal monastic regimen. For Cassian, chastity was one element in a complex of interrelated virtues through which the monk sought extraordinary personal transformation. The pursuit of chastity entailed a demanding regimen to control both “the heat of the body” and the “motion of the soul.” For Cassian, the monk could transcend sexual desire only by reaching a state of exalted love for his own purity; to resist pleasure was mere abstinence, but to rebuild the self as a creature untouched by its temptations was true chastity. Cassian outlined six degrees of chastity through which the monk might, with the infusion of divine grace, seek perfection: first, not to be struck down by carnal sin; second, not to let his mind dilate on thoughts of pleasure; third, not to let the sight of a woman move him to lust; fourth, not to suffer a “little movement of the flesh” while awake; fifth, when some occasion for thought of human generation occurred, such as a suggestive passage of the reading, not to give the “slightest assent” to sensual thoughts; and finally, not to be tormented by seductive visions of women while sleeping. For Cassian, a concern with nocturnal emissions that had quietly percolated in ecclesiastical and monastic circles for centuries suddenly lurches into the foreground, as the supreme test of having transcended physical desire. For Cassian, involuntary discharges were not a matter of purity and pollution, in any physical sense. Rather, they were a sign of the monk’s interior state, a privileged window into the murkiness of the self in an intense system of self-scrutiny.3

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  This first encounter between Nonnos and Pelagia is layered with meaning. As has been noticed, it mimics the scenes of love at first sight between the heroes and heroines of romance. Carnal eros has been displaced by spiritual yearning. Nonnos’s anguish and weeping are drawn directly from the stock of romantic tropes. By the time the Life was written, stylized encounters between holy men and prostitutes had become a regular part of the fictional repertoire. The true holy man—monks like John the Dwarf or Serapion, even rabbis like Hanina and Meir—could stand face-to-face with the prostitute, unfazed by her charm. These scenes assume, and defy, the serious physics of the gaze that are essential to romance. In Leucippe and Clitophon, beauty comes in at the eye; its ray of particulates enters and enervates the soul. An even richer comparandum is the scene in Heliodorus’s Ethiopian Tale in which the priest Kalasiris fled his native town because a courtesan of unparalleled beauty appeared in his city; there was no escape from the “dragnet of erotic charm” that emanated from her eyes. So Kalasiris fled to Greece! Kalasiris, a richly characterized holy man who plays a central role in the narrative, is closer to late antique fiction than to erotic romance, but because The Ethiopian Tale is still a romance, it obeys the erotics of the gaze. Simple indifference or moral superiority to the power of beauty would offend the conventions of the genre, so to preserve his purity Kalasiris must emigrate. The Christian ascetic, by contrast, has attained a spiritual power that transcends the physics of beauty, and the scenes of encounter between holy men and whores dramatize their impassibility.61

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  Every day after work, he walked Daisy to a corner two blocks away from her apartment so he wouldn’t meet her boyfriend, David. There was a drugstore on the corner with colored perfume bottles nesting in fistfuls of crepe paper in the window. The druggist, a middle-aged man with a big stomach and a disappointed face, stood at the door and watched them say good-bye. It was a busy corner; traffic ran savagely in the street, and people stamped by, staring in different directions, clutching their packages, briefcases and huge, screaming radios, their faces concentrated but empty. Daisy was silent and frail as a cattail, her fuzzy black mitten in Joey’s hand, her eyes anxiously scanning the street for David. She would say goodbye to him several times, but he would pull her back by her lapel as she turned to cross the street. After the second time he stopped her, she would sigh and look down, then begin to go through her pockets for scraps of unwanted paper, which she tore into snowflake pieces and scattered like useless messages in the garbage-jammed metal wastebasket under the street lamp, as if, trapped on the corner, she might as well do something useful, like clean her pockets. That day, when he finally let her go, he stood for a moment and watched her pat across the street, through the awful march of people. He walked half a block to a candy store with an orange neon sign, and bought several white bags of jelly beans. Then he caught a cab and rode home like a sultan. He ignored Diane’s bitter stare as he walked through the living room and shut himself up in the bedroom with his jelly beans. He thought of rescuing Daisy. She would be walking across the street, with that airy, unaware look on her face. A car would roar around a garbage-choked corner, she would freeze in its path, her pale face helpless as a crouching rabbit. From out of nowhere he would leap, sweeping her aside with one arm, knocking them both to the sidewalk, to safety, her head cushioned on his arm. Or she would be accosted by a hostile teenager who would grab her coat and push her against a wall. Suddenly he would attack. The punk’s legs would fly crazily as Joey slammed him against a crumbling brick wall. “If you hurt her, I’ll…” He sighed happily and got another pill and a handful of jelly beans. — “My mother couldn’t understand me or do anything for me,” he said. “She thought she was doing the right thing.” “She sounds like a bitch,” said Daisy. “Oh, no. She did what she could, given the circumstances. She at least recognized that I far surpassed her in intelligence.” “Then why did she let her boyfriend beat you up?”

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  We talked about ghosts, about God, about the transmigration of souls, about Hell, about astronomy, about strange birds and fish, about the formation of precious stones, about rubber plantations, about methods of torture, about the Aztecs and the Incas, about marine life, about volcanoes and earthquakes, about burial rites and wedding ceremonies in various parts of the earth, about languages, about the origin of the American Indian, about the buffaloes dying out, about strange diseases, about cannibalism, about wizardry, about trips to the moon and what it was like there, about murderers and highwaymen, about the miracles in the Bible, about the manufacture of pottery, about a thousand and one subjects which were never mentioned at home or in school and which were vital to us because we were starved and the world was full of wonder and mystery and it was only when we stood shivering in the vacant lot that we got to talking seriously and felt a need for communication which was at once pleasurable and terrifying. The wonder and the mystery of life—which is throttled in us as we become responsible members of society! Until we were pushed out to work the world was very small and we were living on the fringe of it, on the frontier, as it were, of the unknown. A small Greek world which was nevertheless deep enough to provide all manner of variation, all manner of adventure and speculation. Not so very small either, since it held in reserve the most boundless potentialities. I have gained nothing by the enlargement of my world; on the contrary, I have lost. I want to become more and more childish and to pass beyond childhood in the opposite direction. I want to go exactly contrary to the normal line of development, pass into a superinfantile realm of being which will be absolutely crazy and chaotic but not crazy and chaotic as the world about me. I have been an adult and a father and a responsible member of society. I have earned my daily bread. I have adapted myself to a world which never was mine. I want to break through this enlarged world and stand again on the frontier of an unknown world which will throw this pale, unilateral world into shadow. I want to pass beyond the responsibility of fatherhood to the irresponsibility of the anarchic man who cannot be coerced nor wheedled nor cajoled nor bribed nor traduced. I want to take as my guide Oberon the nightrider who, under the spread of his black wings, eliminates both the beauty and the horror of the past; I want to flee toward a perpetual dawn with a swiftness and relentlessness that leaves no room for remorse, regret, or repentance. I want to outstrip the inventive man who is a curse to the earth in order to stand once again before an impassable deep which not even the strongest wings will enable me to traverse.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  Every day after work, he walked Daisy to a corner two blocks away from her apartment so he wouldn’t meet her boyfriend, David. There was a drugstore on the corner with colored perfume bottles nesting in fistfuls of crepe paper in the window. The druggist, a middle-aged man with a big stomach and a disappointed face, stood at the door and watched them say good-bye. It was a busy corner; traffic ran savagely in the street, and people stamped by, staring in different directions, clutching their packages, briefcases and huge, screaming radios, their faces concentrated but empty. Daisy was silent and frail as a cattail, her fuzzy black mitten in Joey’s hand, her eyes anxiously scanning the street for David. She would say goodbye to him several times, but he would pull her back by her lapel as she turned to cross the street. After the second time he stopped her, she would sigh and look down, then begin to go through her pockets for scraps of unwanted paper, which she tore into snowflake pieces and scattered like useless messages in the garbage-jammed metal wastebasket under the street lamp, as if, trapped on the corner, she might as well do something useful, like clean her pockets. That day, when he finally let her go, he stood for a moment and watched her pat across the street, through the awful march of people. He walked half a block to a candy store with an orange neon sign, and bought several white bags of jelly beans. Then he caught a cab and rode home like a sultan. He ignored Diane’s bitter stare as he walked through the living room and shut himself up in the bedroom with his jelly beans. He thought of rescuing Daisy. She would be walking across the street, with that airy, unaware look on her face. A car would roar around a garbage-choked corner, she would freeze in its path, her pale face helpless as a crouching rabbit. From out of nowhere he would leap, sweeping her aside with one arm, knocking them both to the sidewalk, to safety, her head cushioned on his arm. Or she would be accosted by a hostile teenager who would grab her coat and push her against a wall. Suddenly he would attack. The punk’s legs would fly crazily as Joey slammed him against a crumbling brick wall. “If you hurt her, I’ll…” He sighed happily and got another pill and a handful of jelly beans. — “My mother couldn’t understand me or do anything for me,” he said. “She thought she was doing the right thing.” “She sounds like a bitch,” said Daisy. “Oh, no. She did what she could, given the circumstances. She at least recognized that I far surpassed her in intelligence.” “Then why did she let her boyfriend beat you up?”

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  She moved about naked with a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth. Her toilet was an affair of great preoccupation; a thousand trifling details had to be attended to before she could so much as don a bathrobe. She was like an athlete preparing for the great event of the day. From the roots of her hair, which she studied with keen attention, to the shape and length of her toe-nails, every part of her anatomy was thoroughly inspected before sitting down to breakfast. Like an athlete I said she was, but in fact she was more like a mechanic overhauling a fast plane for a test flight. Once she slipped on her dress she was launched for the day, for the flight which might end perhaps in Irkutsk or Teheran. She would take on enough fuel at breakfast to last the entire trip. The breakfast was a prolonged affair: it was the one ceremony of the day over which she dawdled and lingered. It was exasperatingly prolonged, indeed. One wondered if she would ever take off, one wondered if she had forgotten the grand mission which she had sworn to accomplish each day. Perhaps she was dreaming of her itinerary, or perhaps she was not dreaming at all but simply allowing time for the functional processes of her marvelous machine so that once embarked there would be no turning back. She was very calm and self-possessed at this hour of the day; she was like a great bird of the air perched on a mountain crag, dreamily surveying the terrain below. It was not from the breakfast table that she would suddenly swoop and dive to pounce upon her prey. No, from the early morning perch she would take off slowly and majestically, synchronizing her every movement with the pulse of the motor. All space lay before her, her direction dictated only by caprice. She was almost the image of freedom, were it not for the Saturnian weight of her body and the abnormal span of her wings. However poised she seemed, especially at the take-off, one sensed the terror which motivated the daily flight. She was at once obedient to her destiny and at the same time frantically eager to overcome it. Each morning she soared aloft from her perch, as from some Himalayan peak; she seemed always to direct her flight toward some uncharted region into which, if all went well, she would disappear forever. Each morning she seemed to carry aloft with her this desperate, last-minute hope; she took leave with calm, grave dignity, like one about to go down into the grave.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  Connie looked at the sadness in her jaw and the tired eyes, and she wanted to put her arms around Alice, to hold her and comfort her. Then either the face or her perception changed, and she was once again looking at a handsome, self-assured, wealthy woman with polite, curious, impenetrable eyes. “You know that we moved, don’t you? We bought a wonderful co-op in Soho. We’ll be having a party sometime soon. I should invite you.” “Oh, Alice!” A man in a paisley jacket with a smile like a bludgeon swooped toward them and took Alice’s elbow. “I must introduce you to Alex here…. Hi,” he said to Connie. “Are you a painter too?” Connie said no, and Alice waved a tiny good-bye with her fingers and went to meet Alex. Connie walked into the next room with her drink and got a hunk of chocolate cake and stood eating it out of one hand, dropping crumbs on the floor. A man asked her if she was a writer and she got involved in drunken conversations with three different people, in which almost nothing was said. The last was interrupted when Franklin appeared, his eyelids thick and purple, and took her by the arm. “Here’s a woman you’ve just got to meet. She’s incredibly intelligent and she’s a writer for The New Yorker. Cathy! Cathy! This is Constance Weymouth, an incredible writer, one of the most brilliant writers I know. You’ve got a lot to talk about.” An attractive gray-haired woman with large blue eyes stood facing her uncertainly but gamely. Connie shook her hand and they traded magazine gossip until it became apparent that while a great friendship could possibly be forged between them, the present situation precluded it. Two more couples shifted and undulated in the corner, and Connie watched them with a mournful and diffuse concentration. Their flat-footed steps were neither graceful nor dynamic, but their goodwill infused their clumsy gestures—the hand outstretched to squeeze a partner’s hand, the sudden eye contact—with a gentle, faded romance that made Connie want to go home and be with Deana. She found Franklin in the middle of two conversations about sculpture and Libya and said good-bye to him quickly. As she was putting on her coat, Alice turned toward her and smiled, holding a finger up in the paisley man’s face. “Are you leaving?” She came hurriedly across the floor. “Do you want to wait a little while? I’m going soon.” Connie felt an eagerness light in her eyes and then fade. She hesitated. “Well, if you’re in a rush, go ahead. But here, let me give you my card.” Alice had her business card ready in her hand. “It’s our new phone number. Why don’t you call?” They said it was good seeing each other, made more stunted hugging gestures and settled for hand squeezes.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I am the intruder, the goy who has come down into the neighborhood to pick off a nice ripe cunt. She on the other hand seems to be proud of her conquest; she’s showing me off to her friends. This is what I picked up in the train; an educated goy, a refined goy! I can almost hear her think it. Walking slowly I’m getting the lay of the land, all the practical details which will decide whether I call for her after dinner or not. There’s no thought of asking her to dinner. It’s a question of what time and where to meet and how will we go about it, because, as she lets drop just before we reach the door, she’s got a husband who s a traveling salesman and she’s got to be careful. I agree to come back and to meet her at the corner in front of the candy store at a certain hour. If I want to bring a friend along she’ll bring her girl friend. No, I decide to see her alone. It’s agreed. She squeezes my hand and darts off into a dirty hallway. I beat it quickly back to the elevated station and hasten home to gulp down the meal. It’s a summer’s night and everything flung wide open. Riding back to meet her the whole past rushes up kaleidoscopically. This time I’ve left the book at home. It’s cunt I’m out for now and no thought of the book is in my head. I am back again this side of the boundary line, each station whizzing past making my world grow more diminutive. I am almost a child by the time I reach the destination. I am a child who is horrified by the metamorphosis which has taken place. What has happened to me, a man of the Fourteenth Ward, to be jumping off at this station in search of a Jewish cunt? Supposing I do give her a fuck, what then? What have I got to say to a girl like that? What’s a fuck when what I want is love? Yes, suddenly it comes over me like a tornado. . . . Una, the girl I loved, the girl who lived here in this neighborhood, Una with big blue eyes and flaxen hair, Una who made me tremble just to look at her, Una whom I was afraid to kiss or even to touch her hand. Where is Una? Yes, suddenly, that’s the burning question: where is Una? In two seconds I am completely unnerved, completely lost, desolate, in the most horrible anguish and despair. How did I ever let her go? Why? What happened?