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 Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  It was a street of theaters and I used to sit there for hours at a time dreaming the most violent dreams. The whole theatrical life of New York was concentrated in that one street, so it seemed. It was Broadway, it was success, fame, glitter, paint, the asbestos curtain and the hole in the curtain. Sitting on the steps of the theater I used to stare at the dance hall opposite, at the string of red lanterns which even in the summer afternoons were lit up. In every window there was a spinning ventilator which seemed to waft the music into the street, where it was broken by the jangled din of traffic. Opposite the other side of the dance hall was a comfort station and here too I used to sit now and then, hoping either to make a woman or make a touch. Above the comfort station, on the street level, was a kiosk with foreign papers and magazines; the very sight of these papers, of the strange languages in which they were printed, was sufficient to dislocate me for the day. Without the slightest premeditation I climbed the stairs to the dance hall, went directly to the little window of the booth where Nick, the Greek, sat with a roll of tickets in front of him. Like the urinal below and the steps of the theater, this hand of the Greek now seems to me a separate and detached thing—the enormous hairy hand of an ogre borrowed from some horrible Scandinavian fairy tale. It was the hand which spoke to me always, the hand which said “Miss Mara will not be here tonight,” or “Yes, Miss Mara is coming late tonight.” It was this hand which I dreamt of as a child when I slept in the bedroom with the barred window. In my fevered sleep suddenly this window would light up, to reveal the ogre clutching at the bars. Night after night the the hairy monster visited me, clutching at the bars and gnashing its teeth. I would awake in a cold sweat, the house dark, the room absolutely silent. Standing at the edge of the dance floor I notice her coming toward me; she is coming with sails spread, the large full face beautifully balanced on the long, columnar neck. I see a woman perhaps eighteen, perhaps thirty, with blue-black hair and a large white face, a full white face in which the eyes shine brilliantly. She has on a tailored blue suit of duveteen. I remember distinctly now the fullness of her body, and that her hair was fine and straight, parted on the side, like a man’s. I remember the smile she gave me—knowing, mysterious, fugitive —a smile that sprang up suddenly, like a puff of wind. The whole being was concentrated in the face.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  It was a street of theaters and I used to sit there for hours at a time dreaming the most violent dreams. The whole theatrical life of New York was concentrated in that one street, so it seemed. It was Broadway, it was success, fame, glitter, paint, the asbestos curtain and the hole in the curtain. Sitting on the steps of the theater I used to stare at the dance hall opposite, at the string of red lanterns which even in the summer afternoons were lit up. In every window there was a spinning ventilator which seemed to waft the music into the street, where it was broken by the jangled din of traffic. Opposite the other side of the dance hall was a comfort station and here too I used to sit now and then, hoping either to make a woman or make a touch. Above the comfort station, on the street level, was a kiosk with foreign papers and magazines; the very sight of these papers, of the strange languages in which they were printed, was sufficient to dislocate me for the day. Without the slightest premeditation I climbed the stairs to the dance hall, went directly to the little window of the booth where Nick, the Greek, sat with a roll of tickets in front of him. Like the urinal below and the steps of the theater, this hand of the Greek now seems to me a separate and detached thing—the enormous hairy hand of an ogre borrowed from some horrible Scandinavian fairy tale. It was the hand which spoke to me always, the hand which said “Miss Mara will not be here tonight,” or “Yes, Miss Mara is coming late tonight.” It was this hand which I dreamt of as a child when I slept in the bedroom with the barred window. In my fevered sleep suddenly this window would light up, to reveal the ogre clutching at the bars. Night after night the the hairy monster visited me, clutching at the bars and gnashing its teeth. I would awake in a cold sweat, the house dark, the room absolutely silent. Standing at the edge of the dance floor I notice her coming toward me; she is coming with sails spread, the large full face beautifully balanced on the long, columnar neck. I see a woman perhaps eighteen, perhaps thirty, with blue-black hair and a large white face, a full white face in which the eyes shine brilliantly. She has on a tailored blue suit of duveteen. I remember distinctly now the fullness of her body, and that her hair was fine and straight, parted on the side, like a man’s. I remember the smile she gave me—knowing, mysterious, fugitive—a smile that sprang up suddenly, like a puff of wind. The whole being was concentrated in the face.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I wanted to hear it all over again, in minute detail. Nothing that I had read about Europe seemed to match this glowing account from my friend’s own lips. It seemed all the more miraculous to me in that we had sprung out of the same environment. He had managed it because he had rich friends—and because he knew how to save his money. I had never known any one who was rich, who had traveled, who had money in the bank. All my friends were like myself, drifting from day to day, and never a thought for the future. O’Mara, yes, he had traveled a bit, almost all over the world—but as a bum, or else in the army, which was even worse than being a bum. My friend Ulric was the first fellow I had ever met who I could truly say had traveled. And he knew how to talk about his experiences. As a result of that chance encounter on the street we met frequently thereafter, for a period of several months. He used to call for me in the evening after dinner and we would stroll through the park which was nearby. What a thirst I had! Every slightest detail about the other world fascinated me. Even now, years and years since, even now, when I know Paris like a book, his picture of Paris is still before my eyes, still vivid, still real. Sometimes, after a rain, riding swiftly through the city in a taxi, I catch fleeting glimpses of this Paris he described; just momentary snatches, as in passing the Tuileries, perhaps, or a glimpse of Montmartre, of the Sacré Cœur, through the Rue Laffitte, in the last flush of twilight. Just a Brooklyn boy! That was an expression he used sometimes when he felt ashamed of his inability to express himself more adequately. And I was just a Brooklyn boy, too, which is to say one of the last and the least of men. But as I wander about, rubbing elbows with the world, seldom it happens that I meet any one who can describe so lovingly and faithfully what he has seen and felt. Those nights in Prospect Park with my old friend Ulric are responsible, more than anything else, for my being here today. Most of the places he described for me I have still to see; some of them I shall perhaps never see. But they live inside me, warm and vivid, just as he created them in our rambles through the park. Interwoven with this talk of the other world was the whole body and texture of Lawrence’s work. Often, when the park had long been emptied, we were still sitting on a bench discussing the nature of Lawrence’s ideas. Looking back on these discussions now I can see how confused I was, how pitifully ignorant of the true meaning of Lawrence’s words. Had I really understood, my life could never have taken the course it did.

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

  I answer that, We must assert that the intellectual principle which we call the human soul is incorruptible. For a thing may be corrupted in two ways—“per se,” and accidentally. Now it is impossible for any substance to be generated or corrupted accidentally, that is, by the generation or corruption of something else. For generation and corruption belong to a thing, just as existence belongs to it, which is acquired by generation and lost by corruption. Therefore, whatever has existence “per se” cannot be generated or corrupted except ‘per se’; while things which do not subsist, such as accidents and material forms, acquire existence or lost it through the generation or corruption of composite things. Now it was shown above ([602]AA[2],3) that the souls of brutes are not self-subsistent, whereas the human soul is; so that the souls of brutes are corrupted, when their bodies are corrupted; while the human soul could not be corrupted unless it were corrupted “per se.” This, indeed, is impossible, not only as regards the human soul, but also as regards anything subsistent that is a form alone. For it is clear that what belongs to a thing by virtue of itself is inseparable from it; but existence belongs to a form, which is an act, by virtue of itself. Wherefore matter acquires actual existence as it acquires the form; while it is corrupted so far as the form is separated from it. But it is impossible for a form to be separated from itself; and therefore it is impossible for a subsistent form to cease to exist. Granted even that the soul is composed of matter and form, as some pretend, we should nevertheless have to maintain that it is incorruptible. For corruption is found only where there is contrariety; since generation and corruption are from contraries and into contraries. Wherefore the heavenly bodies, since they have no matter subject to contrariety, are incorruptible. Now there can be no contrariety in the intellectual soul; for it receives according to the manner of its existence, and those things which it receives are without contrariety; for the notions even of contraries are not themselves contrary, since contraries belong to the same knowledge. Therefore it is impossible for the intellectual soul to be corruptible. Moreover we may take a sign of this from the fact that everything naturally aspires to existence after its own manner. Now, in things that have knowledge, desire ensues upon knowledge. The senses indeed do not know existence, except under the conditions of “here” and “now,” whereas the intellect apprehends existence absolutely, and for all time; so that everything that has an intellect naturally desires always to exist. But a natural desire cannot be in vain. Therefore every intellectual substance is incorruptible.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I remember it because it seemed utterly incongruous to be listening to a man talking about Mt. Aetna and Vesuvius and Capri and Pompeii and Morocco and Paris on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 49th Street, Manhattan. I remember the way he looked about as he talked, like a man who hadn’t quite realized what he was in for but who vaguely sensed that he had made a horrible mistake in returning. His eyes seemed to be saying all the time—this has no value, no value whatever. He didn’t say that, however, but just this over and over: “I’m sure you’d like it! I’m sure it’s just the place for you.” When he left me I was in a daze. I couldn’t get hold of him again quickly enough. I wanted to hear it all over again, in minute detail. Nothing that I had read about Europe seemed to match this glowing account from my friend’s own lips. It seemed all the more miraculous to me in that we had sprung out of the same environment. He had managed it because he had rich friends—and because he knew how to save his money. I had never known any one who was rich, who had traveled, who had money in the bank. All my friends were like myself, drifting from day to day, and never a thought for the future. O’Mara, yes, he had traveled a bit, almost all over the world—but as a bum, or else in the army, which was even worse than being a bum. My friend Ulric was the first fellow I had ever met who I could truly say had traveled. And he knew how to talk about his experiences. As a result of that chance encounter on the street we met frequently thereafter, for a period of several months. He used to call for me in the evening after dinner and we would stroll through the park which was nearby. What a thirst I had! Every slightest detail about the other world fascinated me. Even now, years and years since, even now, when I know Paris like a book, his picture of Paris is still before my eyes, still vivid, still real. Sometimes, after a rain, riding swiftly through the city in a taxi, I catch fleeting glimpses of this Paris he described; just momentary snatches, as in passing the Tuileries, perhaps, or a glimpse of Montmartre, of the Sacré Cœur, through the Rue Laffitte, in the last flush of twilight. Just a Brooklyn boy!

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  In my experience, many people eventually walk away from cults, even those who have spent their entire lives inside one. They crave the freedom to be themselves. Chapter 2–My Life in the Unification Church As a child, I had always been very independent. I wanted to be a writer and poet, but during my college years I struggled to find a career path in which I could make enough money to pursue my dreams. When my girlfriend dumped me in January 1974, I wondered if I would ever find true love. I had always been an avid reader; during that time I began to read a great deal of psychology and philosophy. My neighbor next door, a mathematician, introduced me to the writings of G. I. Gurdjieff and P. D. Ouspensky. I became interested in what was presented as ancient, esoteric knowledge. Much of what I read described humanity’s natural condition as being “asleep” to the truth and in need of someone more spiritually advanced to teach us about higher levels of consciousness. The suggestion that one should join a spiritual school was embedded in those books. At age 19, I knew I was never going to be happy as a businessman, like my father, living my life to pursue money. I wanted to be a creative writer. I wanted answers to the deeper questions. Is there a God? If so, why is there so much suffering? What role was I to play in the world? Could I do anything to make a difference? I felt extreme internal pressure to make a big contribution to humankind. I had been told all my life how intelligent I was and how much I would accomplish when I grew up. But I was going to graduate in another year and I felt like time was running out. I had already become a “foster parent” of a little girl in Chile to whom I sent money each month. I had decided that writing was probably my most important pursuit, and so I wrote. Still I felt it wasn’t enough. I looked out at the world and saw so much in the way of social injustice, political corruption, and ecological destruction that it seemed I could do very little. I knew that I wanted to help change things, but I didn’t know how to go about doing it. One day, as I was reading a book in the student union cafeteria, three attractive Japanese women and an Italian-American man approached me. They were dressed like students and carried college textbooks. They asked if they could share the table. I nodded, and within minutes, they engaged me in a friendly conversation. I thought the women were pretty cute. Since I had a three-hour break between classes, I stayed and talked. They told me they were students too, involved in a small community of “young people from all over the world.” They invited me to visit them.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  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. Even if I must become a wild and natural park inhabited only by idle dreamers I must not stop to rest here in the ordered fatuity of responsible, adult life. I must do this in remembrance of a life beyond all comparison with the life which was promised me, in remembrance of the life of a child who was strangled and stifled by the mutual consent of those who had surrendered. Everything which the fathers and the mothers created I disown. I am going back to a world even smaller than the old Hellenic world, going back to a world which I can always touch with outstretched arms, the world of what I know and see and recognize from moment to moment. Any other world is meaningless to me, and alien and hostile. In retraversing the first bright world which I knew as a child I wish not to rest there but to muscle back to a still brighter world from which I must have escaped. What this world is like I do not know, nor am I even sure that I will find it, but it is my world and nothing else intrigues me. The first glimpse, the first realization, of the bright new world came through my meeting Roy Hamilton. I was in my twenty-first year, probably the worst year of my whole life. I was in such a state of despair that I had decided to leave home. I thought and spoke only of California where I had planned to go to start a new life. So violently did I dream of this new promised land that later, when I had returned from California, I scarcely remembered the California I had seen but thought and spoke only of the California which I had known in my dreams. It was just prior to my leave-taking that I met Hamilton. He was a dubious half brother to my old friend MacGregor; they had only recently made each other’s acquaintance, as Roy, who had lived most of his life in California, had been under the impression all along that his real father was Mr. Hamilton and not Mr. MacGregor.

• 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?

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Whether I die today or tomorrow is of no importance to me, never has been, but that today even, after years of effort, I cannot say what I think and feel—that bothers me, that rankles. From childhood on I can see myself on the track of this specter, enjoying nothing, desiring nothing but this power, this ability. Everything else is a lie—everything I ever did or said which did not bear upon this. And that is pretty much the greater part of my life. I was a contradiction in essence, as they say. People took me to be serious and high-minded, or to be gay and reckless, or to be sincere and earnest, or to be negligent and carefree. I was all these things at once—and beyond that I was something else, something which no one suspected, least of all myself. As a boy of six or seven I used to sit at my grandfather’s workbench and read to him while he sewed. I remember him vividly in those moments when, pressing the hot iron against the seam of a coat, he would stand with one hand over the other and look out of the window dreamily. I remember the expression on his face, as he stood there dreaming, better than the contents of the books I read, better than the conversations we had or the games which I played in the street. I used to wonder what he was dreaming of, what it was that drew him out of himself. I hadn’t learned yet how to dream wide-awake. I was always lucid, in the moment, and all of a piece. His daydreaming fascinated me. I knew that he had no connection with what he was doing, not the least thought for any of us, that he was alone and being alone he was free. I was never alone, least of all when I was by myself. Always, it seems to me, I was accompanied: I was like a little crumb of a big cheese, which was the world, I suppose, though I never stopped to think about it. But I know I never existed separately, never thought myself the big cheese, as it were. So that even when I had reason to be miserable, to complain, to weep, I had the illusion of participating in a common, a universal misery. When I wept the whole world was weeping—so I imagined. I wept very seldom. Mostly I was happy, I was laughing, I was having a good time. I had a good time because, as I said before, I really didn’t give a fuck about anything. If things were wrong with me they were wrong everywhere, I was convinced of it. And things were wrong usually only when one cared too much. That impressed itself on me very early in life. For example, I remember the case of my young friend Jack Lawson. For a whole year he lay in bed, suffering the worst agonies.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I kept my mouth shut. Jan slumped. “Tf I tell you why she broke up with me, you promise me you'll never tell another soul?” I thought about it before I answered her. “You can trust me,” I said. “You took long enough to answer,” she said, warily. “First I had to make sure I meant it.” Jan’s voice grew hoarse. “I just couldn’t let her touch me. We never talked about it. I don’t even know 100 = Leslie Feinberg how to talk about it. At first it was OK with her, she understood. But later she told me she prided herself on always having been able to seduce her stone lovers. That scared the shit out of me, you know?” I was thinking how nice that would be to have a femme lover who cared enough to try. “Anyway,” Jan said, “I couldn’t, and she finally left me. After all these years. Can you believe that?” She laughed ironically. “The only woman I ever loved so goddamn much it makes my teeth ache and she left me.” Jan gripped my arm. “I'd do anything to get her back.” She had tears in her eyes as she spoke. “Td get down on my goddamn knees in front of the whole bar. I’d do anything, I just can’t change the way I am. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I just can’t, you know?” I did. I leaned forward and put my arm around her. She leaned her head against my shoulder. If Jan hadn’t been drunk she might have been embarrassed. Deep down, my insides seethed. I knew I was stone, too. It was a home alarm system that didn’t seem to have an on-off switch. Once installed, the sirens went off and the gates shut, even if the intruder was loving. Would I finally find a woman who loved me and lose her because of that? If that was true, life seemed too hard to bear. I obsessed about one thing Jan had told me: Edna prided herself on being able to seduce her stone butch lovers. I wondered how she did it. I wondered how it would feel to be touched and not be afraid. I thought about Edna a lot. I hung out at Abba’s almost every evening while I recuperated on compensation. Jan stopped going to the bar, afraid to run into Edna. Edna came to the bar on Saturdays. I looked forward to that night all week long. When she walked through the door that Saturday night, she was all I could see. Everyone else was in black and white; only Edna was in full, living color. She headed right toward me. I got off the bar stool as she approached. Edna reached down for my injured hand. She lightly supported the metal contraption and looked up at my face.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  A cruise ship passed; laughter from the people on deck floated across the water. I sat, facing New Jersey, with Frankie’s hands on my shoulders. “Are you still with Johnny?” I felt her body sink against mine. “It’s hard for two butches, Jess. It’s very hard.” I sighed and nodded. “Hey, Frankie. When two butches are together—like lovers I mean—do they talk about their feelings?” “Feelings?” Frankie asked. “What are those?” We both chuckled, warm and relaxed. We laughed harder and harder, until tears streamed down our cheeks. For the first time since she touched me, I relaxed my body against Frankie’s. I allowed myself to enjoy the strength of her arms around me. “You know, Frankie,” I whispered. “There’s things that happened to me because I’m a he-she that I’ve never talked about to a femme. I’ve never had the words.” Frankie nodded. “You don’t need words with me, Jess. I know.” I shook my head. “I do need words, Frankie. Sometimes I feel like ’m choking to death on what I’m feeling. I need to talk and I don’t even know how. Femmes always tried to teach me to talk about my feelings, but it was their words they used for their feelings. I needed my own words—butch words to talk about butch feelings.” Frankie pulled me tighter. Tears welled up in my eyes. “T feel like I’m clogged up with all this toxic goo, Frankie. But I can’t hear my own voice say the words out loud. Pve got no language.” Frankie opened her arms wider, took more of me in. I leaned my face against her arm. She offered me refuge, the way I held Butch Al years ago in a jail cell. “Frankie, ve got no words for feelings that are tearing me apart. What would our words sound like?” I looked up at the sky. “Like thunder, maybe.” Frankie pressed her lips against my hair. “Yeah, like thunder. And yearning.” I smiled and kissed the hard muscle of her biceps. “Yearning,” I repeated softly. “What a beautiful word to hear a butch say out loud.” Stone Butch Blues 301 “YOU MAKE YOUR OWN TRIP to Buffalo, and Tl make my own trip home,” Ruth insisted. “But why?” I couldn’t understand why she refused Esperanza’s offer to lend us her car. “You said you haven’t been home since your grandma died. You’ve been saying you should visit. I could see where you're from. I want to see the lake and the hills and the vineyards you talk so much about.” Ruth sighed. “To you it’s pretty. But I escaped to save my life. It’s not easy for me to go back there. I want to do it alone.” I shook my head. “Tl just drop you off and get back on the Thruway to Buffalo. Where we’te going is only two hours apart, and I can’t drive without a license. We could pass as a nice married couple.”

• From Best Erotic Romance

  Justin’s tongue would probe her mouth, his hands would caress her tender breasts, his manhood would sink inside her most intimate flesh for the very first time all in the same hour. How intense was that? Instead of dragging her off to a tapas bar and a dance club, her dearest girlfriends would attend her in her bridal chamber. They would guide her to the canopied bed, brush her long hair over her shoulders, tuck a fresh rosebud in the neckline of her flowing white nightgown for Justin to remove—literally, deflower—when he claimed his husbandly prerogative. In those days, a man owned his wife’s body as completely as he owned land or horses. Sophie wondered what she would have felt when Justin, her first and only lover, explored all the treasures of his new possession, brushing her sensitive nipples with his fingers, slipping his hand between her nether lips. Would her new husband be gentle or strangely transformed by lust? Would she weep from the total surrender of her heart, her body, her name? Would she cry out when he mounted her, wincing from the pain that was a woman’s duty and yet a secret pleasure as well? Sophie sighed. Justin had been her eighth lover, although he’d been her first for a few of the more esoteric sexual practices most fairly adventurous couples enjoyed on occasion: back-door sex, light bondage, the occasional pearl necklace. Yet the timeless experience she longed for—a first night of profound erotic transformation in the arms of the man she loved deeply—was a pleasure she could never know. “Hey.” Startled from her Victorian era reverie, she looked up to meet her fiancé’s twinkling blue eyes. “Good morning, Mr. Phillips. You look happy.” “I am. Today’s the happiest day of my life.” “Why?” Sophie asked. Still half-lost in her musings, she was genuinely surprised by his answer. “Silly. Because I’m marrying the most wonderful, beautiful woman in the whole world.” Oh, right, speaking of our wedding... “Aunt Sophie!” Elena’s four-year-old daughter, Madison, burst into the room and rushed over to the bed. “You’re getting married today.” “We are. And you’re going to be the best flower girl ever,” Justin said in the perfect avuncular tone, warm but not condescending. He’d be a great father, Sophie thought with a pang of regret. “My dress is so pretty. I can’t wait to see yours.” The little girl was starting to crawl in bed with them when Elena appeared and led her daughter back toward the guest room. She gave Sophie a sly look. “I hope she didn’t disturb you. By the way, Mom and Dad said they’d come over from the hotel by eight. The appointment with the hairdresser is at nine, right?” “Yeah,” Sophie said weakly, that now-familiar dread closing around her ribcage like a corset.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  I asked you to help me to have my kid. I just want the sperm from you.” “I’m Catholic,” he said. “We don’t do such things.” “You do know,” she replied, “that I could sleep with you and go away and you would never know if you had a child or not. But I don’t want that. Honor me with your yes so that I can live peacefully. I want a child of my own, and I want it from you. You will be able to see it as much as you like, but you will have no obligations. You don’t have to talk to it. You don’t have to pay for it. Just make this child for me.” For my mother’s part, the fact that this man didn’t particularly want a family with her, was prevented by law from having a family with her, was part of the attraction. She wanted a child, not a man stepping in to run her life. For my father’s part, I know that for a long time he kept saying no. Eventually he said yes. Why he said yes is a question I will never have the answer to. Nine months after that yes, on February 20, 1984, my mother checked into Hillbrow Hospital for a scheduled C-section delivery. Estranged from her family, pregnant by a man she could not be seen with in public, she was alone. The doctors took her up to the delivery room, cut open her belly, and reached in and pulled out a half-white, half-black child who violated any number of laws, statutes, and regulations—I was born a crime. — When the doctors pulled me out there was an awkward moment where they said, “Huh. That’s a very light-skinned baby.” A quick scan of the delivery room revealed no man standing around to take credit. “Who is the father?” they asked. “His father is from Swaziland,” my mother said, referring to the tiny, landlocked kingdom in the west of South Africa. They probably knew she was lying, but they accepted it because they needed an explanation. Under apartheid, the government labeled everything on your birth certificate: race, tribe, nationality. Everything had to be categorized. My mother lied and said I was born in KaNgwane, the semi-sovereign homeland for Swazi people living in South Africa. So my birth certificate doesn’t say that I’m Xhosa, which technically I am. And it doesn’t say that I’m Swiss, which the government wouldn’t allow. It just says that I’m from another country. My father isn’t on my birth certificate. Officially, he’s never been my father.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  ahead, repress their natural empathy. Girls have to sacrifice their assertive sides. They are supposed to be nice, smiling, deferential, always considering other people’s feelings before their own. A woman can be a boss, but she must be tender and pliant, never too aggressive. In this process, we become less and less dimensional; we conform to the expected roles of our culture and time period. We lose valuable and rich parts to our character. Sometimes we can realize this only when we encounter those who are less repressed and we feel fascination with them. Certainly Caterina Sforza had such an effect. There are also many male counterparts to this in history—the nineteenth-century British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, Duke Ellington, John F. Kennedy, David Bowie, all men who displayed an unmistakable feminine undertone and intrigued people all the more for this. Your task is to let go of the rigidity that takes hold of you as you overidentify with the expected gender role. Power lies in exploring that middle range between the masculine and the feminine, in playing against people’s expectations. Return to the harder or softer sides of your character that you have lost or repressed. In relating to people, expand your repertoire by developing greater empathy, or by learning to be less deferential. When confronting a problem or resistance from others, train yourself to respond in different ways— attacking when you normally defend, or vice versa. In your thinking, learn to blend the analytical with the intuitive in order to become more creative (see the final section of this chapter for more on this). Do not be afraid to bring out the more sensitive or ambitious sides to your character. These repressed parts of you are yearning to be let out. In the theater of life, expand the roles that you play. Don’t worry about people’s reactions to any changes in you they sense. You are not so easy to categorize, which will fascinate them and give you the power to play with their perceptions of you, altering them at will. It is the terrible deception of love that it begins by engaging us in play not with a woman of the external world but with a dol fashioned in our brain—the only woman moreover that we have always at our disposal, the only one we shal ever possess. —Marcel Proust Keys to Human Nature We humans like to believe that we are consistent and mature, and that we have reasonable control over our lives. We make decisions based on rational considerations, on what will benefit us the most. We have free will. We know who we are, more or less. But in one particular aspect of life these self-opinions are all easily shattered— when we fall in love. When in love, we become prey to emotions we cannot control. We make choices of partners we cannot rationally explain, and often these choices end up being unfortunate. Many of us will have at

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  I asked. At that point I hadn’t seen him in over ten years and didn’t think I’d ever see him again. “Because he’s a piece of you,” she said, “and if you don’t find him you won’t find yourself.” “I don’t need him for that,” I said. “I know who I am.” “It’s not about knowing who you are. It’s about him knowing who you are, and you knowing who he is. Too many men grow up without their fathers, so they spend their lives with a false impression of who their father is and what a father should be. You need to find your father. You need to show him what you’ve become. You need to finish that story.” ROBERT My father is a complete mystery. There are so many questions about his life that I still cannot even begin to answer. Where’d he grow up? Somewhere in Switzerland. Where’d he go to university? I don’t know if he did. How’d he end up in South Africa? I haven’t a clue. I’ve never met my Swiss grandparents. I don’t know their names or anything about them. I do know my dad has an older sister, but I’ve never met her, either. I know that he worked as a chef in Montreal and New York for a while before moving to South Africa in the late 1970s. I know that he worked for an industrial food-service company and that he opened a couple of bars and restaurants here and there. That’s about it. I never called my dad “Dad.” I never addressed him “Daddy” or “Father,” either. I couldn’t. I was instructed not to. If we were out in public or anywhere people might overhear us and I called him “Dad,” someone might have asked questions or called the police. So for as long as I can remember I always called him Robert. While I know nothing of my dad’s life before me, thanks to my mom and just from the time I have been able to spend with him, I do have a sense of who he is as a person. He’s very Swiss, clean and particular and precise. He’s the only person I know who checks into a hotel room and leaves it cleaner than when he arrived. He doesn’t like anyone waiting on him. No servants, no housekeepers. He cleans up after himself. He likes his space. He lives in his own world and does his own everything. I know that he never married. He used to say that most people marry because they want to control another person, and he never wanted to be controlled. I know that he loves traveling, loves entertaining, having people over. But at the same time his privacy is everything to him. Wherever he lives he’s never listed in the phone book.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  I stayed busy living my life, surviving high school, surviving my early twenties, becoming a comedian. My career took off quickly. I got a radio DJ gig and hosted a kids’ adventure reality show on television. I was headlining at clubs all over the country. But even as my life was moving forward, the questions about my dad were always there in the back of my mind, bubbling up to the surface now and then. “I wonder where he is. Does he think about me? Does he know what I’m doing? Is he proud of me?” When a parent is absent, you’re left in the lurch of not knowing, and it’s so easy to fill that space with negative thoughts. “They don’t care.” “They’re selfish.” My one saving grace was that my mom never spoke ill of him. She would always compliment him. “You’re good with your money. You get that from your dad.” “You have your dad’s smile.” “You’re clean and tidy like your father.” I never turned to bitterness, because she made sure I knew his absence was because of circumstance and not a lack of love. She always told me the story of her coming home from the hospital and my dad saying, “Where’s my kid? I want that kid in my life.” She’d say to me, “Don’t ever forget: He chose you.” And, ultimately, when I turned twenty-four, it was my mom who made me track him down. Because my father is so private, finding him was hard work. We didn’t have an address. He wasn’t in the phone book. I started by reaching out to some of his old connections, German expats in Johannesburg, a woman who used to date one of his friends who knew somebody who knew the last place he stayed. I got nowhere. Finally my mom suggested the Swiss embassy. “They have to know where he is,” she said, “because he has to be in touch with them.” I wrote to the Swiss embassy asking them where my father was, but because my father is not on my birth certificate I had no proof that my father is my father. The embassy wrote back and said they couldn’t give me any information, because they didn’t know who I was. I tried calling them, and I got the runaround there as well. “Look, kid,” they said. “We can’t help you. We’re the Swiss embassy. Do you know nothing about the Swiss? Discretion is kind of our thing. That’s what we do. Tough luck.” I kept pestering them and finally they said, “Okay, we’ll take your letter and, if a man such as you’re describing exists, we might forward your letter to him. If he doesn’t, maybe we won’t. Let’s see what happens.” A few months later, a letter came back in the post: “Great to hear from you. How are you?

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  generation is neither positive nor negative; it is simply an outgrowth of the organic process described above. Consider yourself a kind of archaeologist digging into your own past and that of your generation, looking for artifacts, for observations that you can piece together to form a picture of the underlying spirit. When you examine your memories, try to do so with some distance, even when you recall the emotions you felt at the time. Catch yourself in the inevitable process of making judgments of good and bad about your generation or the next one, and let go of them. You can develop such a skill through practice. Forging such an attitude will play a key role in your development. With some distance and awareness, you can become much more than a follower of or a rebel against your generation; you can mold your own relationship to the zeitgeist and become a formidable trendsetter. Your second task is to create a kind of personality profile of your generation, so that you can understand its spirit in the present and exploit it. Keep in mind that there are always nuances and exceptions. What you are looking for is common traits that signal an overall spirit. You can begin this by looking at the decisive events that occurred in the years before you entered the work world and that played a large role in shaping this personality. If this period comprises more or less twenty-two years, there is often more than just one decisive event for that period. For instance, for those who came of age during the 1930s, there was the Depression and then the advent of World War II. For the baby boomers, there was the Vietnam War, and later Watergate and the political scandals of the early 1970s. Generation X were children during the sexual revolution and adolescents in the era of latchkey kids. For millennials there was 9/11 and then the financial meltdown of 2008. Depending on where you fall, both will influence you, but one more than the other, as it occurs closer to those formative years between ten and eighteen, when you were gaining awareness of the wider world and developing core values. Some times, such as the 1950s, can be periods of relative stability bordering on stagnation. This will have a powerful effect as well, considering the restlessness of the human mind, particularly among the young, who will come to yearn for adventure and to stir things up. You must also factor into this equation any major technological advances or inventions that alter how people interact. Try to map out the ramifications of these decisive events. Pay particular attention to the effect they may have had on the pattern of socialization that will characterize your generation. If the event was a major crisis of some sort, that will tend to make those of your generation band together for comfort and security, valuing the team and feelings of love, and allergic to confrontation. A period of stability

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  become, and that the king was just an ordinary man. In the 1780s he began to pick up the disparate signs of change— from within the King’s Council and the growing disrespect among the lawyer class, to the clubs and street life, where a new spirit could be detected. He could feel the pain of the lower classes and empathize with their sense of exclusion. And this new spirit was not simply political but also cultural. The youth of Danton’s generation had grown tired of all of the empty formality in French culture. They yearned for something freer and more spontaneous. They wanted to express their emotions openly and naturally. They wanted to get rid of all the elaborate outfits and hairstyles and wear looser clothing with less ostentation. They wanted more open socializing, the open mingling of all the classes, as occurred in the clubs in Paris. We could call this cultural movement the first real explosion of Romanticism, valuing emotions and sensations above the intellect and formalities. Danton both exemplified this Romantic spirit and understood it. He was a man who always wore his heart on his sleeve and whose speeches had the feel of spontaneous outpourings of ideas and emotions. His disinterment of his wife was like something out of Romantic literature, an expression of emotion unimaginable some ten years before. This side of Danton was what made him so relatable and compelling to the public. In a way that made him quite unique, Danton was able before anyone else to connect the meaning behind all of these signs and foresee a mass revolution on its way. An avid swimmer, he compared all of this to the tide in a river. Nothing in human life is ever static. There is always discontent below the surface, and hunger for change. Sometimes this is rather subtle, and the river seems somewhat placid but still moving. At other times it is like a rush, a rising tide that no one, not even a king with absolute power, can hold back. Where was this tide carrying the French? That was the key question. To Danton it soon became clear it was heading toward the formation of a republic. The monarchy was now just a façade. Its show of majesty no longer stirred the masses. They now saw that the actions of the king were all about holding on to power; they saw the aristocracy as a bunch of thieves, doing little work and sucking up the wealth of France. With such levels of disenchantment, there could be no turning back, no middle ground, no constitutional monarchy. As part of his unusual perspicacity and sensitivity to the spirit of the times, before any of the other revolutionary leaders, Danton understood that the Terror he had unleashed was a mistake and that it was time to stop it. In this one instance, his sense of timing was off,

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  A cruise ship passed; laughter from the people on deck floated across the water. I sat, facing New Jersey, with Frankie’s hands on my shoulders. “Are you still with Johnny?” I felt her body sink against mine. “It’s hard for two butches, Jess. It’s very hard.” I sighed and nodded. “Hey, Frankie. When two butches are together—like lovers I mean—do they talk about their feelings?” “Feelings?” Frankie asked. “What are those?” We both chuckled, warm and relaxed. We laughed harder and harder, until tears streamed down our cheeks. For the first time since she touched me, I relaxed my body against Frankie’s. I allowed myself to enjoy the strength of her arms around me. “You know, Frankie,” I whispered. “There’s things that happened to me because I’m a he-she that I’ve never talked about to a femme. I’ve never had the words.” Frankie nodded. “You don’t need words with me, Jess. I know.” I shook my head. “I do need words, Frankie. Sometimes I feel like ’m choking to death on what I’m feeling. I need to talk and I don’t even know how. Femmes always tried to teach me to talk about my feelings, but it was their words they used for their feelings. I needed my own words—butch words to talk about butch feelings.” Frankie pulled me tighter. Tears welled up in my eyes. “T feel like I’m clogged up with all this toxic goo, Frankie. But I can’t hear my own voice say the words out loud. Pve got no language.” Frankie opened her arms wider, took more of me in. I leaned my face against her arm. She offered me refuge, the way I held Butch Al years ago in a jail cell. “Frankie, ve got no words for feelings that are tearing me apart. What would our words sound like?” I looked up at the sky. “Like thunder, maybe.” Frankie pressed her lips against my hair. “Yeah, like thunder. And yearning.” I smiled and kissed the hard muscle of her biceps. “Yearning,” I repeated softly. “What a beautiful word to hear a butch say out loud.” Stone Butch Blues 301 “YOU MAKE YOUR OWN TRIP to Buffalo, and Tl make my own trip home,” Ruth insisted. “But why?” I couldn’t understand why she refused Esperanza’s offer to lend us her car. “You said you haven’t been home since your grandma died. You’ve been saying you should visit. I could see where you're from. I want to see the lake and the hills and the vineyards you talk so much about.” Ruth sighed. “To you it’s pretty. But I escaped to save my life. It’s not easy for me to go back there. I want to do it alone.” I shook my head. “Tl just drop you off and get back on the Thruway to Buffalo. Where we’te going is only two hours apart, and I can’t drive without a license. We could pass as a nice married couple.”

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  To disobey his word was tantamount to sacrilege. If such people could not be persuaded by the symbols of the glorious past, he would have to use force to make the past and the traditions prevail. But once something has lost its spell and no longer enchants, no amount of force can bring it back to life. And as he rode in that carriage in October of 1789 that carried him away forever from Versailles and the past, all he could see were people who were not his subjects but aliens of some sort. He had to include Danton in such a group. At his execution, he addressed the crowd as if he were still the king, forgiving them their sins. The crowd instead saw just a human, stripped of all his previous glory, no better than they were. When Georges-Jacques Danton looked out at the same world as the king, he saw something quite different. Unlike the king, he was not timid or insecure but the opposite. He had no inner need to rely upon the past to prop him up. He had been educated by liberal priests who had instilled in him Enlightenment ideas. And at the age of fifteen, at the coronation he caught a fleeting glimpse of the future, intuiting for a moment how empty the monarchy and its symbols had become, and that the king was just an ordinary man. In the 1780s he began to pick up the disparate signs of change— from within the King’s Council and the growing disrespect among the lawyer class, to the clubs and street life, where a new spirit could be detected. He could feel the pain of the lower classes and empathize with their sense of exclusion. And this new spirit was not simply political but also cultural. The youth of Danton’s generation had grown tired of all of the empty formality in French culture. They yearned for something freer and more spontaneous. They wanted to express their emotions openly and naturally. They wanted to get rid of all the elaborate outfits and hairstyles and wear looser clothing with less ostentation. They wanted more open socializing, the open mingling of all the classes, as occurred in the clubs in Paris. We could call this cultural movement the first real explosion of Romanticism, valuing emotions and sensations above the intellect and formalities. Danton both exemplified this Romantic spirit and understood it. He was a man who always wore his heart on his sleeve and whose speeches had the feel of spontaneous outpourings of ideas and emotions. His disinterment of his wife was like something out of Romantic literature, an expression of emotion unimaginable some ten years before.