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.

Page 24 of 48 · 20 per page

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  By the time we got there, quite a few people were standing along the cliff where the truck went over. It had smashed through the guardrails and fallen hundreds of feet through empty space to the river below, where it lay on its back among the boulders. It looked pitifully small. A stream of thick black smoke rose from the cab, feathering out in the wind. My mother asked whether anyone had gone to report the accident. Someone had. We stood with the others at the cliff’s edge. Nobody spoke. My mother put her arm around my shoulder. For the rest of the day she kept looking over at me, touching me, brushing back my hair. I saw that the time was right to make a play for souvenirs. I knew she had no money for them, and I had tried not to ask, but now that her guard was down I couldn’t help myself. When we pulled out of Grand Junction I owned a beaded Indian belt, beaded moccasins, and a bronze horse with a removable, tooled-leather saddle. IT WAS 1955 and we were driving from Florida to Utah, to get away from a man my mother was afraid of and to get rich on uranium. We were going to change our luck. We’d left Sarasota in the dead of summer, right after my tenth birthday, and headed West under low flickering skies that turned black and exploded and cleared just long enough to leave the air gauzy with steam. We drove through Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, stopping to cool the engine in towns where people moved with arthritic slowness and spoke in thick, strangled tongues. Idlers with rotten teeth surrounded the car to press peanuts on the pretty Yankee lady and her little boy, arguing among themselves about shortcuts. Women looked up from their flower beds as we drove past, or watched us from their porches, sometimes impassively, sometimes giving us a nod and a flutter of their fans. Every couple of hours the Nash Rambler boiled over. My mother kept digging into her little grubstake but no mechanic could fix it. All we could do was wait for it to cool, then drive on until it boiled over again. (My mother came to hate this machine so much that not long after we got to Utah she gave it away to a woman she met in a cafeteria.) At night we slept in boggy rooms where headlight beams crawled up and down the walls and mosquitoes sang in our ears, incessant as the tires whining on the highway outside. But none of this bothered me. I was caught up in my mother’s freedom, her delight in her freedom, her dream of transformation. Everything was going to change when we got out West. My mother had been a girl in Beverly Hills, and the life we saw ahead of us was conjured from her memories of California in the days before the Crash.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  Outside, I wanted to tell R. why I had needed to leave so suddenly, but as I began to speak what I had felt seemed ridiculous, out of scale, and I let it drop. It was already late afternoon, and we angled our way back to the busier part of town. We didn’t have any plans for the evening, and as we walked I kept an eye on the walls of the buildings beside the road, which were crowded with posters for concerts and exhibitions and plays, a surprising number for such a small town, I thought, posters mounted over other posters, bulging like plaster from the walls. Most of them were for small venues, clubs and cafés, but there was a series of performances held within the walls of the ruined fortress, too; the stage of ages, they called it, symphony and opera and ballet. We had been saving Tsarevets for the evening anyway; it would be brutal in the day, exposed to the sun and with almost no shade to be found. I saw that there was a concert that night, members of the Sofia Opera and Ballet performing Lakmé, the opera by Delibes. I had never seen it live, I told R., but it was the first opera I owned on CD, two discs I had played again and again. It was like a door opening onto my adolescence, I felt, a chance to share it with him, and suddenly it seemed important that we go, Please, I said, can we go, please, surprising us both with my insistence. He had never been to an opera before, but he was willing; it would be a new experience, he said, he was eager for new experiences.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Perpetual Motion MachineThere’s this game I played during gym class when I was eight, when they sent me to the outfield during baseball. I would stand so far from everyone else that the balls my classmates hit could never reach me, and our gym teacher didn’t seem to notice that I was sitting open-legged in the tall grass. The teacher, Ms. Lily, was short and stocky and had a cropped haircut, and one of the kids in my class called her a lesbian. I had no idea what that meant; I’m not sure he did, either. It was 1994. Ms. Lily wore baggy athletic pants with patches of neon greens and purples in abstract, eye-searing patterns. (When I learned the story of Joseph and his coat of many colors in Sunday school, all I could think of was Ms. Lily’s outfit.) The synthetic fabric hissed when she walked; you could always hear her coming. I have a clear memory of her trying to explain body isolation to us—she drew a line down the center of herself, starting at the top of her head. When she reached her crotch, kids giggled. From there, she showed us our left sides and our right sides, how to move each independently and then in tandem. She spun her arms like a carnival ride. Fitness!, she’d say, touching her right hand to her left foot, then her left hand to her right foot. You only have one body! You have to take care of it! Maybe she was a lesbian. Sitting in the grass during those baseball games, I’d rip up all of the weeds within my reach, leaving my hands smelling like dirt and wild onions. I broke dandelion stems and marveled at their sticky white milk. The game is this: You take the dandelion and rub it hard beneath your chin—in my case, right over the narrow white scar I earned falling in the tub when I was a toddler—so hard the florets begin to disintegrate. If your chin turns yellow, it means you’re in love. At eight I was reed-thin, anxious. I was too tightly wound to be dreamy, most of the time, but sitting in the grass gave me a kind of peace. Every class I took that dandelion’s severed head and worked it against my chin until it was a hot, wet ball, like a bud that hadn’t yet opened. The trick, or maybe it’s the punch line, is that the yellow always comes off on your skin. The dandelion yields every time. It has no wiles, no secrets, no sense of self-preservation. And so it goes that, even as children, we understand something we cannot articulate: The diagnosis never changes. We will always be hungry, will always want. Our bodies and minds will always crave something, even if we don’t recognize it.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  The back patio: college. So many unrequited crushes, and—ultimately—the worst sex. You once drove across four states to sleep with a man in upstate New York in the dead of winter. It was so cold your drugstore-brand astringent face wash froze in its tube. The sex was bad, obviously, but what you remember most clearly is what you wanted from that night. You wanted that drive-across-four-states desire. You wanted someone to be obsessed with you. How could you accomplish that? You were awake all night staring at the streetlight in the parking lot outside his bedroom window. Why did men never own curtains? How do you get someone you want to want you? Why did no one love you? The kitchen: OkCupid, Craigslist. Living in California and trying to date women, but failing because Bay Area lesbians proved to be pretty testy about the whole bisexual thing. So then, a parade of men: sweet men and terrible men and older men. Professionals and students. An astrophysicist, several programmers. One guy with a boat in the Berkeley marina. Then, moving to Iowa and going on a bunch of terrible dates, including with a man you kept seeing later in the waiting room of your therapist’s office. He played piano. A med student, maybe? You can barely remember. The living room, the office, the bathroom: boyfriends, or something approximating them. Casey and Paul and Al. Casey was the worst. Al was the kindest. Paul was knock-you-sideways perfect; he fucked you and fed you and tried to teach you to love California. It was all you ever wanted. He was so pretty. You loved his downy ass, his surprisingly soft scruff, the strength of his hands. You wanted to crawl up inside him and have him crawl up inside you. He made you feel special and sexy and smart. He broke up with you because he didn’t love you, which is a very good reason to break up with somebody, even though at the time you wanted to die. The bedroom: don’t go in there. Dream House as Time TravelOne of the questions that has haunted you: Would knowing have made you dumber or smarter? If, one day, a milky portal had opened up in your bedroom and an older version of yourself had stepped out and told you what you know now, would you have listened? You like to think so, but you’d probably be lying; you didn’t listen to any of your smarter, wiser friends when they confessed they were worried about you, so why on earth would you listen to a version of yourself who wrecked her way out of a time orifice like a newborn?

• From Confessions of a Mask (1958)

  But in my case, no sooner would I begin to share intellectual understanding with a person who had attracted me than my desire for that person would collapse. The discovery of even the slightest intellectualism in a companion would force me to a rational judgment of values. In a reciprocal relationship such as love, one must give the same thing he demands from the other; hence my desire for ignorance in a companion required, however temporarily, an unconditional "revolt against reason" on my part. But for me such a revolt was absolutely impossible. Thus, when confronting those possessors of sheer animal flesh unspoiled by intellect—young toughs, sailors, soldiers, fishermen—there was nothing for me to do but be forever watching them from afar with impassioned indifference, being careful never to exchange words with them. Probably the only place in which I could have lived at ease would have been some uncivilized tropical land where I could not speak the language. Now that I think of it, I realize that from earliest childhood I felt a yearning toward those intense summers of the kind that are seething forever in savage lands. . . . Well, then, there were the white gloves of which I was going to speak. At my school it was the custom to wear white gloves on ceremonial days. Just to pull on a pair of white gloves, with mother-of-pearl buttons shining gloomily at the wrists and three meditative rows of stitching on the backs, was enough to evoke the symbols of all ceremonial days—the somber assembly hall where the ceremonies were held, the box of Shioze sweets received upon leaving, the cloudless skies under which such days always seem to make brilliant sounds in midcourse and then collapse.It was on a national holiday in winter, undoubtedly Empire Day. That morning again Omi had come to school unusually early. The second-year students had already driven the freshmen away from the swinging-log on the playground at the side of the school buildings, taking cruel delight in doing so, and were now in full possession. Although outwardly scornful of such childish playground equipment as the swinging-log, the second-year students still had a lingering affection for it in their hearts, and by forcibly driving the freshmen away, they were able to adopt the face-saving pretense of indulging in the amusement half-derisively, without any seriousness. The freshmen had formed a circle at a distance around the log and were watching the rough play of the upperclassmen, who, in turn, were quite conscious of having an audience. The log, suspended on chains, swung back and forth rhythmically, with a battering-ram motion, and the contest was to make each other fall off the log. Omi was standing with both feet planted firmly at the mid-point of the log, eagerly looking around for opponents ; it was a posture that made him look exactly like a murderer brought to bay.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  I was enamored of the verve, torque, and tone of the pastor’s voice, his sermon on Noah’s Ark inflected with hesitations, rhetorical questions amplified by long silences that intensified the story’s effect. I loved the way the pastor’s hands moved, flowed, as if his sentences had to be shaken off him in order to reach us. It was, to me, a new kind of embodiment, one akin to magic, one I’d glimpsed only partially in Lan’s own storytelling. But that day, it was the song that offered me a new angle of seeing the world, which is to say, seeing you. Once the piano and organ roared into the first thick chords of “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” everyone in the congregation rose, shuffling, and let their arms fly out above them, some turning in circles. Hundreds of boots and heels hammered the wooden floors. In the blurred gyrations, the twirling coats and scarfs, I felt a pinch on my wrist. Your fingernails were white as they dug into my skin. Your face—eyes closed—lifted toward the ceiling, you were saying something to the fresco of angels above us. At first I couldn’t hear through the sound of clapping and shouting. It was all a kaleidoscope of color and movement as fat organ and trumpet notes boomed through the pews from the brass band. I wrested my arm from your grip. When I leaned in, I heard your words underneath the song—you were speaking to your father. Your real one. Cheeks wet with tears, you nearly shouted. “Where are you, Ba?” you demanded in Vietnamese, shifting from foot to foot. “Where the hell are you? Come get me! Get me out of here! Come back and get me.” It might have been the first time Vietnamese was ever spoken in that church. But no one glared at you with questions in their eyes. No one made a double take at the yellow-white woman speaking her own tongue. Throughout the pews other people were also shouting, in excitement, joy, anger, or exasperation. It was there, inside the song, that you had permission to lose yourself and not be wrong. I stared at the toddler-sized plaster of Jesus hanging to the side of the pulpit. His skin seemed to throb from the stamping feet. He was regarding his petrified toes with an expression of fatigued bewilderment, as if he had just woken from a deep sleep only to find himself nailed red and forever to this world. I studied him for so long that when I turned to your white sneakers I half expected a pool of blood under your feet.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  For a moment there I forgot that he’s my husband and a real pain in the ass, obnoxious, stubborn, that he annoys me, that he leaves his mess all over the floor. At that moment I saw him as if I didn’t know all that, and I was drawn to him like in the beginning. He’s very smart; he talks well; he has this soothing, sexy way about him. I wasn’t thinking about all our stupid exchanges when we bicker in the morning because I’m running late, or why did you do this, or what’s going on for Christmas, or we have to talk about your mother. I was away from all that inane stuff and those absurd conversations. I just really saw him. That’s how I felt, and I wonder if he ever feels like that about me anymore.” When I ask Adele if she has ever told Alan of that experience, she is quick to let me know that she hasn’t. “No way. He’ll make fun of me.” I suggest that maybe the waning of romance is less about the bounds of familiarity and the weight of reality than it is about fear. Eroticism is risky. People are afraid to allow themselves these moments of idealization and yearning for the person they live with. It introduces a recognition of the other’s sovereignty that can feel destabilizing. When our partner stands alone, with his own will and freedom, the delicateness of our bond is magnified. Adele’s vulnerability is obvious in the way she wonders if Alan ever feels this way about her. The typical defense against this threat is to stay within the realm of the familiar and the affectionate—the trivial bickering, the comfortable sex, the quotidian aspects of life that keep us tethered to reality and bar any chance of transcendence. But when Adele looks at Alan out of the context of their marriage—switching from a zoom lens to a wide-angle—his otherness is accentuated, and that in turn heightens Adele’s attraction to him. She sees him as a man. She has transformed someone familiar into someone still unknown after all these years. Just When You Thought You Knew Her... If uncertainty is a built-in feature of all relationships, so too is mystery. Many of the couples who come to therapy imagine that they know everything there is to know about their mate. “My husband doesn’t like to talk.” “My girlfriend would never flirt with another man. She’s not the type.” “My lover doesn’t do therapy.” “Why don’t you just say it? I know what you’re thinking?” “I don’t need to give her lavish presents; she knows I love her.”

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  I encourage Mitch and Laura to listen to each other with greater empathy. Mitch begins to understand that Laura’s alienation from her body has nothing to do with him. This eases his sense of rejection and his anguish about being unable to please her. While it is clear to Mitch that his desire is rooted in love, he needs to help Laura trust the sincerity of his interest in her. Far from seeking a selfish discharge, he longs for union. For her part, Laura learns something equally crucial about Mitch—that when the language of words fails him, as it invariably does in the realm of emotion, he communicates with his body. She’d always felt that Mitch’s “itch for the horizontal” had little to do with her; it was just raw physical release. As she hears him, she sees that Mitch needs physicality to voice his tenderness, his yearning to connect. Only in sex does he feel emotionally safe. By limiting him to her own nonphysical language, to the exclusion of his sensual language, Laura has stifled his ability to “speak” to her. She blinds herself to her husband as he really is, and at the same time reinforces the very behaviors she rails against. When Mitch is reduced to using a truncated language of words, the romantic lover disappears and the bully emerges. Mitch and Laura exemplify two extremes on the mind-body continuum. Couples are often configured on opposite sides of this divide. There are those for whom the body is like a prison in which they feel confined, self-conscious, and self-critical. The body is an inhibited site, awkward and tense. Play and inventiveness have no place there. Words feel safer than gesture and movements, and these people take refuge in speech. When reaching out to others, they prefer the verbal route. Then there are those for whom the body is like a playground, a place where they feel free and unrestricted. They retain the child’s capacity to fully inhabit their bodies. In the physical realm, they can let go; they don’t have to be responsible. They are often the partner in the relationship who wants more physical intimacy. It is especially during lovemaking that they are able to escape their inner rumblings. For them, sex is a relief that puts a halt to their anxiety; for their more verbal partners, sex turns out to be a source of anxiety.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  I ask my friends who they would set me up with, and they can’t think of anyone either. So you see?” Ben is in perpetual search for the ideal woman. Of course, he’s been looking for a long time: even the most idealized creature ultimately turns out to be merely human, and therefore flawed. At the beginning of each encounter he is swept away, and free from his inner turmoil. Invariably, when the initial ascent levels of, his phantoms reappear, as even the most beautiful princess will not deliver him from himself, or from the challenges of love. No matter how extraordinary she is, she can’t protect him from the tedium that comes with time and its disillusionments. After each failed relationship he falls into what Octavio Paz calls a “swamp of concupiscence”—what we more commonly refer to as a sex binge. These multiple encounters offer him Olympian pleasures at night, but only sea-level dialogue the next morning. So each encounter quickly starts to feel empty, and he again finds himself yearning for the fantasy of connection with a stable partner. Hungry after months of casual sex, he approaches his new conquest with no less panic. Every time Ben falls in love, he goes from zero to 100 in one swoop. He can’t pace himself. He can’t get enough. He incorporates her, and not just sexually. It’s the opposite swing of the pendulum—totally symmetrical and just as intense. People like Ben are easily disparaged for their extreme reactions, but they’re also a compelling topic of conversation. Ben is the one people like to gossip about with a mixture of pity (mainly the women) and envy (mainly the men). He’s a live version of the conflict that so many of us experience silently, or in a more subdued fashion. Knowing Ben’s romantic nature, I’m reluctant to prescribe concrete sexual interventions designed to recharge his libido. Ben is advice-resistant; pragmatic solutions don’t work for him, because his quandary is less something to repair than something to acknowledge. With this in mind, I borrow an exercise from Barry Johnson. I tell Ben, “I want you to breathe in and keep the air in as long as you can.” Fresh oxygen inevitably turns into suffocating carbon dioxide, forcing him to exhale. At first, the release feels wonderful, but a few moments later he craves fresh oxygen again. I explain, “You can’t choose between inhaling and exhaling; you have to do both. It’s the same thing with intimacy and passion.” I explain to Ben that the tension between security and adventure is a paradox to manage, not a problem to solve. It is a puzzle. “Can you hold the awareness of each polarity? You need each at different times, but you can’t have both at the same time. Can you accept that? It’s not an either-or situation, but one where you get the benefits of each and also recognize the limits of each.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  The narrowing of focus, the core lie of storytelling, is always an attempt to see better—to achieve a clearer and deeper vision of the world. Why have I written these particular tales? In this work, as in all my writing endeavors, I have been both pushed and pulled: pushed by unconscious forces—by primitive self-serving motives and by buried events from my past which strain for expression; and pulled by the future—by the ideals I have constructed and to which I aspire and by the goals of edifying and entertaining my audience. In this discussion of the six tales I shall focus more on pull than on push—my reasons are not only more accessible to me but in better taste. The title story, “Momma and the Meaning of Life,” had its inception in a dream, which I accurately reproduced in the opening paragraphs. Upon awakening from that dream, I was haunted the rest of the day by the dream phrase “Momma, how’d I do?” The image made me shudder, it seemed ripe with possibility and stirred up many thoughts about meaning in life. I turned on my computer to jot down my ruminations but something else entirely happened. I had the eerie writerly experience of being only a midwife or a scribe to a rapidly emerging story that insisted upon writing itself. The “push” in writing this story is unambiguous: my conversation with my mother’s ghost, a conversation that, alas, I never had in life, was an attempt to resolve some unfinished and tormented business from the past. The same theme reverberates with somewhat less clamor, in the next two tales as well—“Travels with Paula” and “Southern Comfort.” In this, I join a long line of writers who have unabashedly used their medium to work through personal conflicts. Even Hemingway, who was no aficionado of the search within and who always denigrated psychotherapy and its “effete wet-thinking” practitioners, acknowledged that his Corona (i.e. his typewriter) was his psychiatrist. I meant the second tale, “Travels with Paula,” to be an encomium to a remarkable woman, a memoir of my apprenticeship in working with the dying, and a guide to practitioners who consult with cancer patients. It is also a historical account of the first therapy group for cancer patients. Though such groups are exceedingly common today * , they were entirely unknown when Paula and I first embarked on the venture. The professional reader may obtain more information about such groups from my book Existential Psychotherapy (Basic Books, 1980). I recommend this text to readers interested in pursuing all the existential themes discussed in Momma and the Meaning of Life as well as in my other books: Love’s Executioner, When Nietzsche Wept, and Lying on the Couch. It is the mother book for all my literary writing. Despite its ponderous title it is easily read by nonprofessionals since I have made every effort to avoid jargon and to write lucidly.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  The cumulative consequences of suppressing such powerful impulses, however, takes its toll in the form of back pain, headaches, high blood pressure, heart disease and gastrointestinal disorders, just to mention a few. Today our survival depends very little on actually executing our basic instincts. Rather, our physical and psychological health depends on having deliberate and nonreactive access to them. Because our ancient design plan remains intact, it is our legacy to feel really alive only when our survival instincts are fully engaged. However, and this is the rub, modern life rarely provides the opportunity for that kind of raw and powerful expression. And when we are called to action, being swept away with a fight-or-flight response is rarely appropriate to the social context in which we find ourselves. As such, we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t. Unable to feel our instinctual aliveness, we are left with certain cravings. These impulses generally revolve around two of our primary instincts: those for self-survival (threat) and those for species survival (sex). Furthermore, if we cannot find a “real” situation to evoke these instincts, we manufacture one. For example, we may engage in inappropriate and dangerous sexual liaisons or jump off cliffs with our ankles attached to bungee cords. These temporary fixes don’t satisfy our yearnings. Most of the time we have solely our thoughts as meager substitutes for our instinctual drives. We not only put a lot of energy into our thoughts, but we also frequently confuse them with reality; we come to believe erroneously, as did Descartes, that we are our thoughts. Thoughts, unfortunately, are poor surrogates for experienced aliveness, and when disconnected from feelings, they result in corrosive rumination, fantasy, delusion and excessive worry. Such perseveration is not really surprising, as the paranoid tendency toward concern for potential threat in the face of ambiguity might have had a significant adaptive advantage in earlier times. Now, however, it is the currency of our judgmental, negativistic “superegos.” On the other hand, when we are informed by clear body sensations and feelings, worry is diminished, while creativity and a sense of purpose are enhanced. The poet David Budbill, working in his Vermont garden, speaks to this very human condition in his relevant verse, “This Shining Moment in the Now”: 132 When I am every day all day all body and no mind, when I am physically, wholly and completely, in this world with the birds, the deer, the sky, the wind, the trees … this shining moment in the now, devoid of mental rumination. And in another sort of garden, a young woman expresses the following sentiment in a sexuality seminar, “I feel like the most important thing is being there, in my body, with my husband and not inside of my head.”

• From Cleanness (2020)

  HARBOR THE LITTLE SAINT AN EVENING OUT Acknowledgments Also by Garth Greenwell A Note About the Author Copyright Farrar, Straus and Giroux 120 Broadway, New York 10271 Copyright © 2020 by Garth Greenwell All rights reserved First edition, 2020 E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71814-5 Our e-books may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by e-mail at MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com . www.fsgbooks.com www.twitter.com/fsgbooks • www.facebook.com/fsgbooks HARBOR Even in the dark I liked to look at it, though the sea was never truly dark, even now in the off-season it caught the light of the moon, which hung high and almost full, and of the few restaurants and hotels that were open in the new town, so that the whole harbor shimmered with points of light. It had been months since I had seen the sea, a year, and I was hungry for it; I had stepped to the edge of the terrace to check my phone but found myself staring at the sea instead. You could lose yourself in it, that was what drew me, it was beautiful but also it was like looking at nothing, the sight of it drowned out thinking like the sound of it drowned out noise, and at first I didn’t hear the others calling me to join them. I smiled as I turned, though I resented being called back, and saw that they were standing in a circle beside the tables where they had been smoking and talking, their glasses empty. Come here, one of the American writers said, we’re playing spin the bottle, and I laughed and took my place. We were choosing partners; there would be a reading to close the festival at the end of the week, and we would read in pairs, one American, one Bulgarian. A Bulgarian writer held one of the wine bottles we had emptied; he crouched in the center of the circle and then stepped back to the periphery once he had set it spinning, which it did crazily over the cobblestones of the patio. He was the oldest of us, midfifties and handsome, a champion boxer when he was young and now a coach of some sort. All the Bulgarians had other careers, there’s no such thing as a professional writer in Bulgaria, and no writing programs, either, or almost none; they worked in business, or as journalists, one ran a satirical website all my students loved, one was a priest. And they had all published books, some of them several, so that though the program was for emerging writers it was hard to tell the difference between them and the writers still inside the restaurant, the famous writers. That wasn’t true for the Americans, who were younger and less accomplished; most were still in graduate programs for writing, or had just finished.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  HARBOREven in the dark I liked to look at it, though the sea was never truly dark, even now in the off-season it caught the light of the moon, which hung high and almost full, and of the few restaurants and hotels that were open in the new town, so that the whole harbor shimmered with points of light. It had been months since I had seen the sea, a year, and I was hungry for it; I had stepped to the edge of the terrace to check my phone but found myself staring at the sea instead. You could lose yourself in it, that was what drew me, it was beautiful but also it was like looking at nothing, the sight of it drowned out thinking like the sound of it drowned out noise, and at first I didn’t hear the others calling me to join them. I smiled as I turned, though I resented being called back, and saw that they were standing in a circle beside the tables where they had been smoking and talking, their glasses empty. Come here, one of the American writers said, we’re playing spin the bottle, and I laughed and took my place. We were choosing partners; there would be a reading to close the festival at the end of the week, and we would read in pairs, one American, one Bulgarian. A Bulgarian writer held one of the wine bottles we had emptied; he crouched in the center of the circle and then stepped back to the periphery once he had set it spinning, which it did crazily over the cobblestones of the patio. He was the oldest of us, midfifties and handsome, a champion boxer when he was young and now a coach of some sort. All the Bulgarians had other careers, there’s no such thing as a professional writer in Bulgaria, and no writing programs, either, or almost none; they worked in business, or as journalists, one ran a satirical website all my students loved, one was a priest. And they had all published books, some of them several, so that though the program was for emerging writers it was hard to tell the difference between them and the writers still inside the restaurant, the famous writers. That wasn’t true for the Americans, who were younger and less accomplished; most were still in graduate programs for writing, or had just finished. We were boring in comparison to them, I thought as the bottle came to a stop and, to a chorus of cheers, the boxer stepped forward and shook the hand of one of the Americans. There was something a little sheepish about the pair of them, maybe the erotic overtones of the game caused them to lean away from each other as they shook hands, each staying decidedly in his own sphere. N., who ran the website, took the bottle next. He was a bigger man, not quite fat, not quite handsome, the friendliest and funniest in the group; he had made us laugh to tears over dinner and he made us laugh now, when he took his American partner by the shoulders and hugged him close, he was so happy, they would be brothers forever, a toast, he said, taking him to the table and its bottle of rakia.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Ben, for example, has a new girlfriend every six months, and each time he’s convinced he’s found “the one.” But when the erotic intensity wanes even slightly, he panics and bails, thinking, “It’s all downhill from here. I guess it wasn’t love after all.” He talks a lot about wanting a stable relationship—he wants commitment, he’s ready to pair up—but his tolerance for sexual ennui is nil. In Ben’s experience, commitment and excitement are mutually exclusive. But in his fantasy, there is an omnipotent woman out there who can make it all come together. Her enchanting powers will ensure that the sex remains vibrant—the clearest sign of enduring love. She will be a woman who is so extraordinary, so amazing, that her sheer perfection will induce him to want to settle down (as if all this has nothing to do with him). Invariably, her unavailability is her single most attractive feature. He’s been saying the same thing for years, “I just haven’t found the right person yet. I’ve met loads of women. I just haven’t met the right one, the one I could really stay with. I ask my friends who they would set me up with, and they can’t think of anyone either. So you see?” Ben is in perpetual search for the ideal woman. Of course, he’s been looking for a long time: even the most idealized creature ultimately turns out to be merely human, and therefore flawed. At the beginning of each encounter he is swept away, and free from his inner turmoil. Invariably, when the initial ascent levels of, his phantoms reappear, as even the most beautiful princess will not deliver him from himself, or from the challenges of love. No matter how extraordinary she is, she can’t protect him from the tedium that comes with time and its disillusionments. After each failed relationship he falls into what Octavio Paz calls a “swamp of concupiscence”—what we more commonly refer to as a sex binge. These multiple encounters offer him Olympian pleasures at night, but only sea-level dialogue the next morning. So each encounter quickly starts to feel empty, and he again finds himself yearning for the fantasy of connection with a stable partner. Hungry after months of casual sex, he approaches his new conquest with no less panic. Every time Ben falls in love, he goes from zero to 100 in one swoop. He can’t pace himself. He can’t get enough. He incorporates her, and not just sexually. It’s the opposite swing of the pendulum—totally symmetrical and just as intense. People like Ben are easily disparaged for their extreme reactions, but they’re also a compelling topic of conversation. Ben is the one people like to gossip about with a mixture of pity (mainly the women) and envy (mainly the men). He’s a live version of the conflict that so many of us experience silently, or in a more subdued fashion.

• From Story of O (1954)

  When the buds burst open on the poplar trees along the quays, and daylight, lingering longer, gave lovers time to sit for a while in the gardens after work, she thought she had at last found the courage to face Jacqueline. In winter, Jacqueline had seemed too triumphant to her beneath her cool furs, too iridescent, untouchable, inaccessible. And Jacqueline knew it. Spring put her back into suits, flat-heeled shoes, sweaters. With her short Dutch bob, she finally resembled those fresh school girls whom O, as a lycée student herself, used to grab by the wrists and drag silently into an empty cloakroom and push back against the hanging coats. The coats would tumble from the hangers. Then O would burst out laughing. They used to wear uniform blouses of raw cotton, with their initials embroidered in red cotton on their breast pockets. Three years later, three kilometers away, Jacqueline had worn the same blouses in another lycée. It was by chance that O learned that one day when Jacqueline was modeling some high-fashion dresses and said with a sigh that, really, if only they had had as pretty dresses at school, they would have been much happier there. Or if they had been allowed to wear the jumper they gave you, without anything on underneath. “What do you mean, without anything on?” O said. “Without a dress, naturally,” Jacqueline replied. To which O began to blush. She could not get used to being naked beneath her dress, and any equivocal remark seemed to her to be an allusion to her condition. It did no good to keep on repeating to herself that one is always naked beneath one’s clothes. No, she felt as naked as that woman from Verona who went out to offer herself to the chief of the besieging army in order to free her city: naked beneath a coat, which only needed to be opened a crack. It also seemed to her that, like the Italian, her nakedness was meant to redeem something. But what? Since Jacqueline was sure of herself, she had nothing to redeem; she had no need to be reassured, all she needed was a mirror. O looked at her humbly, thinking that the only flowers one could offer her were magnolias, because their thick, lusterless petals slowly turn to blister as they fade and wither, or else camellias, because their waxen whiteness is sometimes infused with a pink glow. As winter waned, the pale tan that gilded Jacqueline’s skin vanished with the memory of the snow. Soon, only camellias would do. But O was afraid of making a fool of herself with these melodramatic flowers. One day she brought a big bouquet of blue hyacinths, whose odor is overwhelming, like that of tuberoses: oily, cloying, clinging, exactly the odor camellias ought to have but don’t. Jacqueline buried her Mongolian nose in the warm, stiff-stemmed flowers, her small nose and her pink lips, for she had been wearing a pink lipstick for the past two weeks, and not red any longer.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  She deeply resented any suggestion that she let go of Jack: two years after his death his personal belongings still lay in his desk drawers, his photos hung throughout the house, his favorite magazines and books were all in place, and she continued long daily conversations with him. I worried that the conversation with Eric would set therapy back months by reinforcing her idea of how wrong I was. Now it would be more difficult than ever to persuade her that eventually she would recover from her grief. As for her foolish belief in a secret silent society of the bereaved who all agreed with her, that was just another of her legion of irrational conceits. No point in dignifying that notion with an answer. But as always, some of Irene’s comments hit home. A story is told about the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti, whose leg was broken in a traffic accident. While lying in the street, waiting for the ambulance, he was heard to say, “Finally, finally, something has happened to me.” I know exactly what he meant. Irene had my number all right. Teaching at Stanford for over thirty years, I’ve lived in the same house, watched my children walk to the same schools, and never had to face darkness. No hard, untimely deaths: my father and mother died old, he seventy, she in her nineties. My sister, seven years older, is healthy. I have lost no close friends, and my four children are nearby and thriving. For a thinker who has embraced an existential frame of reference, such a benign, shielded life is a liability. Many times I have yearned to venture out of the university’s ivory tower into the travails of the real world. For years I imagined spending a sabbatical as a blue-collar worker, perhaps as an ambulance driver in Detroit or a short-order cook in the Bowery or a sandwich maker in a Manhattan deli. But I never did: the siren calls of a colleague’s Venetian apartment or a fellowship to Bellagio on Lake Como were irresistible. I’ve never even had the growth experience of a marital separation and facing adult aloneness. I met Marilyn, my wife, when I was fifteen and decided on the spot that she was the woman for me. (I even bet my best friend $50 that I would marry her—and collected eight years later.) Our marriage has not always been placid—thank God for the Sturm und Drang—but throughout my life she has been a loving friend, always there at my side. Sometimes I have secretly envied patients living on the edge who have the courage to change their lives radically, who move, leave jobs, change professions, divorce, start all over again. I worry about being a voyeur and wonder if I covertly encourage my patients to take a heroic plunge for me. All these things I say to Irene.

• From Story of O (1954)

  “Even if you don’t want to kiss me, O, keep me with you. Keep me with you always. If you had a dog, you’d keep him and take care of him. And even if you don’t want to kiss me but would enjoy beating me, you can beat me. But don’t send me away.” “Keep still, Natalie, you don’t know what you’re saying,” O murmured, almost in a whisper. The child, slipping down and hugging O’s knees, also replied in a near-whisper: “Oh, yes I do. I saw you the other morning on the terrace. I saw the initials, I saw the long black-and-blue marks. And Jacqueline has told me …” “Told you what?” “Where you’ve been, O, and what they did to you there.” “Did she talk to you about Roissy?” “She also told me that you had been, that you are …” “That I was what?” “That you wear iron rings.” “That’s right,” O said, “and what else?” “That Sir Stephen whips you every day.” “That’s correct,” O repeated, “and he’ll be here any second. So run along, Natalie.” Natalie, without shifting position, raised her head to O, and O’s eyes encountered her adoring gaze. “Teach me, O, please teach me,” she started in again, “I want to be like you. I’ll do anything you tell me. Promise me you’ll take me with you when you go back to that place Jacqueline told me about.” “You’re too young,” O said. “No, I’m not too young, I’m fifteen going on sixteen,” she cried out angrily. “I’m not too young. Ask Sir Stephen,” she said, for he had just entered the room.

• From Story of O (1954)

  “Are they for me?” she said, the way women do who are used to receiving gifts. Then she thanked O and asked her if René were coming for her. Yes, he was coming, O said. He’s coming, she repeated to herself, and it will be for him that Jacqueline will lift her icy, liquid eyes for a second, those eyes which never look at anyone squarely, as she stands there falsely motionless, falsely silent. No one would need to teach her anything: neither to remain silent nor how to keep her hands unclenched at her sides, nor indeed how to arch her head half back. O was dying to seize a handful of that too blond hair at the nape of the neck, and pull her docile head all the way back, to run at least her finger over the line of her eyebrows. But René would want to do it too. She was fully aware why she, once so daring and bold, had become so shy, why she had wanted Jacqueline for two months without betraying it by the least word or gesture, and giving herself lame excuses to explain her timidity. It was not true that Jacqueline was intangible. The obstacle was not in Jacqueline, it lay deep within O herself, its roots deeper than anything she had ever before encountered. It was because René was leaving her free, and because she loathed her freedom. Her freedom was worse than any chains. Her freedom was separating her from René. She could have taken Jacqueline by the shoulders any number of times and, without saying a word, pinned her against the wall with her two hands, the way a butterfly is impaled; Jacqueline would not have moved, and probably not even done so much as smile. But O was henceforth like those wild animals which have been taken captive and either serve as decoys for the hunter or, leaping forward only at the hunter’s command, head off the game for him. It was she who sometimes leaned back against a wall, pale and trembling, stubbornly impaled by her silence, bound there by her silence, so happy to remain silent. She was waiting for more than permission, since she already had permission. She was waiting for an order. It came to her not from René, but from Sir Stephen.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Passages like these, though striking, do not stand alone. They are telltale signs of a much deeper set of themes. And this set of themes, sometimes awakened by reference to these passages, are central to what the New Testament says about Jesus’s death and its effects. If you read quickly through Israel’s scriptures—what Christians came to call the “Old Covenant” or the “Old Testament”—you will discover that, contrary to some popular suppositions, they tell a single great story. But this story is strangely inconclusive. It seems to be pointing toward, but not finding, an appropriate ending. The Hebrew Bible is arranged so that the books of Chronicles come last. In the traditions that shaped most modern translations, including English Bibles, Chronicles comes after Kings, and the collection ends with the prophets, the last of which is Malachi. But whether it’s Chronicles or Malachi, a quick read through leaves us straining forward, wondering what’s going to happen next. Actually, you get the same effect if you read quickly through the Pentateuch, the “Five Books,” which stand at the head of Israel’s scriptures. Deuteronomy, the fifth of the Five Books, does not conclude with a “happily ever after” vision of the future, but rather with a challenging prospect, a mixture of warning and hope. Yet the great opening sequence of the Bible—the creation of heaven and earth and man and woman; the call of Abraham; the slavery in Egypt and the subsequent Exodus; the journey to the land of promise—all this seems to indicate that ancient Israel, at least in the view of those who compiled and edited the scriptures, was playing a critical role in a great drama, the drama of the Creator himself and his creation. But the drama wasn’t over yet. At the end of Deuteronomy, Israel is warned about rebellion, exile, and death. At the end of Chronicles, the exile was still continuing. At the end of Malachi, God was promising to come back and sort everything out, but it hadn’t happened yet. One cannot imagine Shakespeare playing this trick, working his way through the stages of a plot and then stopping in the middle without tying the narrative strands together and reaching a resolution. Israel and Adam

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Taking a deep, deep breath, I utter the words: “I thank you, Momma. I thank you.” That isn’t too hard. Why has it taken me fifty years? I take her arm, maybe for the first time. The fleshy part just above the elbow. It feels soft and warm, something like her warm kichel dough just before baking. “I remember your telling Jean and me about Uncle Simon’s 7 Up. That must have been hard.” “Hard? You’re telling me. Sometimes she’d drink his 7 Up with a piece of my kichel—you know what a job making kichel is—and all she’d talk about was the 7 Up.” “It’s good to talk, Momma. It’s the first time. Maybe I’ve always wanted it, and that’s why you stay in my mind and my dreams. Maybe now it will be different.” “Different how?” “Well, I’ll be able to be more myself—to live for the purposes and causes that I choose to cherish.” “You want to get rid of me?” “No—well, not in that way, not in a bad way. I want the same for you too. I want you to be able to rest.” “Rest? Did you ever see me rest? Daddy napped every day. Ever see me nap?” “What I mean is you should have your own purpose in life—not this,” I say, poking her shopping bag. “Not my books! And I should have my own purpose.” “But I just explained,” she replies, moving her shopping bag to her other hand, away from me. “These aren’t only your books. These are my books too!” Her arm, which I’m still clutching, is suddenly cold, and I release it. “What do you mean,” she goes on, “I should have my purpose? These books are my purpose. I worked for you—and for them. All my life I worked for those books—my books.” She reaches into her shopping bag and pulls out two more. I cringe, afraid she is going to hold them up and show them to the small crowd of bystanders who have now gathered around us. “But you don’t get it, Momma. We’ve got to be separate—not fettered by one another. That’s what it is to become a person. That’s exactly what I write about in those books. That’s how I want my children—all children—to be. Unfettered.” “Vos meinen—unfeathered?” “No, no, unfettered—a word that means free or liberated. I’m not getting through to you, Momma. Let me put it this way: every single person in the world is fundamentally alone. It’s hard, but that’s the way it is, and we have to face it. So I want to have my own thoughts and my own dreams. You should have yours too. Momma, I want you out of my dreams.”