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 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. I omit nothing. I tell her she is right about my life—up to a point.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Fortunately, I was spared having to wait long. There was suddenly light, unexpectedly brilliant, recreating the whole universe around me. I saw that I was seated in the middle of a landing between two floors, and Jean-Jean, a huge boy whose nickname was Hippo, was slowly and heavily climbing the stairs, carrying a bottle in either hand. With him, I entered Michel’s apartment, as disturbed as if I had been visited by signs and portents. I spotted Ginou at once. She had a crowd of boys around her and was beaming with pleasure, her cheeks already flushed with happiness. I took my fill of her vitality, till my eyes and heart were satiated with the bursting health of her complexion, the delicacy of her hair, the dappled colors of her dress, all green and purple. Nearly all the boys had already arrived, but there were still only a few girls at the party. Mina seemed pale from her constant coughing; she threw me a knowing glance that made me ill at ease. Most of the boys were expensively dressed, with custom-made suits of imported English cloth and silk shirts and smart sport shoes; they were already surprisingly like their own parents. Their very natural ease, in such fine clothes, made a deep impression on me, and I felt stiff and solemn in my only good suit. But there was Pinhas too, the leader of the working-class scout outfit! I didn’t know why, but I didn’t like meeting him here. His suit had certainly seen better days too and suffered worse treatment than my own overcoat: his wasn’t even a once-a-year suit. But what was he doing here, so much out of place and so badly dressed? The scout movement, in order to make a show of its interest in ghetto affairs, and also to satisfy some of its own scruples, now wanted to organize a working-class scout group and had asked Pinhas to take charge of it. This whole business, to me, seemed hateful and absurd. Was it at all possible to bring rich men’s boys, well dressed, with their pockets full of petty cash, accustomed to spending enough pocket money on a single outing to feed a whole family on a holiday, together with undernourished urchins dressed in rags?

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Such here-and-now disclosure is of extraordinary importance and complexity and several tales in this volume contain examples of such self-disclosure. (The here-and-now is an ahistoric focus; it refers to what is happening now in the immediate moment of meeting between two people, here in the office, in the space between the therapist and patient.) The most important tool of the therapist is his/her own person and learning how to use it meaningfully and helpfully in the here-and-now of therapy is perhaps the single most challenging task in the training of therapists. To understand the use of the self properly (and this is the subtext of the seminar discussion in “Double Exposure”) we must discard the old therapist roles that have outlived their usefulness—the “blank screen” therapist, the white-coated aloof medical practitioner, the therapist as objective noninteractive scientist. Therapy is a two-person relationship demanding both interaction and exploration of that interaction; real feelings and mutual disclosure about the feelings evoked in the therapy interaction are necessary. Today many progressive psychoanalytic institutes have abandoned the old blank screen model in favor of a new model—the real two-person relationship—and published clinical investigations of that phenomenon—”intersubjectivity” or “two-person” psychology—are now commonplace in the professional literature. Ernest Lash is much more conflicted, as he should be, about disclosing details of his personal, non-here-and-now life. In these tales I have presented the view that such disclosure should be served only to the extent that it serves therapy. Therapists must facilitate the formation of a trusting fellow-traveler relationship, demonstrate understanding and respect for the patient, and set a model to encourage the patient’s deeper participation; if personal disclosure facilitates any of these ends then the effective therapist will not shrink from it. Though “The Hungarian Cat Curse” is my most fictional and fantastical tale, it is studded with real events and issues. The therapist’s delight when a taxing and unpleasant patient decides to terminate, his boredom with a particular patient and the subsequent use of that boredom as a guide in therapy, the therapist’s chagrin at the damage his patient has inflicted on another, his yearning to redress that wrong, lapses in which he loses sight of his patient’s best interests, his grandiose rescue fantasies, his lustful fascination with a character in a patient’s life, his dilemma about whether healers are ever off duty—all of these foibles, and more, are taken from my personal experience. The final surreal dialogue between man and ninth-lifer cat is meant to represent a type of truth—a therapeutic inquiry into the ultimate concern of death. A few attributions for that discussion are in order: the psychologist who said that many refuse the loan of life to avoid the debt of death was Otto Rank.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Not only is such close-cropping required for dramatic impact, but for vision as well. As Nietzsche put it, we must blind ourselves to many things in order to see the one thing. Hence, to uncover underlying truths we must clear away obscuring distractions. 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).

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  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. Many therapists have recommended this book to patients struggling with urgent life issues.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  “I’ve got to believe in something,” I said, low. His hand rested on my neck, warm, heavy. His good plain face, sad hazel eyes. And I realized he wanted to kiss me. I felt it inside me. And when he saw that I felt it, he reddened and looked away. Dear Astrid, ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND?? You may not 1) be baptized, 2) call yourself a Christian, and 3) write to me on that ridiculous stationery. You will not sign your letters “born again in Christ”! God is dead, haven’t you heard, he died a hundred years ago, gave out from sheer lack of interest, decided to play golf instead. I raised you to have some self-respect, and now you’re telling me you’ve given it all away to a 3-D postcard Jesus? I would laugh if it weren’t so desperately sad. Don’t you dare ask me to accept Jesus as my savior, wash my soul in the Blood of the Lamb. Don’t even think of trying to redeem me. I regret NOTHING. No woman with any self-respect would have done less. The question of good and the nature of evil will always be one of philosophy’s most intriguing problems, up there with the problem of existence itself. I’m not quarreling with your choice of issues, only with your intellectually diminished approach. If evil means to be self-motivated, to be the center of one’s own universe, to live on one’s own terms, then every artist, every thinker, every original mind, is evil. Because we dare to look through our own eyes rather than mouth clichés lent us from the so-called Fathers. To dare to see is to steal fire from the Gods. This is mankind’s destiny, the engine which fuels us as a race. Three cheers for Eve. Mother. I prayed for her redemption. She took a life because someone humiliated her, hurt her image of herself as the Valkyrie, the stainless warrior. Exposed her weakness, which was only love. So she avenged herself. So easy to justify, I wrote to her. It’s because you felt like a victim you did it. If you were really strong, you could have tolerated the humiliation. Only Jesus can make us strong enough to fight the temptations of sin. She wrote back, a quotation from Milton, Satan’s part in Paradise Lost: What though the field be lost? All is not lost; the unconquerable will, And study of revenge, immortal hate, And courage never to submit or yield. UNCLE RAY was teaching me to play chess from a book, Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess . He had taught himself in Vietnam. “I had a lot of time to kill there,” he said, running his fingers over the peaked hat of the white pawn. He’d carved the set there, Vietnamese kings and Buddhas for bishops, horses with sculpted cheeks and combed manes.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  that I loved you less. And immediately you withdrew from me, in order not to suffer. You hardened yourself. It is your childhood tragedy repeating itself. If, when you were a child, you had been made to realize that your father had to live his own life, that he was forced to abandon you, that in spite of this he loved you, you would not have suffered so terribly. And it is always the same. If Hugo is busy in the bank, you feel he is neglecting you. If I talk about work, you are hurt. Believe me, you are deeply mistaken. I love you in a way which is far deeper and more true than what you seek. I sensed that you still needed an analyst, that you were not well. I was determined that no attraction to you should interfere with my care of you. If I were wildly impatient merely to possess you, you would soon realize what a meager gift I was making you. I want more than that. I want to do away with this conflict which causes you so much pain.” “You cannot do any more for me,” I said. “Since I have begun to depend on you I feel weaker than ever before. I have disappointed you by acting neurotically at the very moment when I should have shown the wisdom of your guidance. I don’t want to ever come back to you. I feel that I must go and work and live and forget about all this.” “That is no solution. This time you must face the whole thing with me. I will help you. I must lay aside all personal desire for the moment, and you must give up this doubt completely today. It always ruins your happiness. If you can accept what I tell you this time—that I love you, that we must wait, that you must realize how entangled I am with Hugo and Eduardo, that I must, first of all, finish my task as a doctor before I take any pleasure in our personal relationship—then we may conquer your reaction for good.” He talked so fervently, so justly. I lay back in my chair, weeping silently, realizing how right he was, racked with pain, not only because of my struggle to win him but because of the accumulated bitterness of all my unhappy relationships. When I left him, I felt dazed. I almost fell asleep in the train. To Henry: “Do you remember the time I told you I was in great revolt against Allendy and analysis? He had made me reach a point where, by great effort of logic on his part, he had resolved my chaos, established a pattern. I was furious to think I could be made to fit within one of those ‘few fundamental patterns.’

• From Bluets (2009)

  113. In his unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen , Novalis tells the story of a medieval troubadour who sees a little blue flower—perhaps a bluet—in a dream. Afterward he longs to see the blue flower in “real life.” “I can’t get rid of the idea,” he says. “It haunts me.” (Mallarmé, too: “ Je suis hanté . L’Azur! l’Azur! l’Azur! l’Azur!”) Heinrich knows his obsession is a little singular: “For who would be so concerned about a flower in this world? And I’ve never heard of anyone being in love with a flower.” Nonetheless, he devotes his life to searching for it: thus begins the adventure, the high romance, the romance of seeking. 114. But now think of the Dutch expression: “ Dat zijn maar blauwe bloempjes ”—“Those are nothing but blue flowers.” In which case “blue flowers” means a pack of bald-faced lies. 115. In which case seeking itself is a spiritual error. 116. One of the last times you came to see me, you were wearing a pale blue button-down shirt, short-sleeved. I wore this for you , you said. We fucked for six hours straight that afternoon, which does not seem precisely possible but that is what the clock said. We killed the time. You were on your way to a seaside town, a town of much blue, where you would be spending a week with the other woman you were in love with, the woman you are with now. I’m in love with you both in completely different ways , you said. It seemed unwise to contemplate this statement any further. 117. “How clearly I have seen my condition, yet how childishly I have acted,” says Goethe’s sorrowful young Werther. “How clearly I still see it, and yet show no sign of improvement.” 118. Not long after that afternoon I came across a photograph of you with this woman. You were wearing the shirt. I went over to the house of my injured friend and told her the story as I moved her legs in and out of the inflatable, thigh-high boots she wears to compress her legs while lying down so as to inhibit the formation of blood clots. How ghastly , she said. 119. My friend was a genius before her accident, and she remains a genius now. The difference is that these days it is nearly impossible to discount her pronouncements. Something about her condition has bestowed upon her the quality of an oracle, perhaps because now she generally stays in one place, and one must go unto her. Eventually you will have to give up this love , she told me one night while I made us dinner. It has a morbid heart.

• From Bluets (2009)

  11. That is to say: I don’t care if it’s colorless. 12. And please don’t talk to me about “things as they are” being changed upon any “blue guitar.” What can be changed upon a blue guitar is not of interest here. 13. At a job interview at a university, three men sitting across from me at a table. On my cv it says that I am currently working on a book about the color blue. I have been saying this for years without writing a word. It is, perhaps, my way of making my life feel “in progress” rather than a sleeve of ash falling off a lit cigarette. One of the men asks, Why blue? People ask me this question often. I never know how to respond. We don’t get to choose what or whom we love, I want to say. We just don’t get to choose. 14. I have enjoyed telling people that I am writing a book about blue without actually doing it. Mostly what happens in such cases is that people give you stories or leads or gifts, and then you can play with these things instead of with words. Over the past decade I have been given blue inks, paintings, postcards, dyes, bracelets, rocks, precious stones, watercolors, pigments, paperweights, goblets, and candies. I have been introduced to a man who had one of his front teeth replaced with lapis lazuli, solely because he loved the stone, and to another who worships blue so devoutly that he refuses to eat blue food and grows only blue and white flowers in his garden, which surrounds the blue ex-cathedral in which he lives. I have met a man who is the primary grower of organic indigo in the world, and another who sings Joni Mitchell’s Blue in heartbreaking drag, and another with the face of a derelict whose eyes literally leaked blue, and I called this one the prince of blue, which was, in fact, his name. 15. I think of these people as my blue correspondents, whose job it is to send me blue reports from the field. 16. But you talk of all this jauntily, when really it is more like you have been mortally ill, and these correspondents send pieces of blue news as if last-ditch hopes for a cure. 17. But what goes on in you when you talk about color as if it were a cure, when you have not yet stated your disease. 18. A warm afternoon in early spring, New York City. We went to the Chelsea Hotel to fuck. Afterward, from the window of our room, I watched a blue tarp on a roof across the way flap in the wind. You slept, so it was my secret. It was a smear of the quotidian, a bright blue flake amidst all the dank providence. It was the only time I came. It was essentially our lives. It was shaking.

• From Bluets (2009)

  126. One of Sh ō nagon’s first entries describes her delight in the Festival of Blue Horses, a day on which twenty-one glorious gray-blue horses from the Imperial stables are paraded in front of the Emperor. Reading her account, I feel at once the need to die and be reborn one thousand years ago, so as to see this parade for myself. But here we are in great danger—the danger of being jealous of the blues of others, or of blues of times past. For while one may repeatedly insist that all one wants is to be satisfied and happy, the truth is that one can often find oneself clinging to samsara with a vengeance. This is especially so when one starts to get the sense—however dim—that there might in fact be a way to unloose oneself from the wheel. “Nostalgia for samsara,” some Buddhists call this affliction, the talons of which seem to grow but sharper as soon as one begins to understand the importance of escaping them. 127. Ask yourself: what is the color of a jacaranda tree in bloom? You once described it to me as “a type of blue.” I did not know then if I agreed, for I had not yet seen the tree. 128. When you first told me about the jacarandas I felt hopeful. Then, the first time I saw them myself, I felt despair. The next season, I felt despair again. And so we arrive at one instance, and then another, upon which blue delivered a measure of despair. But truth be told: I saw them as purple. 129. I don’t know how the jacarandas will make me feel next year. I don’t know if I will be alive to see them, or if I will be here to see them, or if I will ever be able to see them as blue, even as a type of blue. 130. We cannot read the darkness. We cannot read it. It is a form of madness, albeit a common one, that we try. 131. “I just don’t feel like you’re trying hard enough ,” one friend says to me. How can I tell her that not trying has become the whole point, the whole plan? 132. That is to say: I have been trying to go limp in the face of my heartache, as another friend says he does in the face of his anxiety. Think of it as an act of civil disobedience , he says. Let the police peel you up . 133. I have been trying to place myself in a land of great sunshine, and abandon my will therewith.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  Our room was gray today, and cold. It was raining. I fought off the desolateness which invaded me. If ever I acted in my life, it was today. I was not stirred, but I did not admit it. Then he sensed the dissatisfaction, and we lived through pages out of Lawrence’s books. For the first time I understood them, better perhaps than Lawrence did, because he described only the man’s feelings. And what does Eduardo feel? He feels more for me than for any woman; he has had his nearest taste of wholeness, of manhood. I couldn’t crush him. I went on with soft words: “Don’t force life. Let things grow slowly. Don’t suffer.” But he knows now. This was all like a nightmare to me. My being clamored for Henry. I saw him today. He was with his friend Fred Perlés, the soft, delicate man with poetic eyes. I like Fred, and yet I felt closer to Henry, so close I couldn’t bear to look at him. We were sitting in the kitchen of their new apartment in Clichy. Henry glowed. When I said I had to go, after we talked a long time, Henry took me to his room and began kissing me, and with Fred so very near, Fred the aristocrat and sensitive man, probably hurt. “I can’t let you go,” said Henry. “We’ll close the door.” I gave myself to that moment with frenzy. I think I am losing my mind, for the feelings it aroused in me haunt me, possess me every moment, and I crave more and more of Henry. I come home. Hugo reads the paper. The tenderness, the smallness, the colorlessness of it all. But I have Henry, and I think of what he said, wildly, while he was coming. I think how I have never been as natural as I am now, have never lived out my true instincts. I didn’t care today that Fred saw my madness. I wanted to face the world, shout to the world: “I love Henry.” I don’t know why I trust him so much, why I want to give him everything tonight—truth, my journal, my life. I even wished that June might suddenly announce her arrival so as to feel the pain the loss of Henry would give me.

• From Bluets (2009)

  19. Months before this afternoon I had a dream, and in this dream an angel came and said: You must spend more time thinking about the divine, and less time imagining unbuttoning the prince of blue’s pants at the Chelsea Hotel . But what if the prince of blue’s unbuttoned pants are the divine, I pleaded. So be it, she said, and left me to sob with my face against the blue slate floor. 20. Fucking leaves everything as it is. Fucking may in no way interfere with the actual use of language. For it cannot give it any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is . 21. Different dream, same period: Out at a house by the shore, a serious landscape. There was a dance underway, in a mahogany ballroom, where we were dancing the way people dance when they are telling each other how they want to make love. Afterward it was time for rough magic: to cast the spell I had to place each blue object (two marbles, a miniature feather, a shard of azure glass, a string of lapis) into my mouth, then hold them there while they discharged an unbearable milk. When I looked up you were escaping on a skiff, suddenly wanted. I spit out the objects in a snaky blue paste on my plate and offered to help the police boat look for you, but they said the currents were too unusual. So I stayed behind, and became known as the lady who waits, the sad sack of town with hair that smells like an animal. 22. Some things do change, however. A membrane can simply rip off your life, like a skin of congealed paint torn off the top of a can. I remember that day very clearly: I had received a phone call. A friend had been in an accident. Perhaps she would not live. She had very little face, and her spine was broken in two places. She had not yet moved; the doctor described her as “a pebble in water.” I walked around Brooklyn and noticed that the faded periwinkle of the abandoned Mobil gas station on the corner was suddenly blooming. In the baby-shit yellow showers at my gym, where snow sometimes fluttered in through the cracked gated windows, I noticed that the yellow paint was peeling in spots, and a decent, industrial blue was trying to creep in. At the bottom of the swimming pool, I watched the white winter light spangle the cloudy blue and I knew together they made God. When I walked into my friend’s hospital room, her eyes were a piercing, pale blue and the only part of her body that could move. I was scared. So was she. The blue was beating.

• From Bluets (2009)

  36. Goethe describes blue as a lively color, but one devoid of gladness. “It may be said to disturb rather than enliven.” Is to be in love with blue, then, to be in love with a disturbance? Or is the love itself the disturbance? And what kind of madness is it anyway, to be in love with something constitutionally incapable of loving you back? 37. Are you sure—one would like to ask—that it cannot love you back? 38. For no one really knows what color is, where it is, even whether it is. ( Can it die? Does it have a heart?) Think of a honeybee, for instance, flying into the folds of a poppy: it sees a gaping violet mouth, where we see an orange flower and assume that it’s orange, that we’re normal. 39. The Encyclopedia does not help. “If normally our perception of color involves ‘false consciousness,’ what is the right way to think of colors?” it asks. “In the case of color, unlike other cases,” it concludes, “false consciousness should be a cause for celebration.” 40. When I talk about color and hope, or color and despair, I am not talking about the red of a stoplight, a periwinkle line on the white felt oval of a pregnancy test, or a black sail strung from a ship’s mast. I am trying to talk about what blue means, or what it means to me, apart from meaning. 41. On the eve of the millennium, driving through the Valley of the Moon. On the radio a DJ was going through the best albums of the century, and somewhere, I think around number thirty, was Joni Mitchell’s Blue . The DJ played “River,” and said that its greatness lies in the fact that no woman had ever said it so clearly and unapologetically before: I’m so hard to handle, I’m selfish and I’m sad . Progress! I thought. Then came the song’s next line: Now I’ve gone and lost the best baby that I ever had . 42. Sitting in my office before teaching a class on prosody, trying not to think about you, about my having lost you. But how can it be? How can it be? Was I too blue for you. Was I too blue . I look down at my lecture notes: Heártbréak is a spondee . Then I lay my head down on the desk and start to weep.—Why doesn’t this help?

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Still, I refused to accompany him into the sergeant’s hut. He came out of it at once, with a permit to take me away for the day. Really, all doors opened before him. Then we went into the village. This day that had no name suddenly became a Sunday for me, a Sunday without mass, a holiday without any ballyhoo about it. We sat together in a café, as we had done in the past. My father offered me what was left over from his midday meal; he was surprised and alarmed when he saw me gobble up so gluttonously a huge piece of ma’akoud (salted egg-cake), a hard-boiled egg, and two cakes cooked in oil. Food prepared by my mother’s hands was rousing in me the appetite that I had lost. Then he spoke to me of my last letter, but cautiously, and asked me if I really wanted to come back home. I had eaten to my heart’s content for the first time in a long while and now felt reassured by his mere presence, so that my anxieties appeared to me to be very far away and rather ridiculous. I lowered my head, not answering him. “I’ll ask the sergeant if it can be arranged,” he concluded. I felt a twinge at my heart. My father had failed to understand me and I had not revealed to him the full extent of my passionate desire to leave the holiday camp. I lost my head and all my reticence gave way: “I want to go back home!” He placed his hand on my head, as he did when blessing me and entrusting me to God, so much more powerful than he. I felt that he was upset. A very painful and utterly disturbing idea entered my mind: perhaps there were things that my father couldn’t achieve for me. Perhaps the sergeant, with his uniform and his leather puttees, was as powerful as the policeman! And if the sergeant refused, what would my father do? At dusk, we returned to camp. We had gone to the village cheerfully enough, but we returned now in silence and slowly. On account of his asthma, which was only beginning at that time, my father had to stop frequently and would then lean on my shoulder. In the gathering darkness, with no other sound around us, his abrupt breathing seemed to resound throughout the mountain valley. When we got back, he went and knocked timidly at the sergeant’s door and I waited outside. When he came out again, I guessed at once why his smile was so constrained and sad: “My son, you’ll have to be reasonable about it. You must stick it out till the end of your holiday.” He didn’t add a word, not even one of encouragement. I was too downhearted or perhaps I felt some pity for him and allowed him to leave without witnessing my tears and protestations.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  She answered me so quietly. “Jean was too masculine. I have faced my feelings, I am fully aware of them, but I have never found anyone I wanted to live them out with, so far.” And she turned the conversation evasively. “What a lovely way you have of dressing. This dress—its rose color, its old-fashioned fullness at the bottom, the little black velvet jacket, the lace collar, the lacing over the breasts—how perfect, absolutely perfect. I like the way you cover yourself, too. There is very little nudity, just your neck, really. I love your turquoise ring, and the coral.” Her hands were shaking; she was trembling. I was ashamed of my brutality. I was intensely nervous. She told me how at the restaurant she had wanted to see my feet and how she could not bring herself to stare. I told her how I was afraid to look at her body. We talked brokenly. She looked at my feet, in sandals, and thought them lovely. I said, “Do you like these sandals?” She answered that she had always loved sandals and worn them until she had become too poor to have them. I said, “Come up to my room and try the other pair I have.” She tried them on, sitting on my bed. They were too small for her. I saw she wore cotton stockings, and it hurt me to see June in cotton stockings. I showed her my black cape, which she thought beautiful. I made her try it on, and then I saw the beauty of her body, its fullness and heaviness, and it overwhelmed me. I could not understand why she was so ill-at-ease, so timid, so frightened. I told her I would make her a cape like mine. Once I touched her arm. She moved it away. Had I frightened her? Could there be someone more sensitive and more afraid than I? I couldn’t believe it. I was not afraid at that moment. I wanted desperately to touch her. When she sat on the couch downstairs, the opening of her dress showed the beginning of her breasts, and I wanted to kiss her there. I was acutely upset and trembling. I was becoming aware of her sensitiveness and fear of her own feelings. She talked, but now I knew she talked to evade a deeper inner talk—the things we could not say. We met the next day at American Express. She came in her tailored suit because I had said I liked it. She had said she wanted nothing from me but the perfume I wore and my wine-colored handkerchief. But I insisted that she had promised to let me buy her sandals.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  On her feet, separated from Cheri by an occasional table with a decanter and port glasses, she made no effort to defend herself against the severe inspection to which she was being subjected; but from the almost invisible tremors that passed over her body, Cheri noted the muscular effort required to keep in her spreading stomach. “How many times must she have put on her full-length corset again, left it off, then valiantly put it on again, before abandoning it for ever? ... How often of a morning must she have varied the shades of her face powder, rubbed a new rouge on her cheeks, massaged her neck with cold-cream and a small lump of ice tied up in a handkerchief, before becoming resigned to the varnished hide that now shines on her cheeks!” Impatience alone, perhaps, had made her tremble, yet this faint tremor led him to expect - so stubbornly blind was he to reality - some miraculous new blossoming, some complete metamorphosis. * Why don’t you say something? ’ Lea persisted. Little by little she was losing her poise, though she was careful not to move. She was playing with her rope of large pearls, knotting and unknotting, round her big well-manicured and wrinkled fingers, their luminous, indescribably bedewed and everlasting lustre. “Perhaps it’s simply because she’s frightened of me,” Cheri mused. “A man who says nothing must always seem a bit cranky. She’s thinking of Valerie Cheniaguine’s terrors. If I put my hand out, would she scream for help? My poor Nounoune!” He lacked the courage to pronounce this name out loud, and, to protect himself from even a moment’s sincerity, he spoke: ‘What are you going to think of me?’ ‘It all depends,’ Lea answered guardedly. ‘At the moment you remind me of people who bring along a little box of cakes and leave it in the hall, saying to themselves: “There’ll be plenty of time to produce these later,” and then pick them up again when they go.’ Reassured by the sound of their voices, she had begun to reason like the Lda of old, quick on the uptake, and as wily as a sharp-witted peasant. Cheri rose to his feet, walked round the table which separated him from Lea, and the daylight streaming through the pink curtains struck him full in his face. This made it easy for her to compute the passage of days and years from his features, which were all of them in danger, though still intact. There was something about so secret a falling away to tempt her pity and trouble her memory, and perhaps extract from her the word or gesture that would precipitate Cheri into a frenzy of humiliation. As he stood there, a sacrifice to the light, with eyes lowered as if he were asleep, it seemed to him this was his last chance of extorting from her one last affront, one last prayer, one final act of homage.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I was not ashamed of my adoration, my humility. Her gesture was not sincere. I do not believe she could love. She says she wants to keep the rose dress I wore the first night she saw me. When I tell her I want to give her a going-away present, she says she wants some of that perfume she smelled in my house, to evoke memories. And she needs shoes, stockings, gloves, underwear. Sentimentality? Romanticism? If she really means it . . . Why do I doubt her? Perhaps she is just very sensitive, and hypersensitive people are false when others doubt them; they waver. And one thinks them insincere. Yet I want to believe her. At the same time it does not seem so very important that she should love me. It is not her role. I am so filled with my love of her. And at the same time I feel that I am dying. Our love would be death. The embrace of imaginings. When I tell Hugo the stories June has told me, he says they are simply very cheap. I don’t know. Then Eduardo spends two days here, the demoniac analyst, making me realize the crisis I am passing through. I want to see June. I want to see June’s body. I have not dared to look at her body. I know it is beautiful. Eduardo’s questions madden me. Relentlessly, he observes how I have humbled myself. I have not dwelt on the successes which could glorify me. He makes me remember that my father beat me, that my first remembrance of him is a humiliation. He had said I was ugly after having typhoid fever. I had lost weight and my curls. What has made me ill now? June. June and her sinister appeal. She has taken drugs; she loved a woman; she talks the cops’ language when she tells stories. And yet she has kept that incredible, out-of-date, uncallous sentimentalism: “Give me the perfume I smelled in your house. Walking up the hill to your house, in the dark, I was in ecstasy.” I ask Eduardo, “Do you really think I am a lesbian? Do you take this seriously? Or is it just a reaction against my experience with Drake?” He is not sure. Hugo takes a definite stand and says he considers everything outside of our love extraneous—phases, passionate curiosities. He wants a security to live by. I rejoice in his finding it. I tell him he is right. Finally Eduardo says I am not a lesbian, because I do not hate men—on the contrary. In my dream last night I desired Eduardo, not June. The night before, when I dreamed of June, I was at the top of a skyscraper and expected to walk down the façade of it on a very narrow fire ladder. I was terrified. I could not do it. She came to Louveciennes Monday.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  If only somewhere I could do one little section which would have the warmth, the tenderness, the pathos of that chapter on Paul Dressier. But I’m not a Dreiser. And I have no brother Paul. It’s far away, the banks of the Wabash. Farther, much farther, than Moscow or Kronstadt, or the warm, utterly romantic Crimea. Why? Russia, where are you leading us? Forward! Ech konee, konee! I think of Gorky, the baker’s helper, his face white with flour, and the big fat peasant (in his nightshirt) rolling in the mud with his beloved sows. The University of Life . Gorky: mother, father, comrade. Gorky, the beloved vagabond, who whether tramping, weeping, pissing, praying or cursing, writes. Gorky: who wrote in blood. A writer true as the sun dial…. Just looking at a title, as I say. Thus, like a piano concerto for the left hand, the day would slip by. Lucky if there were a page or two to show for all the torture and the inspiration. Writing! It was like pulling up poison oak by the roots. Or searching for mangolds. When now and then she asked: “How is it coming, dear Val?” I wanted to bury my head in my hands and sob. “Don’t push yourself, Val!” But I have pushed. I’ve pushed and pushed till there’s not a drop of caca in me. Often it’s just when she says, “Dinner’s ready!” that the flow begins. What the hell! Maybe after dinner. Maybe after she’s gone to sleep. Mañana . At table I talk about the work as if I were another Alexandre Dumas or a Balzac. Always what I intend to do, never what I have done. I have a genius for the impalpable, for the inchoate, for the not yet born. “And your day?” I’ll say sometimes. “What was your day like?” (More to get relief from the devils who plagued me than to hear the trivia which I already knew by heart.) Listening with one ear I could see Pop waiting like a faithful hound for the bone he was to receive. Would there be enough fat on it? Would it splinter in his mouth? And I would remind myself that it wasn’t really the book pages he was waiting for but a more juicy morsel—her . He would be patient, he would be content—for a while at least—with literary discussions. As long as she kept herself looking lovely, as long as she continued to wear the delightful gowns which he urged her to select for herself, as long as she accepted with good grace all the little favors he heaped upon her. As long, in other words, as she treated him like a human being. As long as she wasn’t ashamed to be seen with him.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  slipping into the sewer prepared for it then this whole city can read its own obituary written on the broken record of dreams of ordinary people who wanted what they could not get and so pretended to be someone else ordinary people having what they never learned to want themselves and so becoming pretension concretized. Change of Season Am I to be cursed forever with becoming somebody else on the way to myself? Walking backward I fall into summers behind me salt with wanting lovers or friends a job wider shoes a cool drink freshness something to bite into a place to hide out of the rain out of the shifting melange of seasons where the cruel boys I chased and their skinny dodgeball sisters flamed and died in becoming the brown autumn left in search of who tore the streamers down at graduation christmas my wedding day and as winter wore out the babies came angry effort and reward in their appointed seasons my babies tore out of me like poems after I slept and woke to the thought that promise had come again this time more sure than the dream of being sweet sixteen and somebody else walking five miles through the august city with a free dog thinking now we will be the allamerican family we had just gotten a telephone and the next day my sister cut his leash on Broadway that dog of my childhood bays at the new moon as I reach into time up to my elbows extracting the taste and sharp smell of my first lover’s neck rough as the skin of a brown pear ripening I was terribly sure I would come forever to april with my first love who died on a sunday morning poisoned and wondering would summer ever come. As I face an ocean of seasons they start to separate into distinct and particular faces listening to the cover beginning to crack open and whether or not the fruit is worth waiting thistles and arrows and apples are blooming the individual beautiful faces are smiling and moving even the pavement begins to flow into new concretions the eighth day is coming I have paid dearly in time for love I hoarded unseen summer goes into my words and comes out reason. Generation II A Black girl going into the woman her mother desired and prayed for walks alone and afraid of both their angers. Love, Maybe Always in the middle of our bloodiest battles you lay down your arms like flowering mines to conqueror me home. Conclusion Passing men in the street who are dead becomes a common occurrence but loving one of them is no solution. I believe in love as I believe in our children but I was born Black and without illusions and my vision which differs from yours is clear although sometimes restricted. I have watched you at midnight moving through casual sleep wishing I could afford the non-desperate dreams that stir you

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  One little talk I got with my goddess: she came to the office to ask about reserving a Pullman drawing-room for El Paso. I undertook at once to see to everything, and when the dainty little lady added in her funny accent: “We have so many baggage, twenty-six bits”; I said as earnestly as if my life depended on it: “Please trust me. I shall see to everything. I only wish,” I added, “I could do more for you.” “That’s kind,” said the coquette: “very kind,” looking full at me. Emboldened by despair at her approaching departure I added: “I’m so sorry you’re going. I shall never forget you, never.” Taken aback by my directness, the girl laughed saucily, “_Never_ means a week, I suppose.” “You will see,” I went on hurriedly as if driven, as indeed I was. “If I thought I should not see you again and soon, I should not wish to live.” “A declaration”, she laughed merrily, still looking me brightly in the face. “Not of independence,” I cried, “but of—” as I hesitated between “affection” and “love” the girl put her finger to her lips. “Hush, hush,” she said gravely, “you are too young to take vows and I must not listen”, but seeing my face fall, she added: “You have been very kind. I shall remember my stay in Chicago with pleasure,” and she stretched out her hand. I took it and held it treasuring every touch. Her look and the warmth of her fingers I garnered up in my heart as purest treasure. As soon as she had gone and the radiance with her, I cudgeled my brains to find some pretext for another talk. “She goes tomorrow,” hammered in my brain and my heartache choked me, almost prevented my thinking. Suddenly the idea of flowers came to me. I’d buy a lot. No; everyone would notice them and talk. A few would be better. How many? I thought and thought. When they came into lounge next day ready to start I was watching my opportunity, but the girl gave me a better one than I could have picked. She waited till her father and Arriga had left the hall and then came over to the desk. “You have ze checks?” she asked. “Everything will be given you at the train,” I said, “but I have these for you. Please accept them!” and I handed her three splendid red rosebuds, prettily tied up with maiden hair fern. “How kind!” she exclaimed, coloring, “and how pretty,” she added, looking at the roses. “Just three?” “One for your hair,” I said with love’s cunning, “one for your eyes and one for your heart—will you remember?” I added in a low voice intensely. She nodded and then looked up sparkling: “As long—as ze flowers last,” she laughed, and was back with her mother.