Yearning

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  I just glanced into a studio and saw her there, paintbrush in hand, eyes closed, waltzing slowly around the room. The radio was playing the waltz from Der Rosenkavalier. Paul greeted me with his Martian approximation of a smile but no handshake. “Am I disturbing you?” I asked. “No,” he said, cocking his head to one side as though to test the accuracy of his reply. And that was that. He pointed to a canvas-backed director’s chair. I slid into it. He pressed a cup of coffee into my cold hands. Then he regained his high stool and we both looked and looked at his painting. People say that painting is an instantaneous not a temporal art, but for me the contemplation of Paul’s work unfolded thickly in time. What does he want me to say? What words of mine would please him, even help him? Should I say nothing? Those were the social questions that alternated with my slighter but quite real curiosity about his work. Then I’d sneak a glance at him, at his powerful jaw propped up by his hand as though its very weight solicited support, at his smudged glasses, at the tiny spume of blond hair on his Adam’s apple that the razor had missed for several days. I tried to imagine kissing those dry lips, wrapping my arms around that tall skinny body, but I couldn’t thread that particular loop of film through the projector. As half-consciously I inched toward my desires for men, I

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

  The question imposed itself: “Was I too to sink to fatness? wallow in sensuality, degrade myself for a nerve-thrill?” “No!” I cried to myself, “ten thousand times, no! No! I’ll go and seek the star-lit deserts of Truth or die on the way!” I closed the book and with it and the second volume of it in my hand went to Mrs. Trask. “I want to buy this book”, I said, “it has a message for me that I must never forget!” “I’m glad”, said the little lady smiling, “what is it?” I read her a part of the passage: “I see”, she exclaimed, “but why do you want the books?” “I want to take them with me”, I said, “I mean to leave Lawrence at once and go to Germany to study!” “Good gracious!” she cried, “how can you do that? I thought you were a partner of Sommerfeld’s; you can’t go at once!” “I must”, I said, “the ground burns under my feet: if I don’t go now, I shall never go: I’ll be out of Lawrence tomorrow!” Mrs. Trask threw up her hands and remonstrated with me: such quick decisions were dangerous; “why should I be in such a hurry?” I repeated time and again: “If I don’t go at once, I shall never go: ‘the ignoble pleasures’ will grow sweeter and sweeter to me and I shall sink gradually and drown in the mud-honey of life.” Finally seeing I was adamant and my mind fixed: she sold me the books at full price with some demur, then she added: “I almost wish I had never recommended Emerson to you!” and the dear lady looked distressed, almost on the verge of tears. “Never regret that!” I cried, “I shall remember you as long as I live because of that and always be grateful to you. Professor Smith told me I ought to go; but it needed the word of Emerson to give me the last push! The buds of poetry and science and art shall not perish in me as they have ‘perished already in a thousand, thousand men!’ Thanks to you!” I added warmly, “all my best heart-thanks: you have been to me the messenger of high fortune.” I clasped her hands, wished to kiss her, but foolishly feared to hurt her and so contented myself with a long kiss on her hand and went out at once to find Sommerfeld. He was in the office and forthwith I told him the whole story, how Smith had tried to persuade me and how I had resisted till this page of Emerson had convinced me: “I am sorry to leave you in the lurch,” I explained; but “I must go and go at once.” He told me it was madness: I could study German right there in Lawrence; he would help me with it gladly. “You mustn’t throw away a livelihood just for a word”, he cried, “it is madness, I never heard a more insane decision!”

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  She could still consult her pediatrician. Was this confusion about where she stood in the chronological scheme of things our doing? Did we demand that she be an adult? Did we ask her to assume responsibility before she had any way of doing so? Did our expectations prevent her from responding as a child? I recall taking her, when she was four or five, up the coast to Oxnard to see Nicholas and Alexandra. On the drive home from Oxnard she referred to the czar and czarina as “Nicky and Sunny,” and said, when asked how she had liked the picture, “I think it’s going to be a big hit.” In other words, despite having just been told what had seemed to me as I watched it a truly harrowing story, a story that placed both parents and children in unthinkable peril—a peril to children more unthinkable still because its very source lay in the bad luck of having been born to these particular parents—she had resorted without hesitation to the local default response, which was an instant assessment of audience potential. Similarly, a few years later, taken to Oxnard to see Jaws, she had watched in horror, then, while I was still unloading the car in Malibu, skipped down to the beach and dove into the surf. About certain threats I considered real she remained in fact fearless. When she was eight or nine and enrolled in Junior Lifeguard, a program run by the Los Angeles County lifeguards that entailed being repeatedly taken out beyond the Zuma Beach breakers on a lifeguard boat and swimming back in, John and I arrived to pick her up and found the beach empty. Finally we saw her, alone, huddled in a towel behind a dune. The lifeguards, it seemed, were insisting, “for absolutely no reason,” on taking everyone home. I said there must be a reason. “Only the sharks,” she said. I looked at her. She was clearly disappointed, even a little disgusted, impatient with the turn the morning had taken. She shrugged. “They were just blues,” she said then. When I remember the “sundries” I am forced to remember the hotels in which she had stayed before she was five or six or seven. I say “forced to remember” because my images of her in these hotels are tricky. On the one hand those images survive as my truest memories of the paradox she was—of the child trying not to appear as a child, of the strenuousness with which she tried to present the face of a convincing adult. On the other hand it is just such images—the same images—that encourage a view of her as “privileged,” somehow deprived of a “normal” childhood. On the face of it she had no business in these hotels. The Lancaster and the Ritz and the Plaza Athénée in Paris. The Dorchester in London.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Finally, I have another important audience in mind. This book is also written for concerned judges, attorneys, mediators, and mental health professionals who work with the courts and families. All of you are caught in dilemmas created by a legal system that gives priority to the rights of parents but is mandated to protect children. I invite you to hear the voices of these young adults who have grown up under the policies of our legal system. Few of you have ever had the opportunity to find out what happens to such children after agreements—in which they have no voice—are signed, sealed, and delivered. This is your chance to hear from these children. They speak from the heart. I begin with the rest of Karen’s story. PART ONEParallel Universes: Karen and GaryONEWhen a Child Becomes the CaregiverKaren James’s visit drove me to continue probing the long-term effects of divorce on children. The minute she left, I went to my study and drew out her family’s record to refresh my memory. I have copious files on each family member in our study, including verbatim transcripts of past interviews, letters from teachers, notes describing dollhouse play, children’s drawings, comments from parents about their own lives and their beliefs about their children, comments from children showing an astonishing difference in perceptions, and my own margin notes about what each family represents. The first item that caught my eye was a drawing Karen had done when we met. (Children’s drawings often tell you what they are feeling and reveal far more than spoken words.) Karen had depicted each member of her family in meticulous detail—her mother, father, eight-year-old brother Kevin, and six-year-old sister Sharon. Dressed in bright colors, they were standing very close together, each smiling broadly. Even the cat was smiling. “My Family” was printed across the top in large block letters. I was intrigued by Karen’s capacity to maintain an image of serenity in her drawing because by now I was privy to the shrieking disorganization in her family life. Karen’s wish for peace and family togetherness was poignantly clear. As I was to learn, this was the central desire of her life.

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  59 GIOVANNrS ROOM to Montparnasse perhaps and picked up a girl. Any girl. I could not do it. I told myself all sorts of Ues, standing there at the bar, but I could not move. And this was partly because I knew that it did not really matter anymore; it did not even matter if I never spoke to Giovanni again; for they had become visible, as visible as the wafers on the shirt of the flaming princess, they stormed all over me, my awakening, my in- sistent possibihties. That was how I met Giovanni. I think we connected the instant that we met. And remain connected still, in spite of our later separation de corps, despite the fact that Giovanni will be rotting soon in unhallowed ground near Paris. Until I die there will be those moments, mo- ments seeming to rise up out of the ground like Macbeth's witches, when his face will come be- fore me, that face in all its changes, when the exact timbre of his voice and tricks of his speech will nearly burst my ears, when his smell will overpower my nostrils. Sometimes, in the days which are coming— God grant me the grace to live them—in the glare of the grey morning, sour-mouthed, eyelids raw and red, hair tangled and damp from my stormy sleep, facing, over coffee and cigarette smoke, last night's impen- etrable, meaningless boy who will shortly rise and vanish like the smoke, I will see Giovanni again, as he was that night, so vivid, so winning, all of the light of that gloomy tunnel trapped around his head. Chapter Three. At five o'clock in the morning Guillaume locked the door of the bar behind us. The streets were empty and grey. On a corner near the bar a butcher had already opened his shop and one could see him within, already bloody, hacking at the meat. One of the great, green Paris buses lumbered past, nearly empty, its bright electric flag waving fiercely to indicate a turn. A gargon de cafe spilled water on the sidewalk before his establishment and swept it into the gutter. At the end of the long, curving street which faced us were the trees of the boulevard and straw chairs piled high before cafes and the great stone spire of Saint-Germain-des-Pres— the most magnificent spire, as Hella and I believed, in Paris. The street beyond the 'place stretched be- fore us to the river and, hidden beside and be- hind us, meandered to Montparnasse. It was named for an adventurer who sowed a crop in Europe which is being harvested until today. I GIOVANNI'S ROOM 61 had often walked this street, sometfanes, with Hella, towards the river, often, without her, towards the girls of Montpamasse. Not very long ago either, though it seemed, that morn- ing, to have occurred in another life.

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  GIOVANNrS ROOM 59 to Montparnasse perhaps and picked up a girl. Any girl. I could not do it. I told myself all sorts of Ues, standing there at the bar,but I could not move. And this was partly because I knew that it did not really matter anymore; it did not even matter if I never spoke to Giovanni again; for they had become visible, as visible as the wafers on the shirt of the flaming princess, they stormed all over me,my awakening, my in- sistent possibihties. That was howI met Giovanni. I thinkwe connected the instant that we met. And remain connected still, in spite of our later separation de corps, despite the fact that Giovanni will be rotting soon in unhallowed ground near Paris. Until I die there willbe those moments, mo- ments seeming to rise up out of the ground like Macbeth's witches, when his face will come be- fore me, thatface inall its changes, when the exact timbre of his voiceand tricks of his speech will nearlyburstmy ears, when his smell will overpower mynostrils.Sometimes, in thedays whicharecoming —Godgrant me the graceto live them— in the glare of the grey morning, sour-mouthed, eyelids rawandred, hair tangled and damp frommy stormy sleep,facing, over coffee and cigarette smoke, lastnight's impen- etrable, meaningless boywho willshortly rise andvanishlike the smoke, I willseeGiovanni again,as he wasthat night, sovivid, so winning, allof the light of that gloomy tunnel trapped aroundhis head. Chapter Three. At five o'clock inthe morning Guillaumelocked thedoor of the bar behindus.Thestreetswere empty and grey. On a cornernearthe bar a butcher had already openedhisshopandone could see him within, already bloody, hacking at the meat. One ofthegreat, greenParis buses lumbered past, nearlyempty,its brightelectric flag waving fiercely to indicatea turn.A g argon de cafe spilled wateronthe sidewalk beforehis establishment and swept itinto the gutter. At theend ofthe long,curving street which faced us were the treesofthe boulevard andstraw chairs piled highbefore cafes and the great stone spire of Saint-Germain-des-Pres — themost magnificent spire, as Hella and I believed,in Paris. Thestreetbeyond the 'place stretchedbe- fore usto theriverand, hidden beside and be- hind us, meanderedto Montparnasse. Itwas namedforanadventurer who soweda crop in Europe whichisbeing harvested until today. I

• 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 Every Woman's Battle: Discovering God's Plan for Sexual and Emotional Fulfillment (2003)

  When I recall my preteen years, my eagerness to speed through puberty stands out in my mind. Tired of being treated like a little girl, I wanted so desperately to grow up and become a woman, so I began practicing for the part. I took notice of how modern women dressed, walked, talked, and acted and tried to mimic their performance. During this phase in the 1970s, the Enjoli perfume commercial aired on our television repeatedly. A beautiful blonde in a form-fitting red dress fanned a fistful of dollar bills, twirled a frying pan in the air, then threw herself into a man’s lap and seductively ran her fingers through his hair. The sultry words she wailed were, “I’m a WOMAN!” As Hollywood painted the picture of the liberated woman, most of us were making mental notes and preparing to waltz blindly into Satan’s trap. Don’t get me wrong; I’m thrilled that the women’s liberation movement brought us freedom to vote, get an education, and find satisfaction in careers. But the power plays, quests for control, and manipulation games that have come with it have often buried women up to their necks in the ashes of burned bras. Since this liberation movement, women have been bombarded with messages that we must be in shape, in love, and in control and that being sexy is of utmost priority. With television, music, movies, magazines, romance novels, and the Internet, nothing short of living under a rock will keep women’s minds from being whirled by the world. But when did this sexual revolution begin, and how have we managed to come this far? A JOURNEY THROUGH TIME If we looked to American history books for clues, we’d see that in the early 1900s burlesque theaters opened with lewd jokes, skits, and songs; suggestive dancing; and near-nude female performers. Buxom beauty Mae West got her start in show business by entertaining the crowds at such theaters. By the 1920s the striptease had become the featured act in most of these shows. According to the New Standard Encyclopedia, “Burlesque disappeared completely in the 1960s. It had come to seem old-fashioned and rather tame compared to the sexual explicitness and salacious humor that had developed in nightclubs and motion pictures.”1 Coming out of World War II, women were hungry for lighthearted entertainment and star-struck fans attempted to embrace (literally!) such suave celebrities as Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, and Rock Hudson with reckless abandon. Female sex symbols of this era were voluptuous women—Jane Russell, Jayne Mansfield, and Betty Grable. And who can ever forget Marilyn Monroe, whose personal life produced three failed marriages, multiple affairs, and several attempts at suicide, the last of which would take her life but not her sex-kitten legacy?

• From Every Woman's Battle: Discovering God's Plan for Sexual and Emotional Fulfillment (2003)

  Do you remember the first time you felt you were in love? How he dominated your thoughts morning, noon, and night? How you could be available at a moment’s notice if you knew he was coming by? Remember how you would drop anything and everything when the phone rang, desperately hoping to hear his voice on the line? The potential of this relationship’s going somewhere consumed your world. No matter how hard you tried, you just couldn’t get him off your mind, right? (Not that any of us tried all that hard!) God longs for you to be that consumed with Him. Not that you can stay on a mountaintop like the one just described every day of your life (all love relationships go through peaks and valleys), but He desires to be your First Love. He wants your thoughts to turn to Him throughout the good and the bad days. He wants you to watch for Him expectantly, so that you sense Him beckoning you into His presence. He aches for you to call out to Him and listen for His loving reply. Although He wants you to invest in healthy relationships with others, He wants you to be most concerned about your relationship with Him. Maybe you are thinking, Oh, I’ve been hearing that all my life! The answer to all my problems is “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!” I know Jesus but I’ve never felt complete satisfaction with Him, either! If that’s the case, I can understand why you might challenge what I’m saying. But I know from experience that what I say is true, and so do many women I know. And I can’t help but wonder if you have really invested yourself wholeheartedly in pursuing a satisfying relationship with God. I encourage you to honestly answer the following questions: • Have I really invested much time getting to know God personally and intimately? • Do I read the Bible searching for clues as to God’s character and plan for my life? • Have I given God as many chances as I have given other men? fantasy? Internet chat rooms? • Have I ever made the choice to pray or to dance to worship music or to go for a walk with God instead of picking up the phone to call a guy when I’m lonely? • Are there moments spent alone (masturbating, fantasizing, reading or looking at inappropriate materials, and so on) that I ignore God’s presence in an attempt to satisfy myself? • Do I believe that God can satisfy every single need I have? • Am I willing to test this belief by letting go of all the things, people, and thoughts that I use to medicate my pain, fear, or loneliness, and becoming totally dependent upon God? God longs for you to test Him and try Him on this. He wants to dwell in every part of your heart, not just rent a room there. He wants to fill your heart to overflowing.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  6The summer evenings of my boyhood when I used to ride by her cottage speak to me in that voice of hers now. On a road among fields, where it met the desolate highway, I would dismount and prop my bicycle against a telegraph pole. A sunset, almost formidable in its splendor, would be lingering in the fully exposed sky. Among its imperceptibly changing amassments, one could pick out brightly stained structural details of celestial organisms, or glowing slits in dark banks, or flat, ethereal beaches that looked like mirages of desert islands. I did not know then (as I know perfectly well now) what to do with such things—how to get rid of them, how to transform them into something that can be turned over to the reader in printed characters to have him cope with the blessed shiver—and this inability enhanced my oppression. A colossal shadow would begin to invade the fields, and the telegraph poles hummed in the stillness, and the night-feeders ascended the stems of their plants. Nibble, nibble, nibble—went a handsome striped caterpillar, not figured in Spuler, as he clung to a campanula stalk, working down with his mandibles along the edge of the nearest leaf out of which he was eating a leisurely hemicircle, then again extending his neck, and again bending it gradually, as he deepened the neat concave. Automatically, I might slip him, with a bit of his plantlet, into a matchbox to take home with me and have him produce next year a Splendid Surprise, but my thoughts were elsewhere: Zina and Colette, my seaside playmates; Louise, the prancer; all the flushed, low-sashed, silky-haired little girls at festive parties; languorous Countess G., my cousin’s lady; Polenka smiling in the agony of my new dreams—all would merge to form somebody I did not know but was bound to know soon. I recall one particular sunset. It lent an ember to my bicycle bell. Overhead, above the black music of telegraph wires, a number of long, dark-violet clouds lined with flamingo pink hung motionless in a fan-shaped arrangement; the whole thing was like some prodigious ovation in terms of color and form! It was dying, however, and everything else was darkening, too; but just above the horizon, in a lucid, turquoise space, beneath a black stratus, the eye found a vista that only a fool could mistake for the spare parts of this or any other sunset. It occupied a very small sector of the enormous sky and had the peculiar neatness of something seen through the wrong end of a telescope. There it lay in wait, a family of serene clouds in miniature, an accumulation of brilliant convolutions, anachronistic in their creaminess and extremely remote; remote but perfect in every detail; fantastically reduced but faultlessly shaped; my marvelous tomorrow ready to be delivered to me.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  Colette was back in Paris by the time we stopped there for a day before continuing our homeward journey; and there, in a fawn park under a cold blue sky, I saw her (by arrangement between our mentors, I believe) for the last time. She carried a hoop and a short stick to drive it with, and everything about her was extremely proper and stylish in an autumnal, Parisian, tenue-de-ville-pour-fillettes way. She took from her governess and slipped into my brother’s hand a farewell present, a box of sugar-coated almonds, meant, I knew, solely for me; and instantly she was off, tap-tapping her glinting hoop through light and shade, around and around a fountain choked with dead leaves, near which I stood. The leaves mingle in my memory with the leather of her shoes and gloves, and there was, I remember, some detail in her attire (perhaps a ribbon on her Scottish cap, or the pattern of her stockings) that reminded me then of the rainbow spiral in a glass marble. I still seem to be holding that wisp of iridescence, not knowing exactly where to fit it, while she runs with her hoop ever faster around me and finally dissolves among the slender shadows cast on the graveled path by the interlaced arches of its low looped fence. 81IAM going to show a few slides, but first let me indicate the where and the when of the matter. My brother and I were born in St. Petersburg, the capital of Imperial Russia, he in the middle of March, 1900, and I eleven months earlier. The English and French governesses we had in our childhood were eventually assisted, and finally superseded, by Russian-speaking tutors, most of them graduate students at the capital’s university. This tutorial era started about 1906 and lasted for almost a full decade, overlapping, from 1911 on, our high-school years. Each tutor, in turn, dwelt with us—at our St. Petersburg house during the winter, and the rest of the time either at our country estate, fifty miles from the city, or at the foreign resorts we often visited in the fall. Three years was the maximum it took me (I was better at such things than my brother) to wear out any one of those hardy young men. In choosing our tutors, my father seems to have hit upon the ingenious idea of engaging each time a representative of another class or race, so as to expose us to all the winds that swept over the Russian Empire. I doubt that it was a completely deliberate scheme on his part, but in looking back I find the pattern curiously clear, and the images of those tutors appear within memory’s luminous disc as so many magic-lantern projections.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  4And now comes that bicycle act—or at least my version of it. The following summer, Yuri did not visit us at Vyra, and I was left alone to cope with my romantic agitation. On rainy days, crouching at the foot of a little-used bookshelf, in a poor light that did all it could to discourage my furtive inquiry, I used to look up obscure, obscurely tantalizing and enervating terms in the Russian eighty-two-volume edition of Brockhaus’ Encyclopedia, where, in order to save space, the title word of this or that article would be reduced, throughout a detailed discussion, to its capitalized initial, so that the columns of dense print in minion type, besides taxing one’s attention, acquired the trumpery fascination of a masquerade, at which the abbreviation of a none too familiar word played hide and seek with one’s avid eyes: “Moses tried to abolish P. but failed … In modern times, hospitable P. flourished in Austria under Maria Theresa … In many parts of Germany the profits from P. went to the clergy … In Russia, P. has been officially tolerated since 1843 … Seduced at the age of ten or twelve by her master, his sons or one of his menials, an orphan almost invariably ends in P.”—and so forth, all of which went to enrich with mystery, rather than soberly elucidate, the allusions to meretricious love that I met with during my first immersions in Chekhov or Andreev. Butterfly hunting and various sports took care of the sunny hours, but no amount of exercise could prevent the restlessness which, every evening, launched me on vague voyages of discovery. After riding on horseback most of the afternoon, bicycling in the colored dusk was a curiously subtle, almost discarnate feeling. I had turned upside down and lowered to subsaddle level the handlebars of my Enfield bicycle, converting it into my conception of a racing model. Along the paths of the park I would skim, following yesterday’s patterned imprint of Dunlop tires; neatly avoiding the ridges of tree roots; selecting a fallen twig and snapping it with my sensitive front wheel; weaving between two flat leaves and then between a small stone and the hole from which it had been dislodged the evening before; enjoying the brief smoothness of a bridge over a brook; skirting the wire fence of the tennis court; nuzzling open the little whitewashed gate at the end of the park; and then, in a melancholy ecstasy of freedom, speeding along the hard-baked, pleasantly agglutinate margins of long country roads.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  That summer I would always ride by a certain isba, golden in the low sun, in the doorway of which Polenka, the daughter of our head coachman Zahar, a girl of my age, would stand, leaning against the jamb, her bare arms folded on her breast in a soft, comfortable manner peculiar to rural Russia. She would watch me approach with a wonderful welcoming radiance on her face, but as I rode nearer, this would dwindle to a half smile, then to a faint light at the corners of her compressed lips, and, finally, this, too, would fade, so that when I reached her, there would be no expression at all on her round, pretty face. As soon as I had passed, however, and had turned my head for an instant to take a last look before sprinting uphill, the dimple would be back, the enigmatic light would be playing again on her dear features. I never spoke to her, but long after I had stopped riding by at that hour, our ocular relationship was renewed from time to time during two or three summers. She would appear from nowhere, always standing a little apart, always barefoot, rubbing her left instep against her right calf or scratching with her fourth finger the parting in her light brown hair, and always leaning against things—against the stable door while my horse was being saddled, against the trunk of a tree when the whole array of country servitors would be seeing us off to town for the winter on a crisp September morning. Every time, her bosom seemed a little softer, her forearms a little stronger, and once or twice I discerned, just before she drifted out of my ken (at sixteen she married a blacksmith in a distant village), a gleam of gentle mockery in her wide-set hazel eyes. Strange to say, she was the first to have the poignant power, by merely not letting her smile fade, of burning a hole in my sleep and jolting me into clammy consciousness, whenever I dreamed of her, although in real life I was even more afraid of being revolted by her dirt-caked feet and stale-smelling clothes than of insulting her by the triteness of quasi-seignioral advances.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  But namelessness is compatible with existence. There are innumerable consciousnesses of emptiness, no one of which taken in itself has a name, but all different from each other. The ordinary way is to assume that they are all emptinesses of consciousness, and so the same state. But the feeling of an absence is toto cœlo other than the absence of a feeling. It is an intense feeling. The rhythm of a lost word may be there without a sound to clothe it; or the evanescent sense of something which is the initial vowel or consonant may mock us fitfully, without growing more distinct. Every one must know the tantalizing effect of the blank rhythm of some forgotten verse, restlessly dancing in one's mind, striving to be filled out with words. Again, what is the strange difference between an experience tasted for the first time and the same experience recognized as familiar, as having been enjoyed before, though we cannot name it or say where or when? A tune, an odor, a flavor sometimes carry this inarticulate feeling of their familiarity so deep into our consciousness that we are fairly shaken by its mysterious emotional power. But strong and characteristic as this psychosis is—it probably is due to the submaximal excitement of wide-spreading associational brain-tracts—the only name we have for all its shadings is 'sense of familiarity.' When we read such phrases as 'naught but,' 'either one or the other,' 'a is b, but,' although it is, nevertheless,' 'it is an excluded middle, there is no tertium quid,' and a host of other verbal skeletons of logical relation, is it true that there is nothing more in our minds than the words themselves as they pass? What then is the meaning of the words which we think we understand as we read? What makes that meaning different in one phrase from what it is in the other? 'Who?' 'When?' 'Where?' Is the difference of felt meaning in these interrogatives nothing more than their difference of sound? And is it not (just like the difference of sound itself) known and understood in an affection of consciousness correlative to it, though so impalpable to direct examination? Is not the same true of such negatives as 'no,' 'never,' 'not yet'? The truth is that large tracts of human speech are nothing but signs of direction in thought, of which direction we nevertheless have an acutely discriminate sense, though no definite sensorial image plays any part in it whatsoever.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  If once again I chance to hold thee aye, I will not be so fond As erst I was to suffer thee to fly; Nay, fast I'll hold thee, hap of it what may, And having thee in bond, Of thy sweet mouth my lust I'll satisfy. Now of nought else will I Discourse. Quick, to thy bosom come me strain; The sheer thought bids me sing like lark at morn. This song caused all the company conclude that a new and pleasing love held Filomena in bonds, and as by the words it appeared that she had tasted more thereof than sight alone, she was envied of this by certain who were there and who held her therefor so much the happier. But, after her song was ended, the queen, remembering her that the ensuing day was Friday, thus graciously bespoke all, "You know, noble ladies and you also, young men, that to-morrow is the day consecrated to the passion of our Lord, the which, an you remember aright, what time Neifile was queen, we celebrated devoutly and therein gave pause to our delightsome discoursements, and on like wise we did with the following Saturday. Wherefore, being minded to follow the good example given us by Neifile, I hold it seemly that to-morrow and the next day we abstain, even as we did a week agone, from our pleasant story-telling, recalling to memory that which on those days befell whilere for the salvation of our souls." The queen's pious speech was pleasing unto all and a good part of the night being now past, they all, dismissed by her, betook them to repose. HERE ENDETH THE SEVENTH DAY OF THE DECAMERON _Day the Eighth_ HERE BEGINNETH THE EIGHTH DAY OF THE DECAMERON WHEREIN UNDER THE GOVERNANCE OF LAURETTA IS DISCOURSED OF THE TRICKS THAT ALL DAY LONG WOMEN PLAY MEN OR MEN WOMEN OR MEN ONE ANOTHER Already on the Sunday morning the rays of the rising light appeared on the summits of the higher mountains and every shadow having departed, things might manifestly be discerned, when the queen, arising with her company, went wandering first through the dewy grass and after, towards half-tierce,[364] visiting a little neighboring church, heard there divine service; then, returning home, they ate with mirth and joyance and after sang and danced awhile till the queen dismissed them, so whoso would might go rest himself. But, whenas the sun had passed the meridian, they all seated themselves, according as it pleased the queen, near the fair fountain, for the wonted story-telling, and Neifile, by her commandment, began thus: [Footnote 364: _i.e._ half-past seven a.m.] THE FIRST STORY [Day the Eighth] GULFARDO BORROWETH OF GUASPARRUOLO CERTAIN MONIES, FOR WHICH HE HATH AGREED WITH HIS WIFE THAT HE SHALL LIE WITH HER, AND ACCORDINGLY GIVETH THEM TO HER; THEN, IN HER PRESENCE, HE TELLETH GUASPARRUOLO THAT HE GAVE THEM TO HER, AND SHE CONFESSETH IT TO BE TRUE

• From Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty (1999)

  The reason we have a universal passion for adornment, the reason that photos are doctored and painted representations idealized, is that we long to be not only works of nature but works of art. We want to unite Valéry’s three bodies into a unified whole. In part, the longing is spiritual: to have an outer representation that matches our dreams and visions and moral aspirations. It is also a quest for love and acceptance, to have a face and a body that other people want to look at and know. Biologists would argue that at root the quest for beauty is driven by the genes pressing to be passed on and making their current habitat as inviting for visitors as possible. Quentin Bell writes in his stunning book, On Human Finery, that painters and dressmakers are all philosophers at heart. “Aristotle said that drama was more philosophical than history for history tells us only what did happen whereas drama tells us what ought to have happened. In this sense the dressmaker and the painter are philosophers. The painter seeks to recreate the body in a state of perfection; the dressmaker seeks to arrange drapery so beautifully that the actual body becomes a mere starting point.” The Beauty Canon Running as a common thread through the discourses on beauty, from pre-Socratic times onward, is an aesthetic based on proportion and number. The irreducible elements are clarity, symmetry, harmony, and vivid color. Plato said that beauty resided in proper measure and proper size, of parts that fit harmoniously into a seamless whole. He extended the idea of proportion to the beautiful in all things and wrote of the best length of a speech, the optimal organization of paintings, and the proper use of language in poetry. To St. Augustine, beauty was synonymous with geometric form and balance. He thought that equilateral triangles were more beautiful than scalene triangles because their parts were more even. Squares, being composed of equal-length segments, were more beautiful still, circles even more beautiful, and the point, indivisible and pure, was the most beautiful of all. “What is beauty of the body?” he asked. “A harmony of its parts with a certain pleasing color.” For Aristotle, beauty resided in “order and symmetry and definiteness.” For Cicero, it was “a certain symmetrical shape of the limbs combined with a certain charm of coloring.” For Plotinus, it was a “symmetry of parts toward each other and towards a whole … the beautiful thing is essentially symmetrical.” Plotinus believed that beauty must be present in details as well as the whole; “it cannot be constructed out of ugliness, its law must run throughout.” Common to all these theories is the idea that the properties of beauty are the same whether we are seeing a beautiful woman, a flower, a landscape, or a circle.

• From The Hours (1998)

  At least, she thinks, she does not read mysteries or romances. At least she continues to improve her mind. Right now she is reading Virginia Woolf, all of Virginia Woolf, book by book— she is fascinated by the idea of a woman like that, a woman of such brilliance, such strangeness, such immeasurable sorrow; a woman who had genius but still filled her pocket with a stone and waded out into a river. She, Laura, likes to imagine (it’s one of her most closely held secrets) that she has a touch of brilliance herself, just a hint of it, though she knows most people probably walk around with similar hopeful suspicions curled up like tiny fists inside them, never divulged. She wonders, while she pushes a cart through the supermarket or has her hair done, if the other women aren’t all thinking, to some degree or other, the same thing: Here is the brilliant spirit, the woman of sorrows, the woman of transcendent joys, who would rather be elsewhere, who has consented to perform simple and essentially foolish tasks, to examine tomatoes, to sit under a hair dryer, because it is her art and her duty. Because the war is over, the world has survived, and we are here, all of us, making homes, having and raising children, creating not just books or paintings but a whole world—a world of order and harmony where children are safe (if not happy), where men who have seen horrors beyond imagining, who have acted bravely and well, come home to lighted windows, to perfume, to plates and napkins. What a lark! What a plunge! Laura gets out of bed. It is a hot, white morning in June. She can hear her husband moving around downstairs. A metal lid kisses the rim of its pan. She takes her robe, pale aqua chenille, from the newly reupholstered chair and the chair appears, squat and fat, skirted, its nubbly salmon-colored fabric held down by cord and salmon-colored buttons in a diamond pattern. In the morning heat of June, with the robe whisked away, the chair in its bold new fabric seems surprised to find itself a chair at all.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  "Now you were annoyed when you sat on the stones! I asked you to be introduced..." 'Oh, you're taking this as a young lady too personally, Miss Tony! I'm speaking in principle... I'm saying that we don't have more fraternal humanity than in Prussia... And if I speak personally," he continued, after a short pause, in a quieter voice, from which the peculiar excitement had not disappeared, " I wouldn't mean the present like that, but rather maybe the future, ... if you as a Madame So and So once finally inyoursposh area will disappear and... you can sit on the stones for a lifetime..." He was silent and so was Tony. She stopped looking at him and looked the other way, at the wooden wall next to her. There was an awkward silence for quite a long time. 'Do you remember,' Morten began again, 'that I once told you I had a question for you? Yeah, it's been on my mind since the first afternoon you got here, you know... Don't guess! You can't possibly know what I mean. I'll ask another time, on occasion; there's no hurry, it's really none of my business, it's just curiosity... No, today I just want to tell you one thing... something else... Look." At this, Morten pulled the end of a narrow, colorfully striped ribbon out of a pocket of his jacket and looked into Tony's eyes with a mixture of expectation and triumph. "How pretty," she said blankly. "What does that mean?" But Morten spoke solemnly: “That means that I belong to a fraternity in Göttingen – now you know! I also have a hat in these colors, but I have them I put on the skeleton in the policeman's uniform for the holiday season ... because I shouldn't be seen here with it, you understand ... I can count on you keeping your mouth shut, can't I? If my father found out about it, there would be a misfortune..." “Not a word, Morten! No, you can count on me!... But I don't know anything about it... Are you all conspiring against the nobles?... What do you want?' "We want freedom!" said Morten. "Freedom?" she asked. "Well, freedom, you know, freedom...!" he repeated, making a vague, somewhat awkward but enthusiastic arm movement out, down, across the sea, and not to the side where the Mecklenburg shore limited the bay, but where the sea was open, where it stretched out in ever-narrowing streaks of green, blue, yellow, and gray, slightly rippled, grand and incalculable toward the blurred horizon... Tony's eyes followed the direction of his hand; and while not much was missing, that the two hands, which lay side by side on the rough wooden bench, joined, they gazed together into the same distance. They were silent for a long time while the sea rushed up to them, calm and ponderous...

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  It was a very simple motif that he imagined, a nothing, the fragment of a non-existent melody, a figure of a bar and a half, and when he first played it in a low register with a power that one would not have credited him with single voice sounded as if it should be announced by trumpets unanimously and authoritatively as the primeval substance and starting point of everything to come, it was impossible to foresee what was actually meant. But when he repeated it harmonized in the treble, in a timbre of dull silver, it proved to consist essentially of a single resolution, a yearning and painful sinking from one key to the other... a short-lived, poor invention, but which a strange, mysterious, and significant value was created by the precious and solemn decisiveness with which it was presented and presented. And now agitated walks began, a restless coming and going of syncopation, searching, wandering, and torn with screams, as if a soul were troubled at what it heard, and what did not want to fall silent, but repeated itself in ever-changing harmonies, questioning, lamenting, dying, longing, full of promise. And the syncopations became more and more violent, pushed around helplessly by hasty triplets; but the cries of fear that sounded within took form, they joined, they became melody, and the moment came when, like a fervent and pleading chant of the brass choir emerging, strong and humble, they came to rule. The unstoppable urge, the heaving, straying and slipping away had fallen silent and conquered, and this contrite and childishly praying chorale resounded in an unwaveringly simple rhythm... It ended with a kind of church closure. A pause came, and a silence. And behold, suddenly, very softly, in a timbre of dull silver, the first motive there again, that poor invention, that stupid or mysterious figure, that sweet, painful sinking from one key to another. There was tremendous uproar and wild excitement, dominated by fanfare-like accents, expressions of wild determination. What happened? What was in preparation? It sounded like horns calling for departure. And then there was something like a gathering and concentration, tighter rhythms joined together, and a new figure came in, a bold improvisation, a kind of hunting song, Expressing a fierce determination. What happened? What was in preparation? It sounded like horns calling for departure. And then there was something like a gathering and concentration, tighter rhythms joined together, and a new figure came in, a bold improvisation, a kind of hunting song, Expressing a fierce determination. What happened? What was in preparation? It sounded like horns calling for departure. And then there was something like a gathering and concentration, tighter rhythms joined together, and a new figure came in, a bold improvisation, a kind of hunting song, enterprising and boisterous.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  She kissed little Meta, shook the housewife's hand and nodded to Herr Schwarzkopf when he said: 'Well, don't forget us, Mamselling. And no offense, eh?” "So, and happy travels and best wishes to Mr. Papa and the Consul's wife..." Then the hammer snapped, the fat brown horses drew up, and the three Schwarzkopfs waved their handkerchiefs... Tony stuck his head in the corner of the car and looked out the window. The sky was whitish overcast, the Trave threw small waves that sped before the wind. Now and then small drops tingled against the panes. At the exit of the "front row" people sat in front of their front doors and mended nets; barefoot children ran up and looked curiously at the wagon. They stayed here... As the wagon passed the last of the houses, Tony leaned forward to see the lighthouse again; then she leaned back and closed her eyes, which were tired and sensitive. She had hardly slept that night from excitement, had got up early to put her suitcase in order and had not wanted to have breakfast. There was a stale taste in her parched mouth. She felt so weak that she didn't even try to hold back the tears that welled up slowly and hotly in her eyes every moment. She had hardly closed her eyelids when she was back in Travemünde on the veranda. She saw Morten Schwarzkopf in person, how he spoke to her, leaning forward in his own way and now and then looking good-naturedly at someone else; the way he laughed and showed his beautiful teeth, which he obviously knew nothing about … and she understood it very calmly and cheerfully. She recalled everything she had heard and experienced from him in many conversations, and it gave her a happy satisfaction to promise herself solemnly that she wanted to keep all this within herself as something sacred and untouchable. That the King of Prussia had committed a great injustice, that the municipal advertisements were a pathetic little piece of paper, even that four years ago the federal laws on the universities had been renewed would from now on be venerable and comforting truths to her, a secret treasure that she would be able to look at whenever she wanted. In the middle of the street, in the family circle, as she ate, she would think of it... Who knows? maybe she would go her way and marry Herr Grünlich, it didn't matter; but if he spoke to her she would suddenly think: I know something you don't know... The nobles are - inSpeaking of principle – contemptible! She smiled contentedly to herself... But then, suddenly, in the noise of the wheels, she heard Morten's speech with perfect, incredibly vivid clarity; she discerned every sound in his good-natured, slightly ponderous raspy voice, she heard with her own ear how he said, "Today we both have to sit on the stones, Miss Tony..." and that little memory overwhelmed her.