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 Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Writing about the quest for racial reconciliation in a way that fundamentally acknowledged the human longing for kinship, Murray created space within a broader racial narrative to acknowledge her own sublimated longings for a certain kind of relational connection to a loved one. In this regard, Proud Shoes tills new ground in terms of race women’s revisionist historical project, namely inserting an unspeakable sexual past into a poignant and residual community narrative that marked the shift from unfreedom to freedom by the ability to be with the ones you loved. 88 It is important, too, that the passage refers to the ways that kinship and connection is marked on the body—through dimples, a kind of smile, a particular kind of walk. Murray’s argument grounds her challenge to the rigid identity molds fundamentally within the body, largely because she understood her sexuality and gender identity in terms of a struggle both within and around her body. The corporeal imagery in this text, coupled with Murray’s textual interpellations of her own queerness, constitutes a new iteration of embodied discourse in Black women’s autobiography. Like her nineteenth-century forebears, Murray celebrates the bodily memories of the newly free, but she also uses these bodies as textual vehicles for her own sexual and bodily pleasures and remembrances. Hardison argues that “the mandates of middle-class respectability demanded Murray’s silence on her sexuality in her memoir, as the politics of Jane Crow circumscribed not only black women’s literal bodies but also their textual representation.” 89 Thus, Murray’s particular appropriation of this racial narrative queers the narrative of multiracial identity and familial connection within the U.S. context. And her use of embodied discourse as a form of textual activism against respectable silence provides a way for us to read women’s autobiographies “as negotiations in naming the unspeakable.” 90 Moreover, the narrative allows us to “claim a critical location from which to read the sexual unspeakable from outside a polarized framework in which normative heterosexuality and oppositional homosexuality operate as authorized and mutually exclusive discourses.” 91 By narrating her own irreconcilable differences through the carefully chosen surrogate race narratives of Emancipation and reconciliation, Murray refracted her own “unending quest for loved ones” through the queered prism of a wholly racial experience. Her refusal of the racial binary constituted a rejection of its narrative authority over her history, both sexual and racial. She understood the static racial boundary to be an obstacle whose swift and sure removal was the necessary first step in her quest to authorize herself. Pauli Murray, a mid-twentieth-century race woman problematizes our easy imposition of the categories of race and womanhood on her body. While she is critically important to the intellectual histories of Civil Rights, the Women’s Movement, and Black feminism, she herself was also deeply ambivalent about what it meant to be Black and what it meant to be a woman. Thus, she attempted to understand her actual corporeal body within available social and scientific discourses, with limited results.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  They were carried on in a language that does not exist, a language so simple, so direct, so transparent, that words were useless. It was not a silent language either, as is often used in communication with “higher beings.” It was a language of clamor and tumult—the heart’s clamor, the heart’s tumult. But noiseless. If it were Dostoievski whom I summoned, it was “the complete Dostoievski,” that is to say, the man who wrote the novels, diaries and letters we know, plus the man we also know by what he left unsaid, unwritten. It was type and archetype speaking, so to say. Always full, resonant, veridic; always the unimpeachable sort of music which one credits him with, whether audible or inaudible, whether recorded or unrecorded. A language which could emanate only from Dostoievski. After such indescribably tumultuous communions I often sat down to the machine thinking that the moment had at last arrived. “Now I can say it!” I would tell myself. And I would sit there, mute, motionless, drifting with the stellar flux. I might sit that way for hours, completely rapt, completely oblivious to everything about me. And then, startled out of the trance by some unexpected sound or intrusion, I would wake with a start, look at the blank paper, and slowly, painfully tap out a sentence, or perhaps only a phrase. Whereupon I would sit and stare at these words as if they had been written by some unknown hand. Usually somebody arrived to break the spell. If it were Mona, she would of course burst in enthusiastically (seeing me sitting there at the machine) and beg me to let her glance at what I had written. Sometimes, still half-drugged, I would sit there like an automaton while she stared at the sentence, or the little phrase. To her bewildered queries I would answer in a hollow, empty voice, as if I were far away, speaking through a microphone. Other times I would spring out of it like a Jack-in-the-box, hand her a whopping lie (that I had concealed “the other pages,” for instance), and begin raving like a lunatic. Then I could really talk a blue streak! It was as if I were reading from a book. All to convince her—and even more myself!—that I had been deep in work, deep in thought, deep in creation. Dismayed, she would apologize profusely for having interrupted me at the wrong moment. And I would accept her apology lightly, airily, as though to say—“What matter? There’s more where that came from…. I have only to turn it on or off…. I’m a prestidigitator, I am.” And from the lie I would make truth. I’d spool it off (my unfinished opus) like a man possessed—themes, sub-themes, variations, detours, parentheses—as if the only thing I thought about the live-long day was creation. With this of course went considerable clowning. I not only invented the characters and events, I acted them out.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  I sat around the middle room of the union and talked about art and poetry and fiction for hours with other Beatniks, for I thought of myself as a Beatnik even though I didn’t have the courage to wear a black turtleneck or sandals, or carry a green bookbag. All that serious talk, as enthusiastic as it was imprecise, between companionable sleepwalkers, each cut off by his dreams but convinced that he was in airtight accord with the others. Some afternoons, after twenty uninterrupted hours of writing, reading, drinking Drambuie, playing my twelve records, and hectoring and praising myself, I’d stagger into the union and there find a woman sculptor who had the unsettling habit of nodding before I’d said ten words while murmuring, “Yep. I can see it.” At some minor point in my account of my artistic struggles she’d blurt out, “That’s it! brother, is that ever it,” and I’d smile foolishly, not sure whether I should go on or correct her misunderstanding or coast on it and just give in to the wash of good feeling, misplaced as it might be. I usually gave in and said, “God, I’m glad you understand.” And she did seem to understand the most important thing about my work, which is that I’d lived through something, as though I’d saved a child from drowning. That room was a debriefing room. It was also the room where a potter from New York, as small-shouldered and full-bottomed as her own vases, told me, “I was a math major six years ago, until the day I saw some Japanese porcelains and decided to pot. I was a complete klutz. I threw pots for three years, night and day, before I could get one even to stand up. Any kid at arts-and-crafts camp was better than me. I’d cry and hit myself out of anger.” “And now?” I asked, eager for the sequel. She shrugged and, opening her hands as though to show four aces, radiated all the uncomplicated happiness of a self-made genius. I envied her in a knotted way it took me a moment to untie. Yes, envied her clear picture of what she wanted to make and her strength in submitting to a discipline she’d invented. I wasn’t like her. Everybody said I was intelligent, but I feared I wasn’t artistic. Unlike the potter, I had lots of facility but no goal and very little taste. My mother had convinced me I was or would be “brilliant,” and her belief in me kept me writing. But I didn’t trust my own instincts. I didn’t know what I ought to feel. Just as school was ending, Maria drove up in her old station wagon to stay with me for a few days. She brought a bottle of Armagnac, a carton of cigarettes, and Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, which she finally hurled across the room in exasperation.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  Christina expected her values to be tested when she entered college. “I knew I’d have to stick to my morals,” she said. “If I didn’t want to drink, I wasn’t going to do that. If I didn’t want to have sex with someone, I wasn’t going to do that.” Within a couple of months, though, she began to, as she called it, “loosen up”: venturing out to parties, having a drink or two, making out with boys on the dance floor. “I guess I kind of did glamorize all that,” she admitted. “I think I kind of envied the freedom of these girls who didn’t have a lot of rules set up for them. I wanted to know what that felt like.” At one of those parties, early in the fall of her sophomore year, she met Ethan, a tall, gentle boy who, like her, was from a conservative community. They talked all evening, and found they enjoyed each other’s company. At first she was hesitant to enter into a relationship, but within a month or so, they were dating exclusively, and by the end of October, they began having sex. “It was just very natural,” Christina said. “I wanted to get to know him in that way, and he wanted to get to know me in that way. There was no pressure. It was totally my decision and all very partner-y.” Which is exactly how one would hope girls’ experience of intercourse would be. Could that care and concern for a partner have been an unintended by-product of her conservative education? Was it simply because she was older than many girls at first intercourse? It’s hard to say. Christina did credit her school with teaching an overarching ethic of kindness and respect for others—though apparently that didn’t preclude people teasing her about her race. She also believed that since sex was off the table, boys in her class were forced, for the most part, to see girls as something other than sex objects. At the same time, that education left her especially insecure and ignorant about her body and its responses. “I didn’t know anything before I got to college,” she said. “I had no idea what a clitoris was. And there’s still so much I don’t know.” Like what? I asked. “Well,” she said slowly, “I worry about what’s ‘normal’ in sex, but you can’t ask because everyone is different. So I can’t . . .” Christina trailed off. “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s ‘normal’ for me. Like . . .” She hesitated again and then looked at me shyly. “Like is it normal never to have orgasms?”

• From How to Deal with Angry People (2023)

  needs were more than met. She was clothed and fed and sheltered. Her parents had high standards for achievement so she did well in school and they helped pay for her advanced education. At the same time, though, Simone was suffering pretty severe emotional abuse and neglect. She was never allowed to express negative emotions. Her parents were alcoholics who hadn’t intended to have her, and her father was the victim of horrendous child abuse when he was young. They got sober when she was five years old, but they were young when she was born and “didn’t know what they were doing.” She said to me, “I wasn’t allowed to have any of my feelings.” She was a sensitive and smart kid who questioned everything, and she thinks this made her dad uncomfortable. He wanted to feel like he was succeeding as a parent and that meant having well-behaved children who were under his control. “As long as he could control his children and we showed the world how obedient, well- behaved, and quiet we were, he was succeeding and winning at life.” He controlled them through “terror and gaslighting.” She wasn’t allowed to have any of the normal emotions of a child. Any time she was upset about anything, she was punished. She was scolded for showing any form of negative emotion. “Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about,” he would say. At the same time, he had essentially weaponized the abuse he had experienced as a child to justify his emotional abuse and neglect of her, telling her she didn’t have it nearly as bad as he did and so she shouldn’t complain. As an adult, Simone is doing the work of dealing with all this. She’s in therapy, working through her discomfort with conflict and her anger problems. She said to me that, “in a perfect world, people have done the work to not be insensitive, invalidating, and dismissive.” She wants to feel understood more than anything else. “So much of my childhood was feeling that nobody understood,” she told me. What she really wants is for people to be honest with her and to listen to her. The Emotions of Infants

• From Another Country (1962)

  3On the Wednesday afternoon that Ida went off to see Ellis, Cass called Vivaldo at the midtown bookshop where he worked and asked if she could buy him a drink when his day was over. The sound of her voice, swift, subdued, and unhappy, had the effect of jolting him out of his own bewilderment. He asked her to pick him up at the shop at six. She arrived at the exact time, wearing a green summer dress which made her look very young, carrying an absurdly large straw handbag. Her hair was pulled back and fell over her shoulders; and, for a moment, watching her push through the doors, both blurred and defined by the heavy sunlight, she looked like the Cass of his adolescence, of years ago. She had then been the most beautiful, the most golden girl on earth. And Richard had been the greatest, most beautiful man. She seemed terribly wound up—seemed to blaze, nearly, with some private, barely contained passion. She smiled at him, looking both young and weary; and for a moment he was faintly aware of her personal heat, her odor. “How are you, Vivaldo? It’s been rather a while since we’ve seen each other.” “I guess it has. And it’s been my fault. How are things with you?” She shrugged humorously, raising her hands like a child. “Oh. Up and down.” Then, after a moment, “Rather down right now.” She looked around the store. People were peering into bookshelves rather the way children peered in at the glass-enclosed fish in the aquarium. “Are you free? Can we leave now?” “Yes. I was just waiting for you.” He said good night to his employer and they walked into the scalding streets. They were in the Fifties, on the East Side. “Where shall we have this drink?” “I don’t care. Someplace with air conditioning. And without a TV set. I couldn’t care less about baseball.” They started walking uptown, and east, as though each wished to get as far away as possible from the world they knew and their responsibilities in it. The presence of others, walking past them, walking toward them, erupting rudely out of doorways and taxicabs, and springing up from the curbs, intruded painfully on their stillness and seemed to menace their connection. And each man or woman that passed seemed also to be carrying some intolerable burden; their private lives screamed from their hot and discontented faces. “On days like this,” Cass said, suddenly, “I remember what it was like—I think I remember—to be young, very young.” She looked up at him. “When everything, touching and tasting—everything—was so new, and even suffering was wonderful because it was so complete.” “That’s hindsight, Cass. I wouldn’t want to be that young again for anything on earth.”

• From Another Country (1962)

  At Twelfth Street and Seventh Avenue she made the driver carry her one block more, to the box office of the Loew’s Sheridan; then she paid him and walked out and actually climbed the stairs to the balcony of this hideous place of worship, and sat down. She lit a cigarette, glad of the darkness but not protected by it; and she watched the screen, but all she saw were the extraordinarily unconvincing wiggles of a girl whose name, incredibly enough, appeared to be Doris Day. She thought, irrelevantly, I never should come to movies, I can’t stand them, and then she began to cry. She wept looking straight ahead, this latter rain coming between her and James Cagney’s great, red face, which seemed, at least, thank heaven, to be beyond the possibilities of make-up. Then she looked at her watch, noting that it was exactly eight o’clock. Is that good or bad? she wondered idiotically—knowing, which was always part of her trouble, that she was being idiotic. My God, you’re thirty-four years old, go on downstairs and call him. But she forced herself to wait, wondering all the time if she were waiting too long or would be calling too early. Finally, during the heaviest of the wide screen’s technicolored stormy weather, she walked down the stairs and entered the phone booth. She dialed his number and got the answering service. She crawled back upstairs and found her seat again. But she could not bear the movie, which showed no signs of ever ending. At nine o’clock, she walked downstairs again, intending to walk and have a drink somewhere and go home. Home. And she dialed the number again. It rang once, twice; then the receiver was picked up; there was a silence. Then, in an aggressive drawl, “Hello?” She caught her breath. “Hello?” “Hello. Eric?” “Yes.” “Well, it’s me. Cass.” “Oh,” and then, quickly, “How are you, Cass, it’s good of you to call me. I’ve been sitting here trying to read this play and going out of my mind and feeling suicidal.” “I imagine,” she said, “that you may have been expecting this call.” For never let it be said, she thought, now really in the teeth of irreality and anguish, that I don’t lay my cards on the table. “What did you say, Cass?” But she knew, from the rhythm of his question, that he had understood her. “I said, ‘You may have been expecting this call.’ ” After a moment, he said, “Yes. In a way.” Then, “Where are you, Cass?” “I’m around the corner from your house. Can I come up?” “Please do.” “All right. I’ll be there in about five minutes.” “Okay. Oh, Cass—” “Yes?” “I haven’t got anything in the house to drink. If you’ll pick up a bottle of Scotch, I’ll pay you for it when you get here.” “Any special kind?” “Oh, I don’t care. Any kind you like.”

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  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. (Did he really think, as she averred, that he looked like a toad?) With eyes half-closed I could see him waiting, waiting on a street corner, or in the lobby of a semi-fashionable hotel, or in some outlandish café (in another incarnation), a café such as “Zum Hiddigeigei.” I always saw him dressed like a gentleman, with or without spats and cane. A sort of inconspicuous millionaire, fur trader or stockbroker, not the predatory type but, as the paunch indicated, the kind who prefers the good things of life to the almighty dollar. A man who once played the violin. A man of taste, indisputably. In brief, no dummox. Average perhaps, but not ordinary. Conspicuous by his inconspicuousness. Probably full of watermelon seeds and other pips. And saddled with an invalid wife, one he wouldn’t dream of hurting. (“Look, darling, see what I’ve brought you! Some Maatjes herring, some lachs, and a jar of pickled antlers from the reindeer land.”) And when he reads the opening pages, this pipsqueaking millionaire, will he exclaim: “Aha! I smell a rat!” Or, putting his wiry brains to sleep, will he simply murmur to himself: “A lovely piece of tripe, a romance out of the Dark Ages.” And our landlady, the good Mrs. Skolsky, what would she think if she had a squint at these pages? Would she wet her panties with excitement? Or would she hear music where there were only seismographic disturbances? (I could see her running to the synagogue looking for rams’ horns.) One day she and I have got to have it out, about the writing business. Either more strudels, more Sirota, or—the garrotte . If only I knew a little Yiddish! “Call me Reb!” Those were Sid Essen’s parting words. Such exquisite torture, this writing humbuggery! Bughouse reveries mixed with choking fits and what the Swedes call mardrömmen . Squat images roped with diamond tiaras. Baroque architecture. Cabalistic logarithms. Mezuzahs and prayer-wheels. Portentous phrases. (“Let no one,” said the auk, “look upon this man with favor!”) Skies of blue-green copper, filigreed with lacy striata; umbrella ribs, obscene graffiti. Balaam the ass licking his hind parts. Weasels spouting nonsense. A sow menstruating…. All because, as she once put it, I had “the chance of a lifetime.” Sometimes I sailed into it with huge black wings.

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

  Paul understood our very human tendency to live in denial, closing our eyes to the things in our lives that may need to change. Change is hard work, and we would rather stay as we are. But this is not how God has called us to live. He wants to help us control our minds and our desires so that we can be more like Him. He wants to help us discover His plan for relational satisfaction. But we can’t do this if we insist on keeping our eyes closed to the compromise that robs us of ultimate sexual and emotional fulfillment. To help you open your eyes to your own struggle for sexual and emotional integrity, I encourage you to take the following quiz. ARE YOU ENGAGED IN A BATTLE? Please put a checkmark in the Yes or No column in response to the following questions:

• From Another Country (1962)

  Her face would now be, forever, more mysterious and impenetrable than the face of any stranger. Strangers’ faces hold no secrets because the imagination does not invest them with any. But the face of a lover is an unknown precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment. She slept. He felt that she was sleeping partly in order to avoid him. He fell back on his pillow, staring up at the cracks in the ceiling. She was in his bed but she was far from him; she was with him and yet she was not with him. In some deep, secret place she watched herself, she held herself in check, she fought him. He felt that she had decided, long ago, precisely where the limits were, how much she could afford to give, and he had not been able to make her give a penny more. She made love to him as though it were a technique of pacification, a means to some other end. However she might wish to delight him, she seemed principally to wish to exhaust him; and to remain, above all, herself on the banks of pleasure the while she labored mightly to drown him in the tide. His pleasure was enough for her, she seemed to say, his pleasure was hers. But he wanted her pleasure to be his, for them to drown in the tide together. He had slept, but badly, aware of Ida’s body next to his, and aware of a failure more subtle than any he had known before. And his mind was troubled with questions which he had not before permitted to enter but whose hour, now, had struck. He wondered who had been with her before him; how many, how often, how long; what he, or they before him, had meant to her; and he wondered if her lover, or lovers, had been white or black. What difference does it make? he asked himself. What difference does any of it make? One or more, white or black—she would tell him one of these days. They would learn everything about each other, they had time, she would tell him. Would she? Or would she merely accept his secrets as she accepted his body, happy to be the vehicle of his relief? While offering in return (for she knew the rules) revelations intended to pacify and also intended to frustrate him; to frustrate, that is, any attempt on his part to strike deeper into that incredible country in which, like the princess of fairy tales, sealed in a high tower and guarded by beasts, bewitched and exiled, she paced her secret round of secret days.

• From Paul and Palestinian Judaism (40th Anniversary Edition) (2017)

  For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as refuse, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own, based on law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith; that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that if possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. (Phil. 3.4-12) But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a custodian; for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ's then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to promise. (Gal. 3.25-29) There are several things to be observed about these passages, and we shall resort to enumeration: 1. The verses in Galatians are in some sense the conclusion to the argument about whether righteousness comes by law or by faith (although the discussion of slavery and sonship continues into chapter 4). But in this clinching, concluding argument, the term righteousness drops out. What is received by faith is 'sonship', and sonship 'in Christ Jesus'. The language immediately becomes completely 'participationist': baptized into, put on, all one person, Christ's. In a similar way in Gal. 2 Paul had clinched the argument about righteousness by faith with participationist language: 'I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me ... ' (2.20). 2. In the Philippians passage we do have the righteousness/faith cor- respondence which many feel is the heart of Paul's theology, but here that correspondence hardly determines the meaning of the passage. The Christian righteousness (i.e. that which comes by faith, not by works of law) is given to one who is 'found in him' (Christ). It does not appear in this passage, as it does in the sequence of chapters in Romans, that righteousness is a pre- liminary status having to do with the overcoming of past transgressions, a The law and the human plight 505 status which leads to or makes possible 'life in Christ Jesus'.

• From Another Country (1962)

  “—–leaving so soon!” said Miss Wales. “And we never got a chance to talk!” “Vivaldo,” said Cass, “I’ll call you this week. Ida, I can’t call you, will you call me? Let’s get together.” “I’m waiting for a script from you, you bum,” said Ellis, “just as soon as you climb down out of that makeshift ivory tower. Nice meeting you, Miss Scott.” “He means it,” said Mrs. Ellis. “He really means it.” “I was happy to meet you both,” said Ingram, “very happy. Good luck with your novel.” Richard walked them to the door. “Are we still friends?” “Are you kidding? Of course, we’re still friends.” But he wondered if they were. The door closed behind them and they stood in the corridor, staring at each other. “Shall we go home?” he asked. She watched him, her eyes very large and dark. “You got anything to eat down there?” “No. But the stores are still open. We can get something.” She took his arm and they walked to the elevator. He rang the bell. He stared at her as though he could not believe his eyes. “Good,” she said. “We’ll get something and I’ll cook you a decent supper.” “I’m not very hungry,” he said. They heard the elevator door slam beneath them and the elevator began to rise. The smell of the chicken she had fried the night before still hung in the room, and the dishes were still in the sink. The wishbone lay drying on the table, surrounded by the sticky glasses out of which they had drunk beer, and by their sticky coffee cups. Her clothes were thrown over a chair, his were mainly on the floor. He had awakened, she was asleep. She slept on her side, her dark head turned away from him, making no sound. He leaned up a little and watched her face. Her face would now be, forever, more mysterious and impenetrable than the face of any stranger. Strangers’ faces hold no secrets because the imagination does not invest them with any. But the face of a lover is an unknown precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.

• From Another Country (1962)

  He sighed, smiled. “Hell, I just want to be friends.” She laughed. “Oh, Vivaldo.” “You and I are friends,” he said. “Well—yes. But I’ve always been the wife of a friend of yours. So you never thought of me—” “Sexually,” he said. Then he grinned. “Don’t be so sure.” She flushed, at once annoyed and pleased. “I’m not talking about your fantasies.” “I’ve always admired you,” he said soberly, “and envied Richard.” “Well,” she said, “you’d better get over that.” He said nothing. She rattled the ice around in his empty glass. “Well,” he said, “what am I going to do with it? I’m not a monk, I’m tired of running uptown and paying for it——” “For it’s uptown that you run,” she said, with a smile. “What a good American you are.” This angered him. “I haven’t said they were any better than white chicks.” Then he laughed. “Maybe I better cut the damn thing off.” “Don’t be such a baby. Really. You should hear yourself.” “You’re telling me someone’s going to come along who needs it? Needs me?” “I’m not telling you anything,” she said, shortly, “that you don’t already know.” They heard Richard’s study door open. “I’ll fix you another drink; you might as well get good and drunk.” She bumped into Richard in the hall. He was carrying the manuscript. “Do you want a drink now?” “Love one,” he said, and walked into the living room. From the kitchen she heard their voices, a little too loud, a little too friendly. When she came back into the living room, Vivaldo was leafing through the manuscript. Richard stood by the window. “Just read it,” he was saying, “don’t go thinking about Dostoievski and all that. It’s just a book—a pretty good book.” She handed Richard his drink. “It’s a very good book,” she said. She put Vivaldo’s drink on the table beside him. She was surprised and yet not surprised to realize that she was worried about the effect on Richard of Vivaldo’s opinion. “The next book, though, will be better,” Richard said. “And very different.” Vivaldo put the manuscript down and sipped his drink. “Well,” he said, with a grin, “I’ll read it just as soon as I sober up. Whenever,” he added, grimly, “that may be.” “And tell me the truth, you hear? You bastard.” Vivaldo looked at him. “I’ll tell you the truth.” Years ago, Vivaldo had brought his manuscripts to Richard with almost exactly the same words. She moved away from them both and lit a cigarette. Then she heard the elevator door open and close and she looked at the clock. It was four. She looked at Vivaldo. The bell rang. “There she is,” said Cass. She and Vivaldo stared at each other. “Take it easy,” Richard said. “What’re you looking so tragic about?” “Richard,” she said, “that must be Rufus’s sister.” “Well, go let her in. Don’t leave her waiting in the hall.” As he spoke, the bell rang again.

• From Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir (2017)

  Though there are customers in the store demanding attention, my father knows that this is a man not to be kept waiting. He phones my mother—we live in a small flat above the store—and, out of earshot of the stranger, tells her in Yiddish to rush downstairs. She appears a few minutes later and efficiently waits on the customers while my father leads the stranger into the tiny storage room in the back of the store. They sit down on cases of empty beer bottles and talk. Mercifully no rats or roaches make an appearance. My father is obviously uncomfortable. He would have much preferred for my mother to do the talking, but it would be unseemly to acknowledge publicly that it was she, not he, who ran things, who made all the important family decisions. The man in the suit tells my father remarkable things. “The teachers in my school say that your son, Irvin, is an extraordinary student and has the potential to make an outstanding contribution to our society. But that would happen if, and only if, he were provided a good education.” My father seems frozen, his handsome, penetrating eyes fixed on the stranger, who continues, “Now the Washington, DC, school system is well run and is quite satisfactory for the average student but it is not the place for your son, for a very gifted student.” He opens his briefcase and hands my father a list of several private DC schools and proclaims, “I urge you to send him to one of these schools for the rest of his education.” He takes a card out of his wallet and hands it to my father. “If you contact me, I’ll do all I can to help him obtain a scholarship. ” Upon seeing my father’s bewilderment, he explains, “I’ll try to get some help to pay his tuition—these schools are not free like the public schools. Please, for your son’s sake, give this your highest priority. ” Cut! The daydream always ends at this point. My imagination balks at completing the scene. I never see my father’s response, or his ensuing discussion with my mother. The daydream expresses my longing to be rescued. When I was a child I didn’t like my life, my neighborhood, my school, my playmates—I wanted to be rescued and in this fantasy I am, for the first time, recognized as special by a significant emissary of the outside world, the world beyond the cultural ghetto in which I was raised. I look back now and see this fantasy of rescue and elevation throughout my writing. In the third chapter of my novel The Spinoza Problem , Spinoza, while strolling to the home of his teacher, Franciscus van den Enden, loses himself in a daydream that recounts their first meeting a few months earlier.

• From Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir (2017)

  During the summer school vacations, they were wise to keep me off the dangerous streets (and out of their hair) by sending me, at considerable expense, from the age of seven onward, to summer camps in Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, or New Hampshire. The enormous reception hall on the library main floor inspired such awe that I tiptoed as I moved through it. In the very center of the first floor stood a massive bookcase housing biographies, in alphabetical order by subject. Only after I had circled it a great many times did I work up the nerve to approach the officious librarian for guidance. Without a word, she shushed me with a forefinger over her lips and pointed to the great marble circular stairway leading to the children’s section on the second floor where I belonged. Crestfallen, I followed her instructions, but nevertheless, each time I came to the library I continued to case the biography bookcase, and at some point I developed a plan: I would read one biography a week, beginning with a person whose name started with “A,” and work my way through the alphabet. I started with Henry Armstrong, a lightweight boxing champion of the 1930s. From the B’s I remember Juan Belmonte, the gifted matador of the early nineteenth century, and Francis Bacon, the Renaissance scholar. There was C for Ty Cobb, E for Thomas Edison, G for Lou Gehrig and Hetty Green (“The Witch of Wall Street”), and so on. In the J’s I discovered Edward Jenner, who became my hero for having eliminated smallpox. In the K’s I met Genghis Khan, and for weeks I wondered whether Jenner had saved more lives than Genghis Khan had destroyed. The K’s also housed Paul de Kruif’s Microbe Hunters , which inspired me to read many books about the microscopic world; the following year, I worked on weekends as a soda jerk at Peoples Drug Store and saved enough money to buy a polished brass microscope, which I own to this day. The N’s offered me Red Nichols, the trumpet player, and introduced me also to a weird dude named Friedrich Nietzsche. The P’s led me to Saint Paul and Sam Patch, the first to survive a plunge over Niagara Falls. I recall ending my biography project at the T’s, where I discovered Albert Payson Terhune. I got sidetracked in the weeks that followed devouring his many books about such extraordinary collies as Lad and Lassie. Today I know I suffered no harm from this haphazard reading pattern, no harm from being the only child of ten or eleven in the world who knew so much about Hetty Green or Sam Patch, but still, what a waste! I yearned for some adult, some mainstream American mentor, someone like the man in the seersucker suit who would enter my father’s grocery store and announce that I was a lad of great promise.

• From Another Country (1962)

  For a moment it really seemed that LeRoy was going to refuse, for his scowl deepened. Then a faint smile touched his lips. “Okay. But I can’t walk far. I got to get back.” They began to walk. “I want to get out of this town,” Eric said, suddenly. “You and me both,” said LeRoy. “Maybe we can go North together,” Eric said, after a moment, “where do you think’s best? New York? or Chicago? or maybe San Francisco?” He had wanted to say Hollywood, because he had a dim notion of trying to become a movie star. But he could not really imagine LeRoy as a movie star, and he did not want to seem to want anything LeRoy could not have. “I can’t be thinking about leaving. I got my Ma and all them kids to worry about.” He looked at Eric and laughed, but it was not an entirely pleasant laugh. “Ain’t everybody’s old man runs a bank, you know.” He picked up a pebble and threw it at a tree. “Hell, my old man don’t give me no money. He certainly won’t give me any money to go North. He wants me to stay right here.” “He going to die one day, Eric, he going to have to leave it to somebody, now who you think it’s going to be? Me?” And he laughed again. “Well, I’m not going to hang around here the rest of my life, waiting for my papa to die. That’s certainly not much to look forward to.” And he tried to laugh, to match his tone to LeRoy’s. But he did not really understand LeRoy’s tone. What was wrong between them today? For it was no longer merely the world—there was something unspoken between them, something unspeakable, undone, and hideously desired. And yet, on that far-off, burning day, though this knowledge clamored in him and fell all around him, like the sun, and everything in him was aching and yearning for the act, he could not, to save his soul, have named it. It had yet to reach the threshold of his imagination; and it had no name, no name for him anyway, though for other people, so he had heard, it had dreadful names. It had only a shape and the shape was LeRoy and LeRoy contained the mystery which had him by the throat. And he put his arm around LeRoy’s shoulder and rubbed the top of his head against LeRoy’s chin.

• From Another Country (1962)

  For a moment it really seemed that LeRoy was going to refuse, for his scowl deepened. Then a faint smile touched his lips. “Okay. But I can’t walk far. I got to get back.” They began to walk. “I want to get out of this town,” Eric said, suddenly. “You and me both,” said LeRoy. “Maybe we can go North together,” Eric said, after a moment, “where do you think’s best? New York? or Chicago? or maybe San Francisco?” He had wanted to say Hollywood, because he had a dim notion of trying to become a movie star. But he could not really imagine LeRoy as a movie star, and he did not want to seem to want anything LeRoy could not have. “I can’t be thinking about leaving. I got my Ma and all them kids to worry about.” He looked at Eric and laughed, but it was not an entirely pleasant laugh. “Ain’t everybody’s old man runs a bank, you know.” He picked up a pebble and threw it at a tree. “Hell, my old man don’t give me no money. He certainly won’t give me any money to go North. He wants me to stay right here.” “He going to die one day, Eric, he going to have to leave it to somebody, now who you think it’s going to be? Me?” And he laughed again. “Well, I’m not going to hang around here the rest of my life, waiting for my papa to die. That’s certainly not much to look forward to.” And he tried to laugh, to match his tone to LeRoy’s. But he did not really understand LeRoy’s tone. What was wrong between them today? For it was no longer merely the world—there was something unspoken between them, something unspeakable, undone, and hideously desired. And yet, on that far-off, burning day, though this knowledge clamored in him and fell all around him, like the sun, and everything in him was aching and yearning for the act, he could not, to save his soul, have named it. It had yet to reach the threshold of his imagination; and it had no name, no name for him anyway, though for other people, so he had heard, it had dreadful names. It had only a shape and the shape was LeRoy and LeRoy contained the mystery which had him by the throat. And he put his arm around LeRoy’s shoulder and rubbed the top of his head against LeRoy’s chin.

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  Passing hence from infancy, I came to boyhood, or rather it came to me, displacing infancy. Nor did that depart,—(for whither went it?)—and yet it was no more. For I was no longer a speechless infant, but a speaking boy. This I remember; and have since observed how I learned to speak. It was not that my elders taught me words (as, soon after, other learning) in any set method; but I, longing by cries and broken accents and various motions of my limbs to express my thoughts, that so I might have my will, and yet unable to express all I willed, or to whom I willed, did myself, by the understanding which Thou, my God, gavest me, practise the sounds in my memory. When they named any thing, and as they spoke turned towards it, I saw and remembered that they called what they would point out by the name they uttered. And that they meant this thing and no other was plain from the motion of their body, the natural language, as it were, of all nations, expressed by the countenance, glances of the eye, gestures of the limbs, and tones of the voice, indicating the affections of the mind, as it pursues, possesses, rejects, or shuns. And thus by constantly hearing words, as they occurred in various sentences, I collected gradually for what they stood; and having broken in my mouth to these signs, I thereby gave utterance to my will. Thus I exchanged with those about me these current signs of our wills, and so launched deeper into the stormy intercourse of human life, yet depending on parental authority and the beck of elders.

• From Little Women (1868)

  "The good lady next door says he is studying too hard and needs young society, amusement, and exercise. I suspect she is right, and that I've been coddling the fellow as if I'd been his grandmother. Let him do what he likes, as long as he is happy. He can't get into mischief in that little nunnery over there, and Mrs. March is doing more for him than we can." What good times they had, to be sure. Such plays and tableaux, such sleigh rides and skating frolics, such pleasant evenings in the old parlor, and now and then such gay little parties at the great house. Meg could walk in the conservatory whenever she liked and revel in bouquets, Jo browsed over the new library voraciously, and convulsed the old gentleman with her criticisms, Amy copied pictures and enjoyed beauty to her heart's content, and Laurie played 'lord of the manor' in the most delightful style. But Beth, though yearning for the grand piano, could not pluck up courage to go to the 'Mansion of Bliss', as Meg called it. She went once with Jo, but the old gentleman, not being aware of her infirmity, stared at her so hard from under his heavy eyebrows, and said "Hey!" so loud, that he frightened her so much her 'feet chattered on the floor', she never told her mother, and she ran away, declaring she would never go there any more, not even for the dear piano. No persuasions or enticements could overcome her fear, till, the fact coming to Mr. Laurence's ear in some mysterious way, he set about mending matters. During one of the brief calls he made, he artfully led the conversation to music, and talked away about great singers whom he had seen, fine organs he had heard, and told such charming anecdotes that Beth found it impossible to stay in her distant corner, but crept nearer and nearer, as if fascinated. At the back of his chair she stopped and stood listening, with her great eyes wide open and her cheeks red with excitement of this unusual performance. Taking no more notice of her than if she had been a fly, Mr. Laurence talked on about Laurie's lessons and teachers. And presently, as if the idea had just occurred to him, he said to Mrs. March... "The boy neglects his music now, and I'm glad of it, for he was getting too fond of it. But the piano suffers for want of use. Wouldn't some of your girls like to run over, and practice on it now and then, just to keep it in tune, you know, ma'am?" Beth took a step forward, and pressed her hands tightly together to keep from clapping them, for this was an irresistible temptation, and the thought of practicing on that splendid instrument quite took her breath away. Before Mrs. March could reply, Mr. Laurence went on with an odd little nod and smile...

• From Little Women (1868)

  I do wonder if any of us will ever get our wishes," said Laurie, chewing grass like a meditative calf. "I've got the key to my castle in the air, but whether I can unlock the door remains to be seen," observed Jo mysteriously. "I've got the key to mine, but I'm not allowed to try it. Hang college!" muttered Laurie with an impatient sigh. "Here's mine!" and Amy waved her pencil. "I haven't got any," said Meg forlornly. "Yes, you have," said Laurie at once. "Where?" "In your face." "Nonsense, that's of no use." "Wait and see if it doesn't bring you something worth having," replied the boy, laughing at the thought of a charming little secret which he fancied he knew. Meg colored behind the brake, but asked no questions and looked across the river with the same expectant expression which Mr. Brooke had worn when he told the story of the knight. "If we are all alive ten years hence, let's meet, and see how many of us have got our wishes, or how much nearer we are then than now," said Jo, always ready with a plan. "Bless me! How old I shall be, twenty-seven!" exclaimed Meg, who felt grown up already, having just reached seventeen. "You and I will be twenty-six, Teddy, Beth twenty-four, and Amy twenty-two. What a venerable party!" said Jo. "I hope I shall have done something to be proud of by that time, but I'm such a lazy dog, I'm afraid I shall dawdle, Jo." "You need a motive, Mother says, and when you get it, she is sure you'll work splendidly." "Is she? By Jupiter, I will, if I only get the chance!" cried Laurie, sitting up with sudden energy. "I ought to be satisfied to please Grandfather, and I do try, but it's working against the grain, you see, and comes hard. He wants me to be an India merchant, as he was, and I'd rather be shot. I hate tea and silk and spices, and every sort of rubbish his old ships bring, and I don't care how soon they go to the bottom when I own them. Going to college ought to satisfy him, for if I give him four years he ought to let me off from the business. But he's set, and I've got to do just as he did, unless I break away and please myself, as my father did. If there was anyone left to stay with the old gentleman, I'd do it tomorrow." Laurie spoke excitedly, and looked ready to carry his threat into execution on the slightest provocation, for he was growing up very fast and, in spite of his indolent ways, had a young man's hatred of subjection, a young man's restless longing to try the world for himself.