Admiration

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 My Life on the Road (2015)

  Sure enough, Ho Chi Minh was once a cabin boy on a French freighter. Historians believe he left this job to stay for a while in Manhattan, Brooklyn, maybe also Boston. That was between 1912 and 1918, a time when Trotsky and many other revolutionaries came here. Though America was the home of racism and capitalism, it also had waged the biggest successful anticolonial revolution. Ho was said to have worked as a pastry chef, maybe a photographer as he later did in Paris, but most of all, he kept writing and agitating for his country’s independence. By the end of World War I, Ho had become a recognized leader of independence for his country. That made him a criminal in the eyes of the French, who condemned him to death in absentia. He had so many aliases that when he finally became the leader of North Vietnam, the French recognized him in a photo only by his ears. Yet in 1919 he put on a rented suit and a bowler hat, went to the Versailles Peace Conference, and gave President Woodrow Wilson a petition for the independence of Indochina, based on our own Declaration of Independence. There was no reply. After World War II, he delivered yet another petition to President Truman. Still no reply. For the first issue of New York magazine I write an article called “Ho Chi Minh in New York.” Clay Felker, its founding editor, accepts it on shock value alone. After all, Ho Chi Minh is the enemy leader in an ongoing war that is dividing our own country. In an effort to check facts, I send Ho Chi Minh a telegram. This is surrealism itself. The Western Union operator asks, “Do you have a street address in Hanoi, honey?” Finally, she agrees that “Presidential Palace” is probably enough, “what with the war and all.” I think we both envision this telegram in our FBI files. I get no answer, but thanks to a kindhearted woman in the French consulate, I confirm that the French freighter on which Ho worked did indeed dock in New York. Despite his different revolutionary aliases, I find a reference to two years he spent living in New York around the time of World War I. I also talk to journalist David Schoenbrun, who interviewed Ho during World War II and heard him speak with knowledge and affection about New York City. Other American journalists who met him later in Hanoi say that he often ended their interviews by asking nostalgically, “Tell me, how is New York?” I even find his photo in what is said to be Harlem, though the black neighborhood then would have been the Sugar Hill district above 145th Street. There, Marcus Garvey spoke about black pride and anticolonialism, and leaders from Asia, Africa, and Haiti came to listen.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  The family house had burned down years before, but they camped in their car by a lake near the ancestral land that her father had refused to sell, no matter how broke he was. Wilma and her daughters swam, caught fish, and harvested wild foods as she had done as a child. They learned to tell time by the sun, played Scrabble by lantern light, and listened to music from a portable radio by the campfire. Far from feeling insecure with no money and no home, Wilma said she felt free for the first time since she had left there. It made me realize how deep her connection to the land was. Later, she found an abandoned house nearby, made it into a makeshift home, and applied for an entry-level job at the Cherokee Nation in Tahlequah. Several rejections later, she was hired as a writer of funding proposals. She not only worked harder than anyone else but began to prove her unique gift as an organizer. By respecting and expecting self-authority in others, she drew people out of passivity and despair. It was the beginning of her long and rocky path to leadership. Three years later Wilma was driving on a deserted country road and suffered a head-on collision with another car. Her body was crushed, and she barely survived. She wasn’t told until later that the driver of the other car was a woman friend—who had died instantly. Wilma was in a wheelchair for what was supposed to be the rest of her life. Only after seventeen surgeries—plus a bout with myasthenia gravis, a weakening neuromuscular disease—did she walk again. Even then, she had to wear a metal brace from knee to ankle on one leg, suffered swelling and pain, and needed specially constructed shoes. All this had happened long before we met. Her flowing skirts concealed the brace, and her calm concealed the pain. I never would have guessed any of it. Together with Charlie Soap, a full-blooded Cherokee who also worked for the Nation—and who was fluent in Cherokee, as Wilma was not—she took on what was seen as an impossible project: trying to make positive change for the residents of Bell, an isolated rural community of three hundred families. It was such a place of poverty and despair that even people who escaped were ashamed to say they ever lived there. 16 Because Wilma was patient, respectful, listened, and understood that people could only gain confidence by making decisions for themselves, she slowly persuaded families to trust her enough to come to a community meeting and decide what they needed most. Wilma thought it might be a school, but they chose something that would help everyone, young and old: running water. They had been surviving with one pump by carrying pails every day.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Yes, this is a monument he is setting up here,” said Anna, turning to Dolly with that sly smile of comprehension with which she had previously talked about the hospital. “Oh, it’s a work of real importance!” said Sviazhsky. But to show he was not trying to ingratiate himself with Vronsky, he promptly added some slightly critical remarks. “I wonder, though, count,” he said, “that while you do so much for the health of the peasants, you take so little interest in the schools.” “_C’est devenu tellement commun les écoles,_” said Vronsky. “You understand it’s not on that account, but it just happens so, my interest has been diverted elsewhere. This way then to the hospital,” he said to Darya Alexandrovna, pointing to a turning out of the avenue. The ladies put up their parasols and turned into the side path. After going down several turnings, and going through a little gate, Darya Alexandrovna saw standing on rising ground before her a large pretentious-looking red building, almost finished. The iron roof, which was not yet painted, shone with dazzling brightness in the sunshine. Beside the finished building another had been begun, surrounded by scaffolding. Workmen in aprons, standing on scaffolds, were laying bricks, pouring mortar out of vats, and smoothing it with trowels. “How quickly work gets done with you!” said Sviazhsky. “When I was here last time the roof was not on.” “By the autumn it will all be ready. Inside almost everything is done,” said Anna. “And what’s this new building?” “That’s the house for the doctor and the dispensary,” answered Vronsky, seeing the architect in a short jacket coming towards him; and excusing himself to the ladies, he went to meet him. Going round a hole where the workmen were slaking lime, he stood still with the architect and began talking rather warmly. “The front is still too low,” he said to Anna, who had asked what was the matter. “I said the foundation ought to be raised,” said Anna. “Yes, of course it would have been much better, Anna Arkadyevna,” said the architect, “but now it’s too late.” “Yes, I take a great interest in it,” Anna answered Sviazhsky, who was expressing his surprise at her knowledge of architecture. “This new building ought to have been in harmony with the hospital. It was an afterthought, and was begun without a plan.” Vronsky, having finished his talk with the architect, joined the ladies, and led them inside the hospital. Although they were still at work on the cornices outside and were painting on the ground floor, upstairs almost all the rooms were finished. Going up the broad cast-iron staircase to the landing, they walked into the first large room. The walls were stuccoed to look like marble, the huge plate-glass windows were already in, only the parquet floor was not yet finished, and the carpenters, who were planing a block of it, left their work, taking off the bands that fastened their hair, to greet the gentry.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  The dinner, the dining-room, the service, the waiting at table, the wine, and the food, were not simply in keeping with the general tone of modern luxury throughout all the house, but seemed even more sumptuous and modern. Darya Alexandrovna watched this luxury which was novel to her, and as a good housekeeper used to managing a household—although she never dreamed of adapting anything she saw to her own household, as it was all in a style of luxury far above her own manner of living—she could not help scrutinizing every detail, and wondering how and by whom it was all done. Vassenka Veslovsky, her husband, and even Sviazhsky, and many other people she knew, would never have considered this question, and would have readily believed what every well-bred host tries to make his guests feel, that is, that all that is well-ordered in his house has cost him, the host, no trouble whatever, but comes of itself. Darya Alexandrovna was well aware that even porridge for the children’s breakfast does not come of itself, and that therefore, where so complicated and magnificent a style of luxury was maintained, someone must give earnest attention to its organization. And from the glance with which Alexey Kirillovitch scanned the table, from the way he nodded to the butler, and offered Darya Alexandrovna her choice between cold soup and hot soup, she saw that it was all organized and maintained by the care of the master of the house himself. It was evident that it all rested no more upon Anna than upon Veslovsky. She, Sviazhsky, the princess, and Veslovsky, were equally guests, with light hearts enjoying what had been arranged for them. Anna was the hostess only in conducting the conversation. The conversation was a difficult one for the lady of the house at a small table with persons present, like the steward and the architect, belonging to a completely different world, struggling not to be overawed by an elegance to which they were unaccustomed, and unable to sustain a large share in the general conversation. But this difficult conversation Anna directed with her usual tact and naturalness, and indeed she did so with actual enjoyment, as Darya Alexandrovna observed. The conversation began about the row Tushkevitch and Veslovsky had taken alone together in the boat, and Tushkevitch began describing the last boat races in Petersburg at the Yacht Club. But Anna, seizing the first pause, at once turned to the architect to draw him out of his silence. “Nikolay Ivanitch was struck,” she said, meaning Sviazhsky, “at the progress the new building had made since he was here last; but I am there every day, and every day I wonder at the rate at which it grows.”

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  I knew Hillary Clinton mostly in the way we all do, as a public figure in good times and bad, one who became part of our lives and even our dreams. I once introduced her to a thousand women in a hotel ballroom at a breakfast in New York City. Standing behind her as she spoke, I could see the White House binder on the lectern with her speech carefully laid out—and also that she wasn’t reading from it. Instead, she was responding to people who had spoken before her, addressing activists and leaders she saw in the audience, and putting their work in a national and global context—all in such clear and graceful sentences that no one would have guessed she hadn’t written them in advance. It was an on-the-spot tour de force, perhaps the best I’ve ever heard. But what clinched it for me was listening to her speak after a performance of Eve Ensler’s play Necessary Targets, based on interviews with women in one of the camps set up to treat women who had endured unspeakable suffering, humiliation, and torture in the ethnic wars within the former Yugoslavia. To speak to an audience that had just heard these heartbreaking horrors seemed impossible for anyone, and Hillary had the added burden of representing the Clinton administration, which had been criticized for slowness in stopping this genocide. Nonetheless, she rose in the silence, with no possibility of preparing, and began to speak quietly—about suffering, about the importance of serving as witnesses to suffering. Most crucial of all, she admitted this country’s slowness in intervening. By the time she sat down, she had brought the audience together and given us all a shared meeting place: the simple truth. So when she left the White House and decided to run for the U.S. Senate from her new home in New York State—something no First Lady, not even Eleanor Roosevelt, had dared to do—I was blindsided by the hostility toward her from some women. They called her cold, calculating, ambitious, and even “unfeminist” for using political experience gained as a wife. These were not the right-wing extremists who had accused the Clintons of everything from perpetrating real estate scams in Arkansas to murdering a White House aide with whom Hillary supposedly had an affair. On the contrary, they mostly agreed with her on the issues, yet some were so opposed to her that they came to be called Hillary Haters. It took me weeks of listening on the road to begin to understand why. In living rooms from Dallas to Chicago, I noticed that the Hillary Haters often turned out to be the women most like her: white, well educated, and married to or linked with powerful men. They were by no means all such women, but their numbers were still surprising.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  At tea the same pleasant sort of talk, full of interesting matter, continued. There was not a single instant when a subject for conversation was to seek; on the contrary, it was felt that one had hardly time to say what one had to say, and eagerly held back to hear what the others were saying. And all that was said, not only by her, but by Vorkuev and Stepan Arkadyevitch—all, so it seemed to Levin, gained peculiar significance from her appreciation and her criticism. While he followed this interesting conversation, Levin was all the time admiring her—her beauty, her intelligence, her culture, and at the same time her directness and genuine depth of feeling. He listened and talked, and all the while he was thinking of her inner life, trying to divine her feelings. And though he had judged her so severely hitherto, now by some strange chain of reasoning he was justifying her and was also sorry for her, and afraid that Vronsky did not fully understand her. At eleven o’clock, when Stepan Arkadyevitch got up to go (Vorkuev had left earlier), it seemed to Levin that he had only just come. Regretfully Levin too rose. “Good-bye,” she said, holding his hand and glancing into his face with a winning look. “I am very glad _que la glace est rompue._” She dropped his hand, and half closed her eyes. “Tell your wife that I love her as before, and that if she cannot pardon me my position, then my wish for her is that she may never pardon it. To pardon it, one must go through what I have gone through, and may God spare her that.” “Certainly, yes, I will tell her....” Levin said, blushing. Chapter 11 “What a marvelous, sweet and unhappy woman!” he was thinking, as he stepped out into the frosty air with Stepan Arkadyevitch. “Well, didn’t I tell you?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, seeing that Levin had been completely won over. “Yes,” said Levin dreamily, “an extraordinary woman! It’s not her cleverness, but she has such wonderful depth of feeling. I’m awfully sorry for her!” “Now, please God, everything will soon be settled. Well, well, don’t be hard on people in future,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, opening the carriage door. “Good-bye; we don’t go the same way.” Still thinking of Anna, of everything, even the simplest phrase in their conversation with her, and recalling the minutest changes in her expression, entering more and more into her position, and feeling sympathy for her, Levin reached home.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  the cloakroom, he always had a good joke to tell or some amusing anecdote. He had spent his early years in rural poverty, and although he was well educated, his language had some of the color and biting humor of the Texan farmer and migrant worker. The senators found him amusing. Even Tom Connally had to admit that he had somehow misread him. Older senators, referred to at the time as Old Bulls, particularly came to appreciate Lyndon Johnson. Although they held positions of great authority based on their seniority, they often felt insecure about their age (some were in their eighties) and their physical and mental capacities. But here was Johnson visiting their offices frequently, intent on absorbing their wisdom. One older Democratic senator in particular took to Johnson— Richard Russell of Georgia. He was only eleven years older than Johnson, but he had been serving in the Senate since 1933 and had become one of its most powerful members. They had gotten to know each other because Johnson had requested and received a seat on the Armed Services Committee, on which Russell was second in seniority. Russell crossed paths with Johnson in the cloakroom, in the corridors, on the Senate floor; he seemed to be everywhere. And although Johnson visited Russell in his office almost every day, Russell came to enjoy his presence. Like Russell, Johnson was mostly all business, and full of questions on arcane Senate procedures. He began to call Russell “the Old Master,” and he would often say, “Well, that’s a lesson from the Old Master. I’ll remember that.” Russell was one of the few senators who had remained a bachelor. He never admitted he was lonely, but he spent almost all of his time at his Senate office, even on Sundays. As Johnson would often be in Russell’s office discussing some matter until the evening, he would sometimes invite Russell over for dinner at his house, telling him that his wife, Lady Bird, was an excellent cook, particularly good with southern dishes. The first few times Russell politely refused, but finally he relented and he soon became a weekly regular at the Johnson house. Lady Bird was charming and he quickly took to her. Slowly the relationship between Russell and Johnson deepened. Russell was a baseball fanatic, and to his delight, Johnson confessed a weakness for the sport as well. Now they would go together to night games of the Washington Senators. A day would not pass in which they did not see each other, as the two of them would often be the only senators in their offices working on the weekends. They seemed to have so many interests in common, including the Civil War, and they thought alike on so many issues dear to southern Democrats, such as their opposition to a civil rights bill. Soon Russell could be heard touting the junior senator as “a can-do young man” with a capacity equal to his own for hard work.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  As Humphrey later wrote, “He’d come on just like a tidal wave sweeping all over the place. He went through walls. He’d come through a door and he’d take the whole room over.” Second, he had such invaluable information to share. He taught Humphrey all of the intricacies of Senate procedure and the knowledge he had accrued about the psychological weaknesses of various senators through close observation. He had become the greatest vote counter in the history of the Senate, able to predict the results of almost any Senate vote with astounding accuracy. He shared with Humphrey his vote-counting method. Finally, he taught Humphrey the power he could have by compromising, by being more pragmatic and less idealistic. He would share with him stories about FDR, Humphrey’s hero. When Johnson was in the House of Representatives, he had become close friends with the president. FDR, according to Johnson, was a consummate politician who knew how to get things done by retreating tactically and even compromising. The subtext here was that Johnson was really a closet liberal who also idolized FDR and who wanted just as much as Humphrey to pass a civil rights bill. They were both on the same side, fighting for the same noble causes. Working with Johnson, there was no limit to how high Humphrey could rise within the Senate and beyond. As Johnson had correctly guessed, Humphrey had presidential ambitions. Johnson himself could never become president, or so he said to Humphrey, because the nation was not ready for a president from the South. But he could help Humphrey get there. Together they would make an unbeatable team. What sealed the deal for Humphrey, however, was how Johnson proceeded to make his life easier within the Senate. Johnson talked to his fellow southern Democrats about Humphrey’s intelligence and humor, how they had misread him as a man. Having softened them up in this way, Johnson then reintroduced Humphrey to these senators, who found him charming. Most important of all, he got Russell to change his mind—and Russell could move mountains. Now that he was sharing drinks with the more powerful senators, Humphrey’s loneliness faded away. He felt compelled to return the favor and to get many northern liberals to change their minds about Johnson, whose influence was now beginning to spread like an invisible gas. In 1952 the Republicans swept into power with the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower as president, taking in the process control of the Senate and the House. One of the casualties in the election was Ernest McFarland of Arizona, the former Democratic leader in the Senate. Now that the leadership position was vacant, the scrambling for his replacement began. Johnson suggested that Russell himself take the position, but Russell declined. He could have more power operating behind the scenes. Instead he told Johnson he should be the next leader, and Russell could make it happen. Johnson, acting surprised, said he

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  She was saved by summers in the Smoky Mountains, where her Cherokee grandmother lived. There, Rebecca discovered a way of life that felt like home. Finally, she quit university to become the first staff member hired by the Coalition of Indian Controlled School Boards, a group with the huge goal of reforming schools that were abusing or shaming Indian children, whether they were run by religions, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, or local school boards. In Rebecca’s experience, this right to schools that didn’t shame and abuse was to become to Indian Country what registering and voting in the South was to African Americans—the beginning of a larger movement. Given the parallels of prejudice and power, Rebecca had her life threatened more than once. By the time I met her, she had finished college part time, earned an advanced degree in economics, and was advising the UN International Labor Organization plus indigenous groups in other countries. She had a gift for being understandable—a sure sign of a good organizer—and wrote an essay on reservation life with the concise title “Land Rich, Dirt Poor.” She also put her organizing goal into a four-word slogan for T-shirts: DEVELOPMENT—WITH VALUES ADDED. I wouldn’t fully understand how deep “values added” went until Rebecca asked me to come to a two-day meeting of activists near the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. My role was to bring knowledge of Gandhian village-level economics, plus the low-income and welfare women who had created their own family-friendly small businesses with the support of the Ms. Foundation. Otherwise, I had no idea what to expect. Our meeting took place in the small tribally owned motel next to South Dakota’s Badlands. The goal was to figure out how to create communal economic success in an individualistic economic world. For two full days and late into the nights, this casual, serious, idealistic, practical discussion went on. I noticed how carefully everyone listened and how little ego seemed invested in speaking. Every once in a while, Larry Emerson, a Navajo educator, and Birgil Kills Straight, the Lakota traditionalist from the Oglala Sioux Nation who had first hired Rebecca in the school movement, would speak, sometimes illustrating their comments on the blackboard; then they’d just listen again. Neither seemed to need to talk a lot, to show how much he knew, to approve or disapprove what others said, or to be in control. It took me a while to realize, These men talk only when they have something to say. I almost fell off my chair.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Larry Peebles had grown up in Los Angeles, where his own late father, also a doctor, had been my father’s best friend. He was writing because he had just vacationed in Latin America, bought a few gemstones, and had a Proustian memory of my father that set him to reminiscing on paper. He kindly wrote to give me an unknown part of my father’s life. I think I was Leo’s youngest pal. He was in his sixties when he died, and I was fifteen. My father, William Peebles, was his chief pal. I never saw my dad happier than when he was around Leo. I knew I was a lesser pal, but being a pal of Leo’s was the best. He treated everyone equally, he was not pretentious nor condescending. He was kind. And best of all, he was fun. He had lots of stories. My father gave the appearance of being sophisticated, but he was still a farm boy from Grande Prairie, Alberta. He ran away from home and an abusive father when he was fourteen and spent his formative years on the road. I think he and Leo, who was a salesman of sorts, liked being out in the world. They shared the awareness that’s only developed by being outside in a strange environment, anytime, day or night. I guess you’d call it street sense. When Dad came into money, he spent it. Leo helped him. He and Leo were constantly scheming to make money. Their mantra was “Never work for anyone else.” It was a game, and life was the playing field. While my dad was practicing medicine, they would plot between patients and after work. Saturdays I would ostensibly go to work. I would put pills in pillboxes and label them or develop X-rays. Sometimes I got to assist during minor surgeries. When Leo was there, I pretty much hung out with him in a small anteroom to my father’s office, with a private entrance. Leo was larger than life. He was a big man, over three hundred pounds. We would always start out the same way: I would call him “Mr. Steinem,” and he would look a little pained and say, “Call me Leo.” Not “Uncle Leo” or anything like that, just Leo. It was how I knew we were pals. When he told me to sit down, he always patted the couch next to him, looking furtively around the room. What was going to happen next was not for just anyone to see. He would start searching around in his suitcoat pockets, eventually coming out with gems. Diamonds, rubies, sapphires. Big ones, little ones. They were not in boxes, no wrappings of any kind. No settings, just loose in his pockets. He loved them. I loved them. We would carefully examine them. We would talk about them.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  As I got to know Bella, I learned that as a young lawyer she had taken a civil rights case so unpopular that she had been forced to sleep in bus stations in Mississippi. No hotel would give her shelter, and black families, while grateful for her intervention on behalf of Willie McGee, a black man accused of raping a white woman, would have been endangered. An all-white jury had sentenced him to death after deliberating two and a half minutes, and Bella pursued an appeal that delayed the death penalty. Yet after eight years in jail, he would be executed, still protesting his innocence. She was also a pioneer activist against nuclear testing, and a leader in the global women’s peace movement. Ironically, Bella was once rejected as a spokeswoman for Women Strike for Peace. Despite being happily married and the mother of two daughters, her image wasn’t “motherly” enough. Altogether she was a great example of expanding beyond the usual candidate supply lines, and into social justice movements. She didn’t just respond to public opinion; she changed it. She didn’t put her finger to the wind; she became the wind. She also had an ego as big as her heart, and believed, as did her husband, Martin Abzug, that she should be president. Yet she had a sense of humor about herself. When I was organizing fund-raisers for her in the same liberal suburbs that had supported Gene McCarthy, I had to tell her that her candidacy wasn’t being well received there. “Of course not,” she said. “I’m everything they moved to the suburbs to escape.” As the daughter of an immigrant Jewish butcher from the Bronx, she explained, she was a class step down, but McCarthy, a very un-Jewish silver-haired poet from Minnesota, was a class step up. She said this as cheerfully as she talked about beating boys at street marbles, or going to college on the subway with a liverwurst sandwich prepared by her mother for lunch, or loving the name of her father’s store, the Live and Let Live Butcher Shop. It was great to work with Bella. For one thing, I no longer had to give my suggestions to the man sitting next to me in order to have them taken seriously. For another, I wasn’t banished from strategy meetings by someone saying, “No broads.” Even walking in the street with her was an education. Truck drivers leaned out of their cabs to yell, “Give ’em hell, Bella!” Women stopped to say she made them feel proud. Neighbors asked if she could help them with a harassing landlord or a new child care center. In a very New York way, she reminded me of the Gandhians walking through villages. In that first congressional race, her opponent was Barry Farber, a conservative radio talk show host whose main asset was his ability to talk endlessly about anything.4 She beat him by going to supermarkets and subway stops, and listening as well as talking.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Younger and more diffident than Rayna and Wilma, she seemed to defeat her shyness by sheer force of will. Her gift for understanding everything from the most humble detail to the most challenging economic theory reminded me of that 1930s ideal, the working-class intellectual. Unlike Rayna and Wilma, Rebecca had grown up totally outside Indian Country. She was saved by summers in the Smoky Mountains, where her Cherokee grandmother lived. There, Rebecca discovered a way of life that felt like home. Finally, she quit university to become the first staff member hired by the Coalition of Indian Controlled School Boards, a group with the huge goal of reforming schools that were abusing or shaming Indian children, whether they were run by religions, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, or local school boards. In Rebecca’s experience, this right to schools that didn’t shame and abuse was to become to Indian Country what registering and voting in the South was to African Americans—the beginning of a larger movement. Given the parallels of prejudice and power, Rebecca had her life threatened more than once. By the time I met her, she had finished college part time, earned an advanced degree in economics, and was advising the UN International Labor Organization plus indigenous groups in other countries. She had a gift for being understandable—a sure sign of a good organizer—and wrote an essay on reservation life with the concise title “Land Rich, Dirt Poor.” She also put her organizing goal into a four-word slogan for T-shirts: DEVELOPMENT —WITH VALUES ADDED . I wouldn’t fully understand how deep “values added” went until Rebecca asked me to come to a two-day meeting of activists near the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. My role was to bring knowledge of Gandhian village-level economics, plus the low-income and welfare women who had created their own family-friendly small businesses with the support of the Ms. Foundation. Otherwise, I had no idea what to expect. Our meeting took place in the small tribally owned motel next to South Dakota’s Badlands. The goal was to figure out how to create communal economic success in an individualistic economic world. For two full days and late into the nights, this casual, serious, idealistic, practical discussion went on. I noticed how carefully everyone listened and how little ego seemed invested in speaking. Every once in a while, Larry Emerson, a Navajo educator, and Birgil Kills Straight, the Lakota traditionalist from the Oglala Sioux Nation who had first hired Rebecca in the school movement, would speak, sometimes illustrating their comments on the blackboard; then they’d just listen again. Neither seemed to need to talk a lot, to show how much he knew, to approve or disapprove what others said, or to be in control. It took me a while to realize, These men talk only when they have something to say. I almost fell off my chair. In those meetings, I learned that even economic diagrams needn’t be linear.

• From Querelle (1953)

  2.2 0 I JEAN GENET when he sold that package of opium, and also because he was a strong man. He could not help admiring the sailor's young and supple musculature. Querelle felt n o affection for Nona, but became aware of something else developing between them, joining him to Nona. Was it because Nona was older? He refused to a dmit that Nono dominated him by buggering him, although that could be part of it. After all, it is hardly pos.sible to engage, every day, in a game one regards as only �hat, an amorous game, without ending up being attached to it. But there was some other factor involved in the creation of this new feeling-which was really an atmosphere of relaxed complicity: it consisted of the forms, the gestures, the jewels, the looks of Madame Lysiane, and it inc luded those words she had said twice that very same evening: "My dear." However, after having been wiped out, in every sense, by the detective, Querelle had lost his taste for his games with Norbert. He had given him�elf one more time, out of habit, almost by accident, but-and Nona's pleasure, which had become too obvious in its manifestations, contributed to this change-he began to detest it. Nevertheless, as it seemed impossible to him to entirely extricate himself, he thought of secretly gaining some advantage of the situation and, first of all, of making Nono pay him for his favors. The patronne ' s smile and gestures seemed to indicate another, dimly perceived possi bility. The first idea Querelle abandoned fairly quickly. Norbert was not the kind of guy one could intimidate. We shall see how Querelle did not, however, completely forget the idea itself, and how he applied it to bring about Lieutenant Seblon's downfall. The newspapers were still discussing the Gil Turko case, "the double murder of Brest," and the police went on looking for the assassin whom the articles presented as a frightful monster whose cunning would enable him to evade justice for a long time yet. Gil's reputation became as hideous as that of Gilles d� Rais. As he could not be found, the population of Brest began

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  the other three, showing them to be of the chiefest order in their bearing, drew forward, dancing to their angelic roundelay. “Turn, Beatrice, turn thy holy eyes,” was their song, “to thy faithful one, who to see thee hath moved so many steps. Of thy grace do us the grace that thou unveil thy mouth to him, that he may discern the second beauty which thou hidest.”15 O glory of living eternal, who that so pale hath grown beneath the shade of Parnassus, or hath drunk at its well, that would not seem to have mind encumbered, on trying to render thee as thou appearedest, when in the free air thou didst disclose thee, where heaven in its harmony shadows thee forth? 1. The water of Lethe (see Canto xxviii and later in the present canto).2. good = God; others [goods] = worldly ideals.3. Confession, by softening the Divine wrath, blunts the edge of the sword of Justice. Cf. Canto viii, and the first interpretation given in note 3.4. It seems best not to attempt to identify the young damsel.5. Cf. Prov. i. 17, in the Vulgate.6. wind of ours—the wind blows from the north of Europe (the continent in which Italy is); the south wind comes from Africa, called “Iarbas’ land” from the Libyan king of that name, one of Dido’s suitors (see Æn. iv).7. The angels; cf. Inf. vii and Purg. xi.8. “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow” (Ps. li. 7).9. See Canto i, note 3 10. It is quite natural for those who argue that Beatrice is a purely allegorical character to insist on this passage as implying her pre-existence in heaven, before her incarnation as an earthly maiden. The passage, however, does not necessarily imply this, for it is only carrying a little further the familiar language employed by Dante in the Vita Nuova, § xxvi, the sonnet; Conv. iv. 28; Purg. xx and xxi; Par. xxx—all indicating that the soul comes from heaven. From the assertion that the ascent to heaven at death is a return, it is but a very small step to describe the birth as a descent to the world.

• From Querelle (1953)

  A galley crew used to call their captain "Our Man.:' His gentleness and his toughness. But I know that he could not be otherwise, pe had to be both cruel and gentle; that is to say, he did not have men tortured with just a little smile on his lips, but only with an interior smile, something to soothe his hidden organs ( the liver, the lungs, the stomach, the heart ) . That peacefulness became manifest even in his voice, giving the orders to torture gently, with a gentle gesture, a gentle look in his eye. Undoubtedly I am drawing an idealized and overly perfect picture of this captain, illustrating my own desire-yet its origin, in me, does not make it an arbitrary one. It corresponds to the reality of the captain as seen by the galley convicts. This image of gentleness, superimposed on the atrocious features of a commonplace man, is in the eye of the beholder, the galley slave-it comes from farther still, from his heart. When he ordered those notorious punishments, the captain was cruel. He inflicted profound damage on their bodies, lacerating them, putting out eyes, tearing out fingernails (or ordered all these things to be done, to be exact) , thus obeying his own instructions and maintaining the fear, the terror without which he could not have remained captain. With the authority invested in him by his rank (which is also mine! ) , he ordered men to be tortured, but he did so without feeling any hatred for them-how could he help loving, in a distorted fashion, the element to which he owed his very 'existence? True enough, he worked cruelly and hard on that flesh, delivered to him by the Royal Courts, but he did it with a kind of grave, smiling, yet sad joy. Once again: the galley slaves saw a captain who was both cruel and kind. "Illustrating my own desire," I wrote. If it js my desire to possess such authority, such admirable form, to evoke the loving fear that the historical figure of the captain is able to attract-and 263 I QUERRLE with such violence-[ have to arouse it in the hearts of the crewmen. If only they would love me thus! I want to be their father, and hurt them. I want to brand them: they will hate me. Impassively I shall watch their being tortured, not hvitching a single nerve. Little by little, a feeling of extreme power will enter into me and fill me. I shall be strong, having overcome pity. I shall be sad as well, while watching my own pitiful comedy: that little smile, the soft voice, illuminating my commands. I, too, am a victim of recruitment posters. Of one in particular, depicting a Marine rifleman in white leggings, standing guard at the frontiers of the French Empire. A wind rose under his heel, a red thistle above his head.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  26. Marcus Licinius Crassus, surnamed Dives, the Wealthy, was triumvir with Caesar and Pompey, 60 B.C. He was so notorious for his love of gold, that when he had been slain in a battle with the Parthians, their King, Hyrodes, had molten gold poured down his throat. Floras (Epitome, iii) says that his head … ludibrio fuit, neque indigno. Aurum enim liquidum in rictum oris infusum est, ut cujus animus arserat auri cupiditate, ejus etiam mortuum et exsangue corpus auro ureretur.27. See the following canto.28. Juno, being jealous of Jupiter’s love for Latona, drove the latter from place to place, till she reached Delos, which had been a floating island, tossing about in the sea, till Jupiter made it fast in order to receive her. Here she bore him two children—Apollo and Diana-the sun and the moon (cf. Par. x, xxii, xxix). See Ovid, Met. vi.29. “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men” (see Luke ii. 8-14).C A N T O X X IWith the thirst for knowledge, which God only can slake, keen within him, hastening along the impeded path to keep pace with his leader, and pierced with sympathetic grief for the souls at his feet, Dante pursues his way, till a shade coming behind them gives them the salutation of peace, to which Virgil answers. They are on the western side of the mountain, and the sun still neighbours the east, so that Dante casts no shadow, and the new-come soul does not recognize him as one still living in the first life; and so he gathers from the words of Virgil’s benediction that he and his companion alike are souls excluded from bliss. In answer to the question that hereon arises, Virgil explains his own state and Dante’s; and to the keen satisfaction of the latter, asks in his turn for an explanation of the earthquake and the shout. The shade answers that no material or casual thing can affect the sacred ways of the mount. It trembles only when some soul rises from lying prone with the avaricious, or starts from any other point of the mount to ascend to the earthly Paradise. The repentant souls, though they wish to gain the term and gather the fruit of their penance, are meanwhile as keen to suffer as once they were to sin; and when their present impulse unites with their ultimate desire and creates the instant will to rise, this in itself is a token and assurance that their purgation is complete, and the whole mountain rings with the praises of the spirits. May they, too, soon be sped upon their way! Virgil now asks the shade to reveal himself, and learns that he is the poet Statius. He combines with an enumeration of his own works a glowing tribute to the Æneid and its author; to have lived on earth with whom he would accept another year of exile. Virgil’s glance checks the smile that rises on Dante’s face at these words, but not till Statius has caught its flash upon his features. Pressed on either side, the Poet is finally released from Virgil’s prohibition, and informs Statius that he is indeed in the presence of that very one who strengthened him to sing of men and gods; whereon Statius, forgetting that be and Virgiltre empty shades, drops at his dear master’s feet to kiss them.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  But—so may your greater desire soon be satisfied, so that the heaven may house you which is filled with love and broadest spreads—6 tell me that I may yet trace it on paper, who are ye and what is that throng which is going away behind your backs?” Not otherwise the dazed highlander grows troubled and stares about speechless, when rough and savage he enters the city, than each shade did in its appearance; but after they were unladen of their bewilderment, which in lofty hearts soon is calmed, “Blessed thou,” began again the shade that first did ask of me, “who, for a holier life, art embarking knowledge of our borders! The people who come not with us offended in that for which Cæsar of old in his triumph heard ‘Regina’ called out against him;7 therefore they part from us crying out ‘Sodom’ reproving themselves as thou hast heard, and aid the burning by their shame. Our sin was hermaphrodite; but because we observed not human law,8 and followed our lusts like brute beasts, to our infamy by us is read, when we part us, the name of her who imbruted herself in the brute-like framework. Now knowest thou our deeds and what we were guilty of; if haply thou wouldst know who we are by name, there is no time to tell, nor could I. Thy desire of me, I will indeed make to wane: Guido Guinicelli am I, and already purge me, because I full repentance made before the end.” As in the sorrow of Lycurgus two sons became on beholding again their mother,9 so became I, but not to such height do I rise, when I hear name himself the father of me, and of others my betters, who ever used sweet and graceful rhymes of love; and without hearing and speaking, pondering I went, long time gazing at him, nor because of the fire drew I nigher thither. When I was filled with beholding, I offered me all ready to his service, with the oath which compels another’s belief. And he to me: “Thou leavest, by that which I hear, traces so deep and so clear, that Lethe10 cannot take them away, nor make them dim. But if thy words just now sware truth, tell me, what is the cause wherefore thou showest in speech and look that thou holdest me so dear.” And I to him: “Your sweet ditties, which so long as modern use shall last, will make their very ink precious.” “O brother,” said he, “this one11 whom I distinguish to thee with my finger” (and he pointed to a spirit in front) “was a better craftsman of the mother tongue. In verses of love, and prose tales of romance, all he surpassed, and let fools talk, who think that he of Limoges excels. To rumour rather than to truth they turn their faces, and thus do fix their opinion ere art or reason is listened to by them.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  But by the time of Bush II, none of those earlier candidates could have made it past Republican primaries inundated with busloads of voters from about thirty thousand fundamentalist churches plus other white ultraconservatives, many of whom had been Democrats before that party got “too inclusive” of black, brown, and female human beings. Nor could any remaining liberal or centrist Republicans run on a right-wing national platform shaped by the likes of Senator Jesse Helms, the famously racist and formerly Democratic senator from North Carolina, who long opposed sanctions against apartheid South Africa. He had been among the first to abandon the Democratic Party and become a Republican, out of anger at the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Certainly, President Eisenhower, who had warned against the military-industrial complex, would have had no place in the party anymore. Slowly, control of the Republican platform and most primaries was taken over by economic and religious interests that opposed efforts to increase equality by race, sex, class, or sexuality.3 They would become more entrenched in opposition to the Clinton era, and more still in the Obama one. A right-wing and supposedly populist group called the Tea Party—supported by such rich hyperconservatives as the Koch brothers—would make the Republican Party so extreme that much of its platform wouldn’t have been supported in public opinion polls by most Republicans. This in turn encouraged some Democrats to become more money-hungry and cautious in the name of winning. I would watch as Republican women especially—who once could say that their party was the first to support the Equal Rights Amendment and was as good or better on equality than the Democrats—swelled the ranks of independents, or quit politics, or were turned off by Democratic women who condemned them for ever having been Republicans. When I was campaigning on the road and meeting with Republican or independent women, what I tried to say was: You didn’t leave your party. Your party left you. Forget about party labels. Just vote on the issues and for candidates who support equality. II.If I was already hooked on politics and campaigning before Bella Abzug’s 1970 campaign for Congress, I was mainlining after it. Bella was the first woman I campaigned for. Smart, brave, and larger than life, a one-woman movement, she dared to run for Congress from Manhattan at a time when many feminists were still demonstrating against Congress. We had first met in the mid-1960s at an anti–Vietnam War demonstration outside the Pentagon, and I had been put off by her brashness. I’d never seen a female human so free of any need to be ladylike. Then, when we were both volunteering in the 1965 New York mayoralty campaign of John Lindsay, I saw her warmth, kindness, and political skill. Gradually, it dawned on me that my first response had been my problem, not hers.

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  (Sorry, in a way, that there's a ripple, a very slight ripple, of applause, and some laughter. I like Norman Mailer, despite his bullish fuckups.) More intelligent than Hemingway—and a far better writer—… (I'm making up with Norman.) …—he faces the possibility of intellectual homosexuality. But that can be a greater subterfuge, doubly restricting him from his sensual potential. And Kerouac. Eternal jock buddy. No, the artist doesn't have to be homosexual to produce good art; and certainly not all homosexual artists are “good.” But the artist who represses either the male or female aspect of his or her being produces unfulfilled work. James Joyce, Shakespeare, Picasso, Flannery O'Connor, D. H. Lawrence, and many, many other finally heterosexual artists have accepted, often joyously, the female and the male sides of themselves. If only by the nature of the acute sensibility and sensuality he has brought so abundantly to art, the homosexual should be an object of admiration, not reprobation and hatred. Without him, the arts—and humanity—would be vastly diminished. (Good applause. Not wild, no, but not just polite either. I'm pleased, of course—but I am much more pleased because—Jesus Christ!—Madame DeFarge has set aside her needles and her threads and is clapping spiritedly!) Now there's to be one of those grim panel discussions “necessary” to make these programs an “educational experience.” But the program has dragged on so long—the man who followed me, quite fully recovering from his snit, talked forever—that there are more panelists than audience. (Hyperbole.) I jump off the stage and split. Later I wish I'd gone further in my speech, spoken outright about gay dominance in certain arts. Yes. Oh, and narcissism. “The gay sensibility, obsessed with appearance, produces beautiful bodies, people. The result in males ranges widely—from ballet dancers to bodybuilders.” Yes, narcissism as art form. And certainly bodybuilding as art form. Not that all bodybuilders are sexually gay, of course not, but the form is gay—the pursuit of the idealized grace of the “woman” and the idealized strength of the “man.” And I forgot to mention the silently symphonic, intricate, instinctively choreographed beauty of the promiscuous sexhunt. 1:09 A.M. The Lots and Alleys Near the Costume Bars. J IM PARKS ACROSS the street from the Turf bar—one of several “costume” bars in an area of dark houses and closed commercial buildings. Outside the bars, the lots and alleys become the sexual arena throughout the night. Scouts are already hunting the terrain in preparation for the main bouts immediately before and after the bars' closing, when accumulated sex will flow outside. Now the preliminaries are occurring. Jim waits in the lot. Grime-veiled streetlights intensify the sense of otherworldness. A car's brights enclose him slowly in a brilliant net. The car stops, the lights blink in signal. Jim moves past the passenger window of the car.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  Statius folk yonder still do name me; I sang of Thebes, and then of the great Achilles; but I fell by the way with the second burden. The sparks, which warmed me, from the divine flame whence more than a thousand have been kindled, were the seeds of my poetic fire: of the Æneid I speak, which was a mother to me, and was to me a nurse in poesy; without it I had not stayed the weight of a drachm. And to have lived yonder, when Virgil was alive, I would consent to one sun more than I owe to my coming forth from exile.” These words turned Virgil to me with a look that silently said: “Be silent.” But the virtue which wills is not all powerful; for laughter and tears follow so closely the passion from which each springs, that they least obey the will in the most truthful. I did but smile, like one who makes a sign: whereat the shade was silent and looked at me in the eyes, where most the soul is fixed. And he said: “So may such great toil achieve its end; wherefore did thy face but now display to me a flash of laughter?” Now am I caught on either side; one makes me keep, silence, the other conjures me to speak; wherefore I sigh and am understood by my Master, and he said to me, “Have no fear of speaking, but speak, and tell him that which he asketh with so great desire.” Wherefore I: “Perchance thou dost marvel, O ancient spirit, at the laugh I gave, but I desire that yet greater wonder seize thee. He who guideth mine eyes on high, is that Virgil from whom thou drewest power to sing of men and gods. If thou didst believe other cause for my laughter, set it aside as untrue, and believe it was those words which thou spakest of him.” Already was he stooping to embrace my Teacher’s feet; but he said: “Brother, do not so, for thou art a shade and a shade thou seest.” And he, rising: “Now canst thou comprehend the measure of the love which warms me toward thee, when I forget our nothingness, and treat shades as a solid thing,” 1. Dante begins his Convito by quoting Aristotle’s words (Metaphysics, i), thai “all men naturally desire knowledge.” 2. See John iv. 7-15: “Whosover drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; ... The woman saith unto him, Sir, give me this water, that I thirst not....” 3. Luke xxiv. 13-15: “And, behold, two of them went that same day to a village called Emmaus, which was from Jerusalem about threescore furlongs. And they talked together of all these things which had happened. And it came to pass, that, while they communed together and reasoned, Jesus himself drew near, and went with them.” 4. This is the poet Statius, who remains with Dante till the end of the Cantica (see Canto xxxiii). He was born at Naples about the year 50, and died there ca. 96. In making Statius a native of Toulouse, Dante follows a common medieval error, probably due to a confusion with the poet’s contemporary. Lucius Statius, the rheotorician, who really was born at Toulouse. The poet lived mostly at Rome during the reign of Vespasian (69-79), whose son, Titus, captured Jerusalem in the year 70 (cf. Par. vi and vii). The name is, of course, that of poet. Statius was author of the Thebaid and of the fragmentary Achilleid, which deal with the expedition of the Seven against Thebes and the Trojan war, respectively, and with which Dante was well acquainted. [The MS of the Silva was not discovered till the beginning of the 15th century.] 5. The early commentators, who probably knew best, say that the regular “countersign” consisted of the words—“And with thy spirit.” 6. Clotho prepared the thread of life, which was spun by Lachesis and cut by Atropos (cf. Inf. xxxiii; Purg. xxv). 7. Being still chained to its body. 8. Cf. Canto xviii. 9. A human soul (see Canto xvi). 10. Iris, the daughter of Thaumas and Electra. In classical mythology she personified the rainbow, and was represented as the messenger of the gods (cf. Par. xii, xxviii, xxxiii). 11. Compare the distinction made between the absolute and the practical will, in Par. iv.