Anxiety

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 Anna Karenina (1877)

  “I?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, “there’s nothing I desire so much as that—nothing! It would be the best thing that could be.” “But you’re not making a mistake? You know what we’re speaking of?” said Levin, piercing him with his eyes. “You think it’s possible?” “I think it’s possible. Why not possible?” “No! do you really think it’s possible? No, tell me all you think! Oh, but if ... if refusal’s in store for me!... Indeed I feel sure....” “Why should you think that?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, smiling at his excitement. “It seems so to me sometimes. That will be awful for me, and for her too.” “Oh, well, anyway there’s nothing awful in it for a girl. Every girl’s proud of an offer.” “Yes, every girl, but not she.” Stepan Arkadyevitch smiled. He so well knew that feeling of Levin’s, that for him all the girls in the world were divided into two classes: one class—all the girls in the world except her, and those girls with all sorts of human weaknesses, and very ordinary girls: the other class—she alone, having no weaknesses of any sort and higher than all humanity. “Stay, take some sauce,” he said, holding back Levin’s hand as it pushed away the sauce. Levin obediently helped himself to sauce, but would not let Stepan Arkadyevitch go on with his dinner. “No, stop a minute, stop a minute,” he said. “You must understand that it’s a question of life and death for me. I have never spoken to anyone of this. And there’s no one I could speak of it to, except you. You know we’re utterly unlike each other, different tastes and views and everything; but I know you’re fond of me and understand me, and that’s why I like you awfully. But for God’s sake, be quite straightforward with me.” “I tell you what I think,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, smiling. “But I’ll say more: my wife is a wonderful woman....” Stepan Arkadyevitch sighed, remembering his position with his wife, and, after a moment’s silence, resumed—“She has a gift of foreseeing things. She sees right through people; but that’s not all; she knows what will come to pass, especially in the way of marriages. She foretold, for instance, that Princess Shahovskaya would marry Brenteln. No one would believe it, but it came to pass. And she’s on your side.” “How do you mean?” “It’s not only that she likes you—she says that Kitty is certain to be your wife.” At these words Levin’s face suddenly lighted up with a smile, a smile not far from tears of emotion. “She says that!” cried Levin. “I always said she was exquisite, your wife. There, that’s enough, enough said about it,” he said, getting up from his seat. “All right, but do sit down.”

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  The stupider the movie, the less my mind had to work. But I preferred the familiar—Harrison Ford and Whoopi Goldberg, doing what they always do. • • • WHEN I WENT TO SEE Dr. Tuttle in early August for my monthly in-person visit, she wore a white sleeveless nightgown with tattered lace across her bosom and huge honey-tinted sunglasses with blinders. She still had the neck brace on. “I had a procedure done on my eyes,” she explained, “and the central air has sprung a leak. Excuse the humidity.” Sweat bubbled across her chest and arms like blisters. Her hair frizzed up and out. The fat cats lay on the fainting sofa. “They’re overheated,” Dr. Tuttle said. “Better not disturb them.” There was no place else to sit, so I stood against the bookshelf, bracing myself and taking shallow breaths. The smell of ammonia in the room was intense. It seemed to be coming from the cats. “Did you bring your book of nightmares?” Dr. Tuttle asked, sitting down behind her desk. “I forgot my journal today,” I said. “The nightmares have been getting worse and worse, though,” I lied. My dreams had actually mellowed. “Tell me about one of them, just so I can update my file,” Dr. Tuttle said, pulling out a folder. She seemed harried and hot, but she was not disorganized. “Well . . .” I mined my mind for something disturbing. All I could recall were the plots of the terrible movies I’d recently seen. “I had this one nightmare where I moved to Las Vegas and met a seamstress and gave lap dances. Then I ran into an old friend who gave me a floppy disk full of government secrets and I became a suspect in a murder case and the NSA chased me, and instead of getting a Porsche for Christmas, a football team left me stranded in the desert.” Dr. Tuttle scribbled dutifully, then lifted her head, waiting for more. “So I started eating sand to try to kill myself instead of dying of dehydration. It was awful.” “Very troubling,” Dr. Tuttle murmured. I wobbled against the bookshelf. It was difficult to stay upright—two months of sleep had made my muscles wither. And I could still feel the trazodone I’d taken that morning. “Try to sleep on your side when possible. There was recently a study in Australia that said that when you sleep on your back, you’re more likely to have nightmares about drowning. It’s not conclusive, of course, since they’re on the opposite side of the Earth. So actually, you might want to try sleeping on your stomach instead, and see what that does.” “Dr. Tuttle,” I began, “I was wondering if you could prescribe something a little stronger for bedtime. When I’m tossing and turning at night, I get so frustrated.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Alexey Alexandrovitch had seen nothing striking or improper in the fact that his wife was sitting with Vronsky at a table apart, in eager conversation with him about something. But he noticed that to the rest of the party this appeared something striking and improper, and for that reason it seemed to him too to be improper. He made up his mind that he must speak of it to his wife. On reaching home Alexey Alexandrovitch went to his study, as he usually did, seated himself in his low chair, opened a book on the Papacy at the place where he had laid the paper-knife in it, and read till one o’clock, just as he usually did. But from time to time he rubbed his high forehead and shook his head, as though to drive away something. At his usual time he got up and made his toilet for the night. Anna Arkadyevna had not yet come in. With a book under his arm he went upstairs. But this evening, instead of his usual thoughts and meditations upon official details, his thoughts were absorbed by his wife and something disagreeable connected with her. Contrary to his usual habit, he did not get into bed, but fell to walking up and down the rooms with his hands clasped behind his back. He could not go to bed, feeling that it was absolutely needful for him first to think thoroughly over the position that had just arisen. When Alexey Alexandrovitch had made up his mind that he must talk to his wife about it, it had seemed a very easy and simple matter. But now, when he began to think over the question that had just presented itself, it seemed to him very complicated and difficult.

• From Querelle (1953)

  Now he was just a copper again, but lacking a counterpart (or adversary) he felt diminished. He could only be a true policeman at his own outer limits, which was where he carried on his war against the criminal world. He was unable to create, within himself, the sense of consistency and profound unity that is the internal battle of contrary desires. Although he was most definitely a policeman, Mario knew that he carried in himself a delinquent, perhaps even a criminal-in any case, the shady character he would have become, had he not chosen to be a policeman-but his betrayal of Tony had cut him off from the criminal world, had made it impossible for him to refer himself to it. Now he had to stand outside and be the judge. No longer 247 I QUERELLE could he enter into it as if it were a sympathetic and malleable element. That love every artist feels for his material, in his case the n1aterial did not reciprocate. Thus he could only wait and worry. In that one glimmer of hope of salvation he somehow connected the revenge of the dockers with the glaring evidence for Querelle's guilt. During the day he talked and cracked jokes with his colleagues whom he had never told about the threats that had been addressed to him. Almost every evening he met Querelle by the railroad embankment. It had not occurred to him that the discovery of the cigarette lighter lying next to Vic's dead body could indicate complicity behveen Gil and the sailor; thus he hadn't thought of putting Querelle under surveillance. On his way back from the old prison Querelle came by the embankn1ent. He felt no friendly emotion toward the detective, but kept meeting him out of a habit that was based on his being at Mario's mercy. He also believed that the relationship afforded him some protection. He felt the roots growing. In the dark of one evening he whispered : . ''If you caught me swiping something, would you put me in the cooler?" Taken literally, the expression "you could have knocked him down with a feather" isn't exactly true, yet the state of fragility to which it reduces the person who provokes it obliges us to use it : "you could have knocked" Mario "down with a feather." His reply, though, was foxy enough : usure, why not? I'd be doing my duty." "So it would be your duty to have me put away? That's not very funny!" "That's the way it is, though. And if you killed someone, I'd send you on your way to the old chopper." "I see." Back on his feet again after what neither he nor the detective would have gone so far as to call an act of love, Querelle became a man again, facing another man . He had a little smile on his face as he stood there, buttoning up, closing the buckle 248 I JEAN GENET

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “I understand, I understand,” he interrupted her, taking the letter, but not reading it, and trying to soothe her. “The one thing I longed for, the one thing I prayed for, was to cut short this position, so as to devote my life to your happiness.” “Why do you tell me that?” she said. “Do you suppose I can doubt it? If I doubted....” “Who’s that coming?” said Vronsky suddenly, pointing to two ladies walking towards them. “Perhaps they know us!” and he hurriedly turned off, drawing her after him into a side path. “Oh, I don’t care!” she said. Her lips were quivering. And he fancied that her eyes looked with strange fury at him from under the veil. “I tell you that’s not the point—I can’t doubt that; but see what he writes to me. Read it.” She stood still again. Again, just as at the first moment of hearing of her rupture with her husband, Vronsky, on reading the letter, was unconsciously carried away by the natural sensation aroused in him by his own relation to the betrayed husband. Now while he held his letter in his hands, he could not help picturing the challenge, which he would most likely find at home today or tomorrow, and the duel itself, in which, with the same cold and haughty expression that his face was assuming at this moment he would await the injured husband’s shot, after having himself fired into the air. And at that instant there flashed across his mind the thought of what Serpuhovskoy had just said to him, and what he had himself been thinking in the morning—that it was better not to bind himself—and he knew that this thought he could not tell her. Having read the letter, he raised his eyes to her, and there was no determination in them. She saw at once that he had been thinking about it before by himself. She knew that whatever he might say to her, he would not say all he thought. And she knew that her last hope had failed her. This was not what she had been reckoning on. “You see the sort of man he is,” she said, with a shaking voice; “he....” “Forgive me, but I rejoice at it,” Vronsky interrupted. “For God’s sake, let me finish!” he added, his eyes imploring her to give him time to explain his words. “I rejoice, because things cannot, cannot possibly remain as he supposes.” “Why can’t they?” Anna said, restraining her tears, and obviously attaching no sort of consequence to what he said. She felt that her fate was sealed. Vronsky meant that after the duel—inevitable, he thought—things could not go on as before, but he said something different. “It can’t go on. I hope that now you will leave him. I hope”—he was confused, and reddened—“that you will let me arrange and plan our life. Tomorrow....” he was beginning. She did not let him go on.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  From Parkington I had still a hundred miles to go, and there would be more than that to the Hazy Hills and Brice-land. If I had said I would come for Dolly in the afternoon, it was only because my fancy insisted on merciful night falling as soon as possible upon my impatience. But now I foresaw all kinds of misunderstandings and was all a-jitter lest delay might give her the opportunity of some idle telephone call to Ramsdale. However, when at 9.30 A.M . I attempted to start, I was confronted by a dead battery, and noon was nigh when at last I left Parkington. I reached my destination around half past two; parked my car in a pine grove where a green-shirted, redheaded impish lad stood throwing horseshoes in sullen solitude; was laconically directed by him to an office in a stucco cottage; in a dying state, had to endure for several minutes the inquisitive commiseration of the camp mistress, a sluttish worn out female with rusty hair. Dolly she said was all packed and ready to go. She knew her mother was sick but not critically. Would Mr. Haze, I mean, Mr. Humbert, care to meet the camp counsellors? Or look at the cabins where the girls live? Each dedicated to a Disney creature? Or visit the Lodge? Or should Charlie be sent over to fetch her? The girls were just finishing fixing the Dining Room for a dance.

• From Querelle (1953)

  "So what have you got to lose? If you pull a stick-up job, and they catch you at it, that won't make any difference at aU. \\'hat's a stick-up compared to murder?" Quere11e no longer mentioned the murder of the sailor so as not to ca11 forth Gil's denials, not to rouse that sense of true justice that lives in everyone and that might cause him to go and give himself up. Coming from the outside world as he did, calm and co11ected, Querelle knew that the young mason dung to him with anguished intensity. His anxiety betrayed Gil, betrayed the slightest inner tremor and amplified it, played it out loud, like the needle passing over the grooves of a record. Querelle was able to register aU these shifts and fluctuations and made use of them. "If I wasn't just a sailor . . . but, that's what I am, and there's little I can do to help you. But there's one thing, I can give you some advice. And I believe you can do it." Gil listened, in silence. By this time it had become clear to him that the sailor would never bring him anything else but a chunk of bread, a can of sardines, a pack of cigarettes, but never any money. Hanging his head, his mouth bitter, he feU to pondering the notion of those two murders. An enormous weariness forced him to resign himself to them, to admit them, to admit that he would henceforth travel the high road to he11. Toward Querelle he felt great anger and at the same time he 224 I JEAN GENET had absolute confidence in him, though this was strangely intermingled with a fear that Querelle might "turn him in.'' "Soon as you got some dough and some new clothes you'll be ready to take the trip.'' It looked like a great adventure, and one that the murders had led up to. Thanks to them, Gil would have to dress smartly, more so than he had ever done in his life, not even on Sundays. Buenos Aires, here I come. "I can certainly hear what you're saying; '! sure would like to pull a job, make some dough. But where? Do you know?" "Right now, here in Brest, I know only one place, a simple breaking and entering scene. There's better ones elsewhere, but here in Brest that's the only thing I'm hep to. I'll go case the joint, and then, if you're ready, we can go do the job together. No sweat. I'll be right there with you." "I couldn't do it by myself? Perhaps that would be better?" "You crazy? Forget it. I want to go with you. First thne out, you need a buddy.''

• From Querelle (1953)

  "It's never locked. We'll both go into the hallway. 'Cau'se there's a hallway, and a staircase. You sneak up the stairs, very quiet, all the way to the top. I'll go into the joint. If anything happens, if the owner opens the door at the top of the stairs, down you come, and fast. I'll take off at the same time, heading back toward the Hospital. But if everything goes right, I'll call you, soon as I've finished. Got it?" "Sure!" 2.l6 I JEAN GENET Gil had never stolen anything._ It surprised him how difficult yet easy it was. After looking up and down the fog-shrouded street Querelle, without a sotind, opened the door and went into the hallway. Gil followed him. Querelle took his hand and put it on the staircase banister. "Go," he whispered in his ear, then turned away and quickly slid into the space below the stairs. When he estimated that Gil had reached the second-Boor landing he began to make a series of very quiet scratching noises. Gil was listening. 'What he heard was the rumbling of a stagecoach he and the other guys were getting ready to hold up. A shot rang out in the lonely forest, an axletree broke, young girls were raising their veils, and Marie Taglioni went off dancing under the rain-soaked trees, on carpets unrolled by the happy bandits. He pricked up his ears. He heard a hissing whistle in the dark. He understood the message: "Gil, come on, Gil." Slowly, his heart beating loudly, he descended the staircase. Querelle shut the door quietly behind them. Returning the way they had come they walked along in silence. Gil was anxious to know and finally whispered : "Did you get it?" "Yup. Let's keep goin' ." They passed through the same masses of fog and darkness. Gil felt the old prison drawing closer, the sense of security returning, calming him down. In his cave they lit the candle and Querelle pulled the loot out of his pocket. Two thousand six-hundred francs. He handed half of it over to Gil. "It ain't no fortune, but what can you do? It's the day's takings." "But listen, that ain't bad at alii I can get by on that." "Boy, are you nuts. Where would that get you? You don't even have any threads. No, kiddo, there's more work to do." "Well, all right. Count on me. But the next time I want to be the one does the job. No use your getting messed up because of me." "We'll see. Now why don't you just stash that dough." 221 I QUERELLE

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  The young Princess Kitty Shtcherbatskaya was eighteen. It was the first winter that she had been out in the world. Her success in society had been greater than that of either of her elder sisters, and greater even than her mother had anticipated. To say nothing of the young men who danced at the Moscow balls being almost all in love with Kitty, two serious suitors had already this first winter made their appearance: Levin, and immediately after his departure, Count Vronsky. Levin’s appearance at the beginning of the winter, his frequent visits, and evident love for Kitty, had led to the first serious conversations between Kitty’s parents as to her future, and to disputes between them. The prince was on Levin’s side; he said he wished for nothing better for Kitty. The princess for her part, going round the question in the manner peculiar to women, maintained that Kitty was too young, that Levin had done nothing to prove that he had serious intentions, that Kitty felt no great attraction to him, and other side issues; but she did not state the principal point, which was that she looked for a better match for her daughter, and that Levin was not to her liking, and she did not understand him. When Levin had abruptly departed, the princess was delighted, and said to her husband triumphantly: “You see I was right.” When Vronsky appeared on the scene, she was still more delighted, confirmed in her opinion that Kitty was to make not simply a good, but a brilliant match. In the mother’s eyes there could be no comparison between Vronsky and Levin. She disliked in Levin his strange and uncompromising opinions and his shyness in society, founded, as she supposed, on his pride and his queer sort of life, as she considered it, absorbed in cattle and peasants. She did not very much like it that he, who was in love with her daughter, had kept coming to the house for six weeks, as though he were waiting for something, inspecting, as though he were afraid he might be doing them too great an honor by making an offer, and did not realize that a man, who continually visits at a house where there is a young unmarried girl, is bound to make his intentions clear. And suddenly, without doing so, he disappeared. “It’s as well he’s not attractive enough for Kitty to have fallen in love with him,” thought the mother. Vronsky satisfied all the mother’s desires. Very wealthy, clever, of aristocratic family, on the highroad to a brilliant career in the army and at court, and a fascinating man. Nothing better could be wished for. Vronsky openly flirted with Kitty at balls, danced with her, and came continually to the house, consequently there could be no doubt of the seriousness of his intentions. But, in spite of that, the mother had spent the whole of that winter in a state of terrible anxiety and agitation.

• From Querelle (1953)

  169 I QUERELLE ing the men on deck, the bayonet was exactly in line with Querelle's left eyebrow and eye, and when he met Querelle's star e it seemed to him like looking into an entire arms factory. "With a little dough I could perhaps make it to Spain. I know some guys in Perpignan; I used to work down there." Gil went on eating. He and Querelle seemed to have run out of words already, but Roger perc.:eived that a relationship was being established between them in which there was no room for him. It was, now, a matter of two men talking, in all earnest, about things a boy his age could only daydream abo�t. "Say, you're Robert's brother, the one who's staying at Nono's?" "Yeah. And I know Nono, too." Not for one n1inute did Querelle consider the nature of his relationship with Nono. There was no undertone of irony in his statement. "No kidding, you're a buddy of Nono's?" "You heard me. \Vhat about it?" "D'you think he . . . (Gil was going to say: "could help me," but realized it would be too much heartbreak to get a "no" for an answer). He hesitated, then said: "Do you think he might help me?" In turning him into -an outlaw his crime naturally encouraged Gil to seek refuge among pimps and prostitutes, as they were people who lived-or so he thought-at the very borderline of legality. The murder he had committed would have totally crushed any laboring man of a riper age. Gil, on the contrary, was hardened by it, it made him glow from within, conferring, as it did, a reputation he would not have attained otherwise, and from the lack of which he had been suffering. Gil was a mason, but his life had been too short for him to identify him· self with his trade. He was still entertaining all sorts of vague dreams, and these had suddenly become true (what we call "dreams" are those little peculiarities that may indicate fan·

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “We’ll admit, princess, that that’s not superficial,” he said, “but internal. But that’s not the point,” and he turned again to the general with whom he was talking seriously; “we mustn’t forget that those who are taking part in the race are military men, who have chosen that career, and one must allow that every calling has its disagreeable side. It forms an integral part of the duties of an officer. Low sports, such as prize-fighting or Spanish bull-fights, are a sign of barbarity. But specialized trials of skill are a sign of development.” “No, I shan’t come another time; it’s too upsetting,” said Princess Betsy. “Isn’t it, Anna?” “It is upsetting, but one can’t tear oneself away,” said another lady. “If I’d been a Roman woman I should never have missed a single circus.” Anna said nothing, and keeping her opera-glass up, gazed always at the same spot. At that moment a tall general walked through the pavilion. Breaking off what he was saying, Alexey Alexandrovitch got up hurriedly, though with dignity, and bowed low to the general. “You’re not racing?” the officer asked, chaffing him. “My race is a harder one,” Alexey Alexandrovitch responded deferentially. And though the answer meant nothing, the general looked as though he had heard a witty remark from a witty man, and fully relished _la pointe de la sauce_. “There are two aspects,” Alexey Alexandrovitch resumed: “those who take part and those who look on; and love for such spectacles is an unmistakable proof of a low degree of development in the spectator, I admit, but....” “Princess, bets!” sounded Stepan Arkadyevitch’s voice from below, addressing Betsy. “Who’s your favorite?” “Anna and I are for Kuzovlev,” replied Betsy. “I’m for Vronsky. A pair of gloves?” “Done!” “But it is a pretty sight, isn’t it?” Alexey Alexandrovitch paused while there was talking about him, but he began again directly. “I admit that manly sports do not....” he was continuing. But at that moment the racers started, and all conversation ceased. Alexey Alexandrovitch too was silent, and everyone stood up and turned towards the stream. Alexey Alexandrovitch took no interest in the race, and so he did not watch the racers, but fell listlessly to scanning the spectators with his weary eyes. His eyes rested upon Anna. Her face was white and set. She was obviously seeing nothing and no one but one man. Her hand had convulsively clutched her fan, and she held her breath. He looked at her and hastily turned away, scrutinizing other faces. “But here’s this lady too, and others very much moved as well; it’s very natural,” Alexey Alexandrovitch told himself. He tried not to look at her, but unconsciously his eyes were drawn to her. He examined that face again, trying not to read what was so plainly written on it, and against his own will, with horror read on it what he did not want to know.

• From The Art of the Graphic Memoir: Tell Your Story, Change Your Life (2018)

  I wrote, “Nothing matters but you have to tell this story” above my desk, but that didn’t prevent life, distractions, and inertia from getting in the way. This note helped remind me to stay on task. Write whatever you need to be reminded of, tattoo it on your arm, or put it anywhere you will see it every day. REDEFINE “FINISHING” Be easy on yourself. It may be that we weren’t meant to “finish” this project. Or else perhaps our “finishing” doesn’t look like the ones in this book. I am not sure if “finishing” holds an inherently better value than merely messing around. Is a finished project necessarily any better than just staying in a therapeutic/manifesting mindset? If we’re sketching, and writing and drawing and talking, do we need to be “finishing” something? For some, it’s certainly yes. Finishing brings some of us to a place of completion; it allows a stage to be passed through. It allows us to put something fully in the past, and to become someone who has gone through that something, rather than someone who is still wrestling with it. But maybe our note-taking, our material gathering, or story structuring, our sketching, and our starting was all to bring us to a new form. Maybe that new form will be a quilt, or a sculpture, or a new job or a new role in a new community. Finishing LIVE EXAMPLE FINISHING I am like an 85% finisher. I have finished a lot of projects, and I have also not finished plenty of them, too. I think about the ones I’ve left unfinished. Should they have been finished? Was it okay that I abandoned them? Did those unfinished thoughts, feelings, and labor get incorporated into other work? Should I go back to those stories? I don’t know. My book about my daughter wasn’t easy to finish, but it was harder to not finish it. But this isn’t always the case. In some cases such as in this live example, inertia or other obstacles come in to keep us from moving forward. Here, I felt thwarted by unexpected story turns. I thought I would find my friend, and never did, and this was disheartening. I had to find another reason to finish. Another goal. Going back to the Change Your Life chapter, I asked myself: What relationships need to change? I need to be able to exist in the forest more. I need to see the trees and woods as my home. What pressures need to be relieved, or what troubles need to be processed or better understood? I need to find continuity between the teenage me, who listened to Pink Floyd and talked to his friend about books and life, with the adult me who runs a school and is obsessed with paying the bills. What story needs to be experienced? I need to walk back to having a relationship with the forest. I need the older me to know younger me.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  This, I guess, is at the root of our troubles.” On Wednesday I managed to waylay Lo for a few seconds: she was on the landing, in sweatshirt and green-stained white shorts, rummaging in a trunk. I said something meant to be friendly and funny but she only emitted a snort without looking at me. Desperate, dying Humbert patted her clumsily on her coccyx, and she struck him, quite painfully, with one of the late Mr. Haze’s shoetrees. “Doublecrosser,” she said as I crawled downstairs rubbing my arm with a great show of rue. She did not condescend to have dinner with Hum and mum: washed her hair and went to bed with her ridiculous books. And on Thursday quiet Mrs. Haze drove her to Camp Q. As greater authors than I have put it: “Let readers imagine” etc. On second thought, I may as well give those imaginations a kick in the pants. I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita. She would be thirteen on January 1. In two years or so she would cease being a nymphet and would turn into a “young girl,” and then, into a “college girl”—that horror of horrors. The word “forever” referred only to my own passion, to the eternal Lolita as reflected in my blood. The Lolita whose iliac crests had not yet flared, the Lolita that today I could touch and smell and hear and see, the Lolita of the strident voice and the rich brown hair—of the bangs and the swirls at the sides and the curls at the back, and the sticky hot neck, and the vulgar vocabulary—“revolting,” “super,” “luscious,” “goon,” “drip”— that Lolita, my Lolita, poor Catullus would lose forever. So how could I afford not to see her for two months of summer insomnias? Two whole months out of the two years of her remaining nymphage! Should I disguise myself as a somber old-fashioned girl, gawky Mlle Humbert, and put up my tent on the outskirts of Camp Q, in the hope that its russet nymphets would clamor: “Let us adopt that deep-voiced D.P.,” and drag the sad, shyly smiling Berthe au Grand Pied to their rustic hearth. Berthe will sleep with Dolores Haze! Idle dry dreams. Two months of beauty, two months of tenderness, would be squandered forever, and I could do nothing about it, but nothing, mais rien . One drop of rare honey, however, that Thursday did hold in its acorn cup. Haze was to drive her to the camp in the early morning. Upon sundry sounds of departure reaching me, I rolled out of bed and leaned out of the window.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Feeling that the reconciliation was complete, Anna set eagerly to work in the morning preparing for their departure. Though it was not settled whether they should go on Monday or Tuesday, as they had each given way to the other, Anna packed busily, feeling absolutely indifferent whether they went a day earlier or later. She was standing in her room over an open box, taking things out of it, when he came in to see her earlier than usual, dressed to go out. “I’m going off at once to see maman; she can send me the money by Yegorov. And I shall be ready to go tomorrow,” he said. Though she was in such a good mood, the thought of his visit to his mother’s gave her a pang. “No, I shan’t be ready by then myself,” she said; and at once reflected, “so then it was possible to arrange to do as I wished.” “No, do as you meant to do. Go into the dining-room, I’m coming directly. It’s only to turn out those things that aren’t wanted,” she said, putting something more on the heap of frippery that lay in Annushka’s arms. Vronsky was eating his beefsteak when she came into the dining-room. “You wouldn’t believe how distasteful these rooms have become to me,” she said, sitting down beside him to her coffee. “There’s nothing more awful than these _chambres garnies_. There’s no individuality in them, no soul. These clocks, and curtains, and, worst of all, the wallpapers—they’re a nightmare. I think of Vozdvizhenskoe as the promised land. You’re not sending the horses off yet?” “No, they will come after us. Where are you going to?” “I wanted to go to Wilson’s to take some dresses to her. So it’s really to be tomorrow?” she said in a cheerful voice; but suddenly her face changed. Vronsky’s valet came in to ask him to sign a receipt for a telegram from Petersburg. There was nothing out of the way in Vronsky’s getting a telegram, but he said, as though anxious to conceal something from her, that the receipt was in his study, and he turned hurriedly to her. “By tomorrow, without fail, I will finish it all.” “From whom is the telegram?” she asked, not hearing him. “From Stiva,” he answered reluctantly. “Why didn’t you show it to me? What secret can there be between Stiva and me?” Vronsky called the valet back, and told him to bring the telegram. “I didn’t want to show it to you, because Stiva has such a passion for telegraphing: why telegraph when nothing is settled?” “About the divorce?” “Yes; but he says he has not been able to come at anything yet. He has promised a decisive answer in a day or two. But here it is; read it.” With trembling hands Anna took the telegram, and read what Vronsky had told her. At the end was added: “Little hope; but I will do everything possible and impossible.”

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “So you’ll come?” “Of course.” “At five o’clock, then, and not evening dress.” And Stepan Arkadyevitch got up and went down below to the new head of his department. Instinct had not misled Stepan Arkadyevitch. The terrible new head turned out to be an extremely amenable person, and Stepan Arkadyevitch lunched with him and stayed on, so that it was four o’clock before he got to Alexey Alexandrovitch. Chapter 8 Alexey Alexandrovitch, on coming back from church service, had spent the whole morning indoors. He had two pieces of business before him that morning; first, to receive and send on a deputation from the native tribes which was on its way to Petersburg, and now at Moscow; secondly, to write the promised letter to the lawyer. The deputation, though it had been summoned at Alexey Alexandrovitch’s instigation, was not without its discomforting and even dangerous aspect, and he was glad he had found it in Moscow. The members of this deputation had not the slightest conception of their duty and the part they were to play. They naïvely believed that it was their business to lay before the commission their needs and the actual condition of things, and to ask assistance of the government, and utterly failed to grasp that some of their statements and requests supported the contention of the enemy’s side, and so spoiled the whole business. Alexey Alexandrovitch was busily engaged with them for a long while, drew up a program for them from which they were not to depart, and on dismissing them wrote a letter to Petersburg for the guidance of the deputation. He had his chief support in this affair in the Countess Lidia Ivanovna. She was a specialist in the matter of deputations, and no one knew better than she how to manage them, and put them in the way they should go. Having completed this task, Alexey Alexandrovitch wrote the letter to the lawyer. Without the slightest hesitation he gave him permission to act as he might judge best. In the letter he enclosed three of Vronsky’s notes to Anna, which were in the portfolio he had taken away. Since Alexey Alexandrovitch had left home with the intention of not returning to his family again, and since he had been at the lawyer’s and had spoken, though only to one man, of his intention, since especially he had translated the matter from the world of real life to the world of ink and paper, he had grown more and more used to his own intention, and by now distinctly perceived the feasibility of its execution. He was sealing the envelope to the lawyer, when he heard the loud tones of Stepan Arkadyevitch’s voice. Stepan Arkadyevitch was disputing with Alexey Alexandrovitch’s servant, and insisting on being announced. “No matter,” thought Alexey Alexandrovitch, “so much the better. I will inform him at once of my position in regard to his sister, and explain why it is I can’t dine with him.”

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  No house stands empty for long. An empty house is a source of worry. A sheriff’s unit will drive by at noon. Neighbors call city hall with complaints about weeds in the lawn and the unchecked garden. Most empty houses are owned by out-of-town landlords with skipped renters. Occasionally, an empty house will hide a hunched and blackening corpse, in bed, on the kitchen floor, or in the hall. A letter carrier puts mail through a slot in the door to which no one else comes. The house, in this climate, only grows dusty. Eventually someone wonders, when the weeds have gone too long. Some neighbor’s husband, with only a little persuasion, will try doors and attempt to look in. A braver one, standing on a ladder, will break the window over the kitchen sink. In a week or two, with the lawn mowed, the house will be up for sale. 64 Every block is divided into the common grid of fifty-by-one-hundred-foot lots. All the houses are about 1,100 square feet. The houses are on ground so flat that the average grade across the city’s nine-and-a-half square miles is less than a foot. Tree roots, bulging into a gutter, pond dark water down half a block. 65 These houses went up cheaply on fields cut to stubble only hours before construction began. Veterans needed no down payment, and the Federal Housing Authority guaranteed loans at four percent interest for up to thirty years. Nonveterans paid $695 down. Mortgage payments began at $46.98 a month for a two-bedroom house and $53.50 for one with three. The two-bedroom houses sold for $7,575. The three-bedroom houses sold for $8,525. The first unit of the new subdivision was ready for sale in March 1950. Rows of concrete foundations surrounded the one remaining bean field where the ground had been broken for the shopping center. The developers were anxious to identify their development, so remote from any city. They put a steel oil derrick at the edge of the last field, mounted a war-surplus beacon at the top, and strung the derrick’s legs with more electric lights. At night, a hundred feet above the implausibly level ground, the light could be seen for miles. 66 Buyers did not require encouragement. When the sales office opened on a cloudless Palm Sunday in April 1950, twenty-five thousand people were waiting. Almost as many showed up on Easter Sunday, and on the weekends through May and June. Couples waited in line to be led in and out of a row of seven model houses, the first time that a street of model houses was used to sell a subdivision. Young men from the nearby junior college, recruited from the athletic department, acted as guides to the unfamiliar experience. The models were furnished by the Aaron Schultz furniture store in Long Beach. Each model was decorated in one of four styles—Maple, Traditional, Modern, and Provincial. At night, the model houses were lighted by rows of flood lamps.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  The petitioner, the widow of a staff captain Kalinin, came with a request impossible and unreasonable; but Stepan Arkadyevitch, as he generally did, made her sit down, heard her to the end attentively without interrupting her, and gave her detailed advice as to how and to whom to apply, and even wrote her, in his large, sprawling, good and legible hand, a confident and fluent little note to a personage who might be of use to her. Having got rid of the staff captain’s widow, Stepan Arkadyevitch took his hat and stopped to recollect whether he had forgotten anything. It appeared that he had forgotten nothing except what he wanted to forget—his wife. “Ah, yes!” He bowed his head, and his handsome face assumed a harassed expression. “To go, or not to go!” he said to himself; and an inner voice told him he must not go, that nothing could come of it but falsity; that to amend, to set right their relations was impossible, because it was impossible to make her attractive again and able to inspire love, or to make him an old man, not susceptible to love. Except deceit and lying nothing could come of it now; and deceit and lying were opposed to his nature. “It must be some time, though: it can’t go on like this,” he said, trying to give himself courage. He squared his chest, took out a cigarette, took two whiffs at it, flung it into a mother-of-pearl ashtray, and with rapid steps walked through the drawing-room, and opened the other door into his wife’s bedroom. Chapter 4

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Absorbed in business with the chief secretary, Alexey Alexandrovitch had completely forgotten that it was Tuesday, the day fixed by him for the return of Anna Arkadyevna, and he was surprised and received a shock of annoyance when a servant came in to inform him of her arrival. Anna had arrived in Petersburg early in the morning; the carriage had been sent to meet her in accordance with her telegram, and so Alexey Alexandrovitch might have known of her arrival. But when she arrived, he did not meet her. She was told that he had not yet gone out, but was busy with his secretary. She sent word to her husband that she had come, went to her own room, and occupied herself in sorting out her things, expecting he would come to her. But an hour passed; he did not come. She went into the dining-room on the pretext of giving some directions, and spoke loudly on purpose, expecting him to come out there; but he did not come, though she heard him go to the door of his study as he parted from the chief secretary. She knew that he usually went out quickly to his office, and she wanted to see him before that, so that their attitude to one another might be defined. She walked across the drawing-room and went resolutely to him. When she went into his study he was in official uniform, obviously ready to go out, sitting at a little table on which he rested his elbows, looking dejectedly before him. She saw him before he saw her, and she saw that he was thinking of her. On seeing her, he would have risen, but changed his mind, then his face flushed hotly—a thing Anna had never seen before, and he got up quickly and went to meet her, looking not at her eyes, but above them at her forehead and hair. He went up to her, took her by the hand, and asked her to sit down. “I am very glad you have come,” he said, sitting down beside her, and obviously wishing to say something, he stuttered. Several times he tried to begin to speak, but stopped. In spite of the fact that, preparing herself for meeting him, she had schooled herself to despise and reproach him, she did not know what to say to him, and she felt sorry for him. And so the silence lasted for some time. “Is Seryozha quite well?” he said, and not waiting for an answer, he added: “I shan’t be dining at home today, and I have got to go out directly.” “I had thought of going to Moscow,” she said. “No, you did quite, quite right to come,” he said, and was silent again. Seeing that he was powerless to begin the conversation, she began herself.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  After obtaining his brother’s address from Sergey Ivanovitch’s footman, Levin was on the point of setting off at once to see him, but on second thought he decided to put off his visit till the evening. The first thing to do to set his heart at rest was to accomplish what he had come to Moscow for. From his brother’s Levin went to Oblonsky’s office, and on getting news of the Shtcherbatskys from him, he drove to the place where he had been told he might find Kitty. Chapter 9 At four o’clock, conscious of his throbbing heart, Levin stepped out of a hired sledge at the Zoological Gardens, and turned along the path to the frozen mounds and the skating ground, knowing that he would certainly find her there, as he had seen the Shtcherbatskys’ carriage at the entrance. It was a bright, frosty day. Rows of carriages, sledges, drivers, and policemen were standing in the approach. Crowds of well-dressed people, with hats bright in the sun, swarmed about the entrance and along the well-swept little paths between the little houses adorned with carving in the Russian style. The old curly birches of the gardens, all their twigs laden with snow, looked as though freshly decked in sacred vestments. He walked along the path towards the skating-ground, and kept saying to himself—“You mustn’t be excited, you must be calm. What’s the matter with you? What do you want? Be quiet, stupid,” he conjured his heart. And the more he tried to compose himself, the more breathless he found himself. An acquaintance met him and called him by his name, but Levin did not even recognize him. He went towards the mounds, whence came the clank of the chains of sledges as they slipped down or were dragged up, the rumble of the sliding sledges, and the sounds of merry voices. He walked on a few steps, and the skating-ground lay open before his eyes, and at once, amidst all the skaters, he knew her.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  perfidies.” When by his silence the sacred soul showed he had finished setting of the woof across the warp I had held out in readiness to him, I began, as he who longeth in doubt for counsel from one who seeth and willeth straight, and loveth: “Well do I see, my father, how time cometh spurring toward me to give me such a buffet as is heaviest to whoso most abandoneth himself; wherefore with foresight it were well to arm me, that if the dearest place be reft from me, I lose not all the rest by reason of my songs. Down in the world endlessly bitter, and along the mount from whose fair summit my Lady’s eyes uplifted me, and after, through the heaven from light to light, I have learnt that which if I tell again, will have strong-bitter flavour unto many; and if to truth I am a shrinking friend, I fear to lose life amongst those who shall call this time ancient.” The light wherein was smiling my treasure which I there had found, first coruscated as at the sun’s rays doth a golden mirror; then answered: “Conscience darkened, or by its own or by another’s shame, will in truth feel thy utterance grating. But none the less, every lie set aside, make thy entire vision manifest, and let them scratch wherever is the scab; for if thy voice be grievous at first taste, yet vital nutriment shall it leave thereafter when digested. This cry of thine shall do as doth the wind, which smiteth most upon the loftiest summits; and this shall be no little argument of honour. Therefore have been displayed to thee, in these wheels, upon the mount, and in the dolorous vale, only souls known to fame; for the soul of him who heareth resteth not nor fixeth faith by an example which hath its root unknown and hidden, nor other unconspicuous argument.” 1. Phaëton. The fatal consequences of his father giving him leave to drive the chariot of the Sun still act as a warning to fathers. What he “had heard uttered against himself” was that he was not really Apollo’s son. 2. Cf. Cantos vi. ii and xxix. 3. Cf. Inf. x, xv, xxiv; and Purg. xi, and more vaguely Purg viii and xxiv. 4. See Canto x, note 11. 5. “Thance” = from the “eternal aspect” mentioned above. 6. Phædra accused Hippolytus of the sin of which she herself was really guilty. So Florence. 7. Gardner, i. 4, “The Jubilee,” etc. 8. Apparently implying that Dante had broken with the Whites before the “affair of Lastra.” Gardner, i. 5, “Benedict xi”; and Villani, viii. 72. 9. Bartolomeo della Scala, Lord of Verona, brother of Can Grande. Gardner, i, 5; “Verona,” etc. His arms were an eagle on a ladder (scala). 10. Can Grande. Cf. Inf. i. 11. Clement V encouraged Henry VII’s expedition to Italy, but he was not loyal to him. See Canto xxx, and note 7. Also Gardner, i. 6.