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 The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  It is easy for him and me to decipher now a past destiny; but a destiny in the making is, believe me, not one of those honest mystery stories where all you have to do is keep an eye on the clues. In my youth I once read a French detective tale where the clues were actually in italics; but that is not McFate’s way—even if one does learn to recognize certain obscure indications. For instance: I would not swear that there was not at least one occasion, prior to, or at the very beginning of, the Midwest lap of our journey, when she managed to convey some information to, or otherwise get into contact with, a person or persons unknown. We had stopped at a gas station, under the sign of Pegasus, and she had slipped out of her seat and escaped to the rear of the premises while the raised hood, under which I had bent to watch the mechanic’s manipulations, hid her for a moment from my sight. Being inclined to be lenient, I only shook my benign head though strictly speaking such visits were taboo, since I felt instinctively that toilets—as also telephones—happened to be, for reasons unfathomable, the points where my destiny was liable to catch. We all have such fateful objects—it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another—carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of special significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane’s heart always break. Well—my car had been attended to, and I had moved it away from the pumps to let a pickup truck be serviced—when the growing volume of her absence began to weigh upon me in the windy grayness. Not for the first time, and not for the last, had I stared in such dull discomfort of mind at those stationary trivialities that look almost surprised, like staring rustics, to find themselves in the stranded traveller’s field of vision: that green garbage can, those very black, very whitewalled tires for sale, those bright cans of motor oil, that red icebox with assorted drinks, the four, five, seven discarded bottles within the incompleted crossword puzzle of their wooden cells, that bug patiently walking up the inside of the window of the office. Radio music was coming from its open door, and because the rhythm was not synchronized with the heave and flutter and other gestures of wind-animated vegetation, one had the impression of an old scenic film living its own life while piano or fiddle followed a line of music quite outside the shivering flower, the swaying branch. The sound of Charlotte’s last sob incongruously vibrated through me as, with her dress fluttering athwart the rhythm, Lolita veered from a totally unexpected direction. She had found the toilet occupied and had crossed over to the sign of the Conche in the next block. They said there they were proud of their home-clean restrooms.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  Beauty had dozed, then awakened again and again, to find herself still chained in the ornate bedchamber as if in a nightmare. She was bound to the wall, her ankles cuffed in leather, her wrists up over her head, her buttocks pushed against the cold stone behind her. At first the stone had felt good. Now and then she twisted to leg the air touch the soreness. Of course the abraded flesh was much healed from last night's ordeal on the Bridle Path, but she still suffered, and she knew tonight she was surely destined for more torment. Not the least of it, however, was her own passion. What had the Prince awakened in her that after one night of no satisfaction, she should feel so wanton? It was the stirring between her legs that first brought her out of sleep in the Slaves' Hall, and now and then she felt it as she stood waiting. The room itself lay in shadow and unbroken stillness. Dozens of thick candles burned in their heavy gilded holders, the wax spilling in rivulets through the traceries of gold. The bed with its tapestried draperies appeared a gaping cavern. Beauty closed her eyes. She opened them again. And when she was again on the verge of dream, she heard the heavy double doors thrown open and suddenly saw the tall, slender figure of the Queen materialized before her. The Queen moved to the center of the carpet. Her blue velvet gown cleaved to her girdled hips before flaring gently to cover her black pointed slippers. She gazed at Beauty with narrow, black eyes tipped up at the ends to give her a cruel expression, and then she smiled, her white cheeks dimpling though an instant before they had seemed as hard as white porcelain. Beauty had lowered her eyes at once. Petrified, she watched covertly as the Queen moved away from her and seated herself at an ornate dressing table, her back to a high mirror. With an off-handed gesture she dismissed the Ladies who stood at the door. A figure remained there, and Beauty, afraid to look, was certain it was Prince Alexi. So her tormentor had come, Beauty thought. Her heart pounded in her ears, becoming a roar rather than a pulse, and she felt the bonds holding her helpless so that she could not have defended herself against anyone or anything. Her breast felt heavy, and the moisture between her legs greatly agitated her. Would the Queen discover it and use it to further punish her? Yet mingled with her fear was some sense of her helplessness which had come over her the night before and never left her. She knew how she must appear, she was afraid, but she could do nothing and she was accepting it. Maybe this was a new strength, this acceptance.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  For at least two minutes I waited and strained on the brink, like that tailor with his homemade parachute forty years ago when about to jump from the Eiffel Tower. Her faint breathing had the rhythm of sleep. Finally I heaved myself onto my narrow margin of bed, stealthily pulled at the odds and ends of sheets piled up to the south of my stone-cold heels—and Lolita lifted her head and gaped at me. As I learned later from a helpful pharmaceutist, the purple pill did not even belong to the big and noble family of barbiturates, and though it might have induced sleep in a neurotic who believed it to be a potent drug, it was too mild a sedative to affect for any length of time a wary, albeit weary, nymphet. Whether the Ramsdale doctor was a charlatan or a shrewd old rogue, does not, and did not, really matter. What mattered, was that I had been deceived. When Lolita opened her eyes again, I realized that whether or not the drug might work later in the night, the security I had relied upon was a sham one. Slowly her head turned away and dropped onto her unfair amount of pillow. I lay quite still on my brink, peering at her rumpled hair, at the glimmer of nymphet flesh, where half a haunch and half a shoulder dimly showed, and trying to gauge the depth of her sleep by the rate of her respiration. Some time passed, nothing changed, and I decided I might risk getting a little closer to that lovely and maddening glimmer; but hardly had I moved into its warm purlieus than her breathing was suspended, and I had the odious feeling that little Dolores was wide awake and would explode in screams if I touched her with any part of my wretchedness. Please, reader: no matter your exasperation with the tenderhearted, morbidly sensitive, infinitely circumspect hero of my book, do not skip these essential pages! Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let’s even smile a little. After all, there is no harm in smiling. For instance (I almost wrote “frinstance”), I had no place to rest my head, and a fit of heartburn (they call those fries “French,” grand Dieu! ) was added to my discomfort. She was again fast asleep, my nymphet, but still I did not dare to launch upon my enchanted voyage. La Petite Dormeuse ou l’Amant Ridicule . Tomorrow I would stuff her with those earlier pills that had so thoroughly numbed her mummy. In the glove compartment—or in the Gladstone bag? Should I wait a solid hour and then creep up again? The science of nympholepsy is a precise science.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  This sort of thinking isn’t limited to Silicon Valley. A BBC report from September 2003 reported, “Well-off is the new poor.” Dr. Clive Hamilton, a visiting scholar at Cambridge University, set out to study the “suffering rich” and found that four of every ten people earning over £50,000 (roughly $80,000 at the time) felt “deprived.” Hamilton concluded, “The real concerns of yesterday’s poor have become the imagined concerns of today’s rich.” Another recent survey in the United States found that 45 percent of those with a net worth (excluding their home) over $1 million were worried about running out of money before they died. Over one-third of those with more than $5 million had the same concern.18 “Affluenza” (a.k.a. luxury fever) is not an eternal affliction of the human animal, as some would have us believe. It is an effect of wealth disparities that arose with agriculture. Still, even in modern societies, we sometimes find echoes of the ancient egalitarianism of our ancestors. In the early 1960s, a physician named Stewart Wolf heard about a town of Italian immigrants and their descendants in northeast Pennsylvania where heart disease was practically unknown. Wolf decided to take a closer look at the town, Roseto. He found that almost no one under age fifty-five showed symptoms of heart disease. Men over sixty-five suffered about half the number of heart problems expected of average Americans. The overall death rate in Roseto was about one-third below national averages. After conducting research that carefully excluded factors such as exercise, diet, and regional variables like pollution levels, Wolf and sociologist John Bruhn concluded that the major factor keeping folks in Roseto healthier longer was the nature of the community itself. They noted that most households held three generations, that older folks commanded great respect, and that the community disdained any display of wealth, showing a “fear of ostentation derived from an ancient belief among Italian villagers relating to maloccio (the evil eye). Children,” Wolf wrote, “were taught that any display of wealth or superiority over a neighbor would bring bad luck.” Noting that Roseto’s egalitarian social bonds were already breaking down in the mid-1960s, Wolf and Bruhn predicted that within a generation, the town’s mortality rates would start to shift upward. In follow-up studies they conducted 25 years later, they reported, “The most striking social change was a widespread rejection of a long standing taboo against ostentation,” and that “sharing, once typical of Roseto, had given way to competition.” Rates of both heart disease and stroke had doubled in a generation.19

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Swoon absolutely sure my wife had not telephoned? He was. If she did, would he tell her we had gone on to Aunt Clare’s place? He would, indeedie. I settled the bill and roused Lo from her chair. She read to the car. Still reading, she was driven to a so-called coffee shop a few blocks south. Oh, she ate all right. She even laid aside her magazine to eat, but a queer dullness had replaced her usual cheerfulness. I knew little Lo could be very nasty, so I braced myself and grinned, and waited for a squall. I was unbathed, unshaven, and had had no bowel movement. My nerves were a-jangle. I did not like the way my little mistress shrugged her shoulders and distended her nostrils when I attempted casual small talk. Had Phyllis been in the know before she joined her parents in Maine? I asked with a smile. “Look,” said Lo making a weeping grimace, “let us get off the subject.” I then tried—also unsuccessfully, no matter how I smacked my lips—to interest her in the road map. Our destination was, let me remind my patient reader whose meek temper Lo ought to have copied, the gay town of Lepingville, somewhere near a hypothetical hospital. That destination was in itself a perfectly arbitrary one (as, alas, so many were to be), and I shook in my shoes as I wondered how to keep the whole arrangement plausible, and what other plausible objectives to invent after we had taken in all the movies in Lepingville. More and more uncomfortable did Humbert feel. It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed. As she was in the act of getting back into the car, an expression of pain flitted across Lo’s face. It flitted again, more meaningfully, as she settled down beside me. No doubt, she reproduced it that second time for my benefit. Foolishly, I asked her what was the matter. “Nothing, you brute,” she replied. “You what?” I asked. She was silent. Leaving Briceland. Loquacious Lo was silent. Cold spiders of panic crawled down my back. This was an orphan. This was a lone child, an absolute waif, with whom a heavy-limbed, foul-smelling adult had had strenuous intercourse three times that very morning. Whether or not the realization of a lifelong dream had surpassed all expectation, it had, in a sense, overshot its mark—and plunged into a nightmare.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I have a lot of anxiety. And I have an important business meeting coming up later this month.” Really, I just wanted something especially powerful to blindfold me through the holidays. “Give these a try,” Dr. Tuttle said, sliding a sample bottle of pills across her desk. “Infermiterol. If those don’t put you down for the count, I’ll complain directly to the manufacturer in Germany. Take one and let me know how it goes.” “Thank you, doctor.” “Any plans for Christmas?” she asked, scribbling my refills. “Seeing the folks? Where are you from again? Albuquerque?” “My parents are dead.” “I’m sorry to hear that. But I’m not surprised,” Dr. Tuttle said, writing in her file. “Orphans usually suffer from low immunity, psychiatrically speaking. You may consider getting a pet to build up your relational skills. Parrots, I hear, are nonjudgmental.” “I’ll think about that,” I said, taking the sheaf of prescriptions she’d written, and the Infermiterol sample. It was freezing cold outside that afternoon. As I crossed Broadway, a sliver of moon appeared in the pale sky, then disappeared behind the buildings. The air had a metallic tinge to it. The world felt still and eerie, vibrating. I was glad not to see many people on the street. Those I did see looked like lumbering monsters, human shapes deformed by puffy coats and hoods, mittens and hats, snow boots. I assessed my reflection in the windows of a darkened storefront as I walked up West Fifteenth Street. It did comfort me to see that I was still pretty, still blond and tall and thin. I still had good posture. One might have even confused me for a celebrity in slovenly incognito. Not that people cared. I hailed a cab at Union Square and gave the driver the cross streets of Rite Aid uptown. It was already getting dark out, but I kept my sunglasses on. I didn’t want to have to look anybody in the eye. I didn’t want to relate to anybody too keenly. Plus, the fluorescent lights at the drug store were blinding. If I could have purchased my medications from a vending machine, I would have paid double for them. The pharmacist on duty that evening was a young Latina woman— perfect eyebrows, fake nails. She knew me on sight. “Give me ten minutes,” she said. Next to the vitamins, there was a contraption to measure your blood pressure and pulse. I sat in the seat of the machine, took my arm out of the sleeve of my coat and stuck it in for testing. A pleather pillow inflated around my bicep. I watched numbers on the digital screen go up and down. Pulse 48. Pressure 80/50. That seemed appropriate. I went to the rack of DVDs to browse the latest selection of pre-owned movies. The Nutty Professor, Jumanji, Casper, Space Jam, The Cable Guy.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  "But what is happening, what is the Bridle Path?" she asked in a great fluster. "Shhhhh..." Leon said, pinching and prodding her breasts to give them as he said, "some color." He then glossed Beauty's eyelids and eyelashes with oil and smoothed a little rouge into her lips and into her nipples. Beauty drew back instinctively but his touch was sure and quick and he took no notice of her. But what bothered her most was that her body felt cool and vulnerable. She could feel the sheathing of leather against her calves, and all the rest of her felt worse than naked. It was more terrible than any of the smaller adornments. "What is going to take place?" she asked again, but Leon had thrust her over the end of the table and now oiled her buttocks vigorously. "Well healed," he said. "The Prince must have guessed last night you would run tonight and he spared you." Beauty felt his strong fingers plying her flesh and a dread came over her. So they would spank her, but they always did. Only it would be in the presence of many others? Every humiliating spank she had received before the eyes of others had cost her dearly, though she knew now she would suffer any amount of paddling for the Prince, but she had not really been given a hard, thorough spanking for the pleasure of others since the Inn on the road where the Innkeeper's daughter had spanked her for the soldiers and the common people at the windows. "But it must come," she thought. And a vision of the Court watching it as some ritual caused her to feel an undeniable curiosity that soon enough gave way to panic. "My Lord, please tell me..." Amid the crowd about her, she saw other girls with braided hair and boots. So she was not alone. And there were Princes being fitted with boots also. Through it all there moved a handful of young Princes on their hands and knees polishing boots as quickly as they could, their own buttocks raw, their necks encircled by a little cord of leather to which was attached a sign that Beauty could not read. But now as Leon brought her up standing again and gave some finishing touches to her lips and eyelashes, one of these Princes was now buffing her boots though he was weeping. His buttocks were as red as it could have been. And she saw the sign about his neck said, "I am in Disgrace," in small letters. A Page approached and gave the Prince a sound crack with a belt to hurry him on to another. But Beauty had no time to think of it. Leon had affixed the accursed little brass bells to her nipples.

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  Go to court. Don’t go to court. Get a rape kit. Don’t get a rape kit. Don’t take a class with that teacher. (He’s handsy.) Don’t take a class with her. (She’s unsympathetic.) Don’t watch violent movies. Don’t watch movies that might be violent. Don’t be angry. If you’re angry, explain why calmly. If I were you, I wouldn’t wear that. I’d rather be dead than be raped. (I’d rather be dead than be you?) Don’t talk about rape. Do you have proof? Don’t get defensive. Avoid your triggers. Don’t eat at restaurants with steak knives. Are you eating? You look thin. You look fat. No one’s going to want to go home with you. Don’t let people you don’t know into your home. Who do you really know anyway? Don’t walk alone at night. Don’t not walk alone at night. This is your life. This is your life. This is your life. 17. After college, I move back to Nashville. My girlfriend, M., is a social worker, and she’s heard from a colleague of hers of a lesbian therapist who specializes in PTSD. “Do you want to try?” she asks me. “Not really,” I tell her, thinking of the mutual stare-down with the therapist I saw in high school, thinking of the doctor who asked if I was “gay before,” thinking that I am really, all things considered, finally doing okay. I have a job teaching high school. I can sleep for hours at a time. I can go days, sometimes weeks, without having flashbacks. M. looks at me with exhaustion. “I guess I’ll try,” I say. A smile pops onto M.’s face like it’s been released by my acquiescence. The therapist’s office is attached to her home. She invites me in. I sit on a brown corduroy armchair. She asks me a series of intimate questions as though reading directions for shampoo use. I answer her equally sterilely. To: “Are you religious?” I say: “Jewish.” “Do you have siblings?” “A younger brother.” “Have you experienced trauma?” I say, “I was beaten and raped when I was sixteen,” as though agreeing, “Yes. Wash, rinse, repeat.” “Oh.” She pauses, looking up at me. “At least you weren’t killed,” she says, writing something down in her notebook. M. looks hopeful when she picks me up. “How was it?” “It was fine,” I say, and thank her for coming to get me. In our next session, the therapist says we are beginning Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. I’d read that the first step involves holding aspects of the traumatic event in mind. I tell her I don’t think I’m ready. She tells me, “It will be helpful.” I wonder if I can say no. She probably knows what’s best. She tells me to visualize the part of “the scene” I remember most strongly. I throw up in her bathroom. That night, I sleep on the couch.

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

  To tell it and to crawl out of the experience anew. KEEPING ON TRACK A big project sometimes needs some project management. There are lots of apps and skills and managers able to help you with that. For me I needed to keep logs just to keep seeing that I was making progress, because a lot of times it felt like I wasn’t progressing at all. The logs helped verify what my anxiety and frustration was keeping me from seeing: that the process was moving forward. Finishing DO THIS I encourage you to be in your story again. Use this as a chance to live twice. If the story you’re working on is a positive one, then let the work be a celebration of it. If it’s a tragic story, then let your work on it be a healing. What follows are other good self-assignments to keep yourself going. START A LOG In the middle of a big project, it may be hard to see you’ve made any progress at all. Start a private log. Each day, write down how you pushed the project further. When you look back at that log, even if you’ve got big holes in it, you’ll still see that you’re moving forward. Continually moving forward is all it takes. At the best of times, I kept a log. On a Google spreadsheet, I logged what part of what pages I did every day I worked. Looking at this, rather than the art and story itself, which was always loaded with emotion, helped me realize that I was, in fact, making progress. If you are capable of sitting down and working one day, you’re capable of doing it again. And if you’re capable of getting down and working many days in a row, then you can finish your book. You may just need some reminders that you’re making progress. FIND SOME READERS It’s probably obvious, but there are tons of comics and comics sites on the web. Join them. Start a site for your project and invite others to look on. Finding friendly voices to egg you on, online, or in person, too, is sometimes essential. I found it imperative toward the end to have a few readers with whom I shared early drafts. I might have been disingenuous when I asked for criticism—I probably really wanted affirmation. It’s okay to ask for that, too. Find readers online, in public, or privately, but allow yourself a cheering section. I now host a forum of readers and creators doing just this. I see it helping people every day. Finishing GO FURTHER START A DIARY Each day, take five minutes to reflect on the process. Hard, easy, technical details, personal details, Morning Pages, whatever. Shedding this skin each day or each session will allow you to be stronger than the pain, the process, the difficulty. WRITE YOURSELF SOME ENCOURAGEMENTS There are times when it’s hard to go on.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Oh, it was? [musingly] Was it?”—and with a yelp of amorous vernal laughter she slapped the glossy bole and tore uphill, to the end of the street, and then rode back, feet at rest on stopped pedals, posture relaxed, one hand dreaming in her print-flowered lap. 14 Because it supposedly tied up with her interest in dance and dramatics, I had permitted Lo to take piano lessons with a Miss Emperor (as we French scholars may conveniently call her) to whose blue-shuttered little white house a mile or so beyond Beardsley Lo would spin off twice a week. One Friday night toward the end of May (and a week or so after the very special rehearsal Lo had not had me attend) the telephone in my study, where I was in the act of mopping up Gustave’s—I mean Gaston’s—king’s side, rang and Miss Emperor asked if Lo was coming next Tuesday because she had missed last Tuesday’s and today’s lessons. I said she would by all means—and went on with the game. As the reader may well imagine, my faculties were now impaired, and a move or two later, with Gaston to play, I noticed through the film of my general distress that he could collect my queen; he noticed it too, but thinking it might be a trap on the part of his tricky opponent, he demurred for quite a minute, and puffed and wheezed, and shook his jowls, and even shot furtive glances at me, and made hesitating half-thrusts with his pudgily bunched fingers—dying to take that juicy queen and not daring—and all of a sudden he swooped down upon it (who knows if it did not teach him certain later audacities?), and I spent a dreary hour in achieving a draw. He finished his brandy and presently lumbered away, quite satisfied with this result ( mon pauvre ami, je ne vous ai jamais revu et quoiqu’il y ait bien peu de chance que vous voyiez mon livre, permettez-moi de vous dire que je vous serre la main bien cordialement, et que toutes mes fillettes vous saluent ). I found Dolores Haze at the kitchen table, consuming a wedge of pie, with her eyes fixed on her script. They rose to meet mine with a kind of celestial vapidity.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Don’t you think that under the circumstances Dolores Haze had better stick to her old man?” By rubbing all this in, I succeeded in terrorizing Lo, who despite a certain brash alertness of manner and spurts of wit was not as intelligent a child as her I.Q. might suggest. But if I managed to establish that background of shared secrecy and shared guilt, I was much less successful in keeping her in good humor. Every morning during our yearlong travels I had to devise some expectation, some special point in space and time for her to look forward to, for her to survive till bedtime. Otherwise, deprived of a shaping and sustaining purpose, the skeleton of her day sagged and collapsed. The object in view might be anything—a lighthouse in Virginia, a natural cave in Arkansas converted to a café, a collection of guns and violins somewhere in Oklahoma, a replica of the Grotto of Lourdes in Louisiana, shabby photographs of the bonanza mining period in the local museum of a Rocky Mountains resort, anything whatsoever—but it had to be there, in front of us, like a fixed star, although as likely as not Lo would feign gagging as soon as we got to it. By putting the geography of the United States into motion, I did my best for hours on end to give her the impression of “going places,” of rolling on to some definite destination, to some unusual delight. I have never seen such smooth amiable roads as those that now radiated before us, across the crazy quilt of forty-eight states. Voraciously we consumed those long highways, in rapt silence we glided over their glossy black dance floors. Not only had Lo no eye for scenery but she furiously resented my calling her attention to this or that enchanting detail of landscape; which I myself learned to discern only after being exposed for quite a time to the delicate beauty ever present in the margin of our undeserving journey. By a paradox of pictorial thought, the average lowland North-American countryside had at first seemed to me something I accepted with a shock of amused recognition because of those painted oilcloths which were imported from America in the old days to be hung above washstands in Central-European nurseries, and which fascinated a drowsy child at bed time with the rustic green views they depicted—opaque curly trees, a barn, cattle, a brook, the dull white of vague orchards in bloom, and perhaps a stone fence or hills of greenish gouache. But gradually the models of those elementary rusticities became stranger and stranger to the eye, the nearer I came to know them.

• From Querelle (1953)

  Gil started to work in the shipyard than the mason had showered him with his attentions, favors which sometimes were real masterpieces of subtlety. He also bought Gil glasses of the syrupy white wine in the bistros of Recouvrance. But within that steely hand slapping him on the back in the bar Gil sensed-and trembled at sensing-the presence of another, softer hand. The one wanted to subjugate him, so that the other could then caress him. The last couple of days Theo had been trying to make him angry. It riled him that he had not yet had his way with the younger man. In the ·shipyard Gil would sometimes look across at him : it was rare not to find Theo's gaze fixed on him. Theo was a scrupulous workman, regarded as exemplary by all his mates. Before placing it in its bed of cement, his hands caressed each stone, turned it over, chose the best-looking surface, and always fitted it so that the best side faced outward. Gil raised his hand, stopped stroking the cat. He put it down gently, next to the stove, on a soft spot covered with shavings. Thus he perhaps made his companions believe that he was a very sweet-tempered man. He even wanted his gentleness to be provoking. Finally, for his own benefit, he had to give the appearance of wishing to distance himself from any excessive reaction induced by Theo's insult. He went to the table, sat down at his place. Theo did not look at him. Gil saw his thick mop of hair and thick neck bent over the white china bowl. He was talking and laughing heartily with one of his friends. The overall sound was one of mouths lapping up spoonfuls of thick soup. Once the meal was finished, Gil was the first one to get up; he took off his sweater and went to work on the dirty dishes. For a few minutes, his shirt open at the neck, sleeves rolled up above elbows, his face reddened and damp from the steam, his bare arms plunging into the greasy dishwater, he looked like a young female kitchen worker in some restaurant. He knew, all of a sudden, that he was no longer just an ordinary workman. For several minutes he felt he had turned into a strange and ambiguous being: a young man 43 I QUERELLE

• From Querelle (1953)

  already encountered in Querelle was equally apparent in his brother Robert who let himself be loved by Madame Lysiane, sinking into the wraps of her tough and tender maternal femininity. He enjoyed floating around in it and was sometimes even tempted to forget himself. As for the Madam, she had at long last found a chance to revolve round an axle and to accomplish a "true marriage of mast and sail." In bed, she worshipped at the blase altar of her lover's outstretched body by rubbing her face and her heavy boobs all over it. During Robert's languorous arousal, Madame Lysiane enjoyed the foreplay, starting out with a mock version of it: after pecking at the base of her lover's nose, she would suddenly and greedily pop that entire organ into her mouth. Sensitive to all tickling, Robert would then snort, withdraw his nose from the hot wet mouth and wipe off the saliva. As she looked up and saw him come through the parlor door, Querelle's face gave her the same shock she had experienced when she first saw the two brothers together, with their look-alike faces. Quite often since that day a pang of anxiety flashed through the gentle and regular progression of her placid mind, and this made her aware of the undercurrent that would alter the course of her life. So great was Querelle's resemblance to her lover that for a moment she even thought (not really believing it) that it had to be Robert, dressed up as a sailor. Querelle's face, advancing toward her with a smile, both annoyed and completely fascinated her. "So what? They're brothers, so it's quite natural," she reassured herself. But she became obsessed with the monstrousness of this so perfect resemblance. I am a repulsive object I have loved him too much, and excess . of love makes you weak. Too strong a love upsets the organism in all its depths-and what rises up to the surface is merely nauseating. 0 0 118 I JEAN GENET Your faces are cymbals that never strike each other, but glide in silence over each other's waters. Querelle's murders multiplied his personality, each one creating a new one that did not forget its predecessors. The last murderer born of the last murder lived -in the company of his noblest friends, those who had preceded him and whom he now surpassed. And so he convened them in that ceremony the bandits of yore called blood marriage: all the participants stuck their knives into the same victim, a ceremony essentially similar to the one of which we have this description : "Rosa said to Nucor: " 'This is a real man. You may take off your socks and serve the kirsch.'

• From Querelle (1953)

  When he went over to her, Madame Lysiane had cried herself dry. Strands of her disheveled hair were glued to her face by tears, and the rouge on her lips was running a little. Querelle hugged her, pressed her against his own body, already hard in its navy-blue armor, and kissed her on the cheeks. This may throw some light on Querelle's later treatment of the Lieutenant, first, and Mario, second. The Venge�r's stay in Brest was drawing to a close. The crew was aware that they would be ready to leave in a few days' time. The idea of departure gave rise to a confused anguish in Querelle. He would be rid of the dry land with all its tangled and dangerous adventures, but he would also lose all its joys. Every moment that turned him into more of a stranger in the city attached him more strongly to life on the ship. Querelle had a foreboding of the exceptional importance of that enormous steel construction. The idea that it was preparing for a cruise to the Baltic, or perhaps even farther, to the White Sea, made him feel uneasy. Without 270 I JEAN GENET accounting for it to himself in any precise manner, Querelle was already arranging the elements of his future. It was on the second day of his liaison with Madame Lysiane that the incident occurred which we have seen mentioned in the Lieutenant's diary. It was Querelle's custom, when walking down the street, to have his own kind of fun with any girls he met. Pretending to grab them, in order to kiss them, he pushed them away if they acquiesced. Sometimes he did kiss them, but the general idea was to mock them, making faces or wisecracks. His vanity yearned for that kind of recognition of his powers as a seducer. He rarely spent more than seconds with any girl he had managed to catch, but kept on rolling along, with his slow and bouncy gait. But that evening things were different. Happy to have escaped, thanks to Madame Lysiane, from the aridity of his affairs with Nono and then Mario, feeling like a winner, proud of having deceived his brother and of having made love to a woman, he was walking down the Rue de Siam. He felt elated, a little drunk. The liquor warmed his chest, lit up his vision. He was smiling. "Hey, baby!"

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  and some of them are suburban. Those critics have called suburban life “stratified, anesthetized, and standardized.” How do you understand that criticism? Americans are always anxious about the ways we house ourselves. In the 1890s, America’s big cities were said to be divided by class conflict and deadened by the rapid pace of life. In the 1920s, America’s rural towns were ridiculed as culturally blighted and narrow-minded. In the 1960s, America’s new suburbs were vilified by Lewis Mumford in The City in History as “a multitude of uniform unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly at uniform distances on uniform roads, in a treeless command waste inhabited by people of the same class, the same incomes, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold manufactured in the same central metropolis.” The targets change, but the language of doubt stays much the same. An American place is never just neutral ground. It’s always a moral sign. Why demonize the suburban experience? The harsh, judgmental line in American thought that stretches from Mumford, through Peter Blake in God’s Own Junkyard, to James Howard Kunstler in Geography of Nowhere, to Andrés Duany in Suburban Nation defines all mass-produced housing since 1945 as a failure, not just a failure of design but a failure of the spirit, too. Kunstler, at the 1999 Congress of New Urbanism, dismissed postwar suburbs as “the place where evil dwells.” That’s been reflected in the critical response to Holy Land, some of which has been strongly negative and some indifferent to the book’s implications about the capacity of places like mine to inspire loyalty or be redemptive. As far as I could tell by their lives together, my parents did not escape to their suburb. They didn’t imagine it to be a bunker in which they could avoid the demands of living with other people. My parents and their neighbors in the 1950s understood, more generously than Mumford, what they had gained and lost by becoming suburban. You write about the suburbs with a certain religiosity. You use words like

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  He did not undress, but walked up and down with his regular tread over the resounding parquet of the dining-room, where one lamp was burning, over the carpet of the dark drawing-room, in which the light was reflected on the big new portrait of himself hanging over the sofa, and across her boudoir, where two candles burned, lighting up the portraits of her parents and woman friends, and the pretty knick-knacks of her writing-table, that he knew so well. He walked across her boudoir to the bedroom door, and turned back again. At each turn in his walk, especially at the parquet of the lighted dining-room, he halted and said to himself, “Yes, this I must decide and put a stop to; I must express my view of it and my decision.” And he turned back again. “But express what—what decision?” he said to himself in the drawing-room, and he found no reply. “But after all,” he asked himself before turning into the boudoir, “what has occurred? Nothing. She was talking a long while with him. But what of that? Surely women in society can talk to whom they please. And then, jealousy means lowering both myself and her,” he told himself as he went into her boudoir; but this dictum, which had always had such weight with him before, had now no weight and no meaning at all. And from the bedroom door he turned back again; but as he entered the dark drawing-room some inner voice told him that it was not so, and that if others noticed it that showed that there was something. And he said to himself again in the dining-room, “Yes, I must decide and put a stop to it, and express my view of it....” And again at the turn in the drawing-room he asked himself, “Decide how?” And again he asked himself, “What had occurred?” and answered, “Nothing,” and recollected that jealousy was a feeling insulting to his wife; but again in the drawing-room he was convinced that something had happened. His thoughts, like his body, went round a complete circle, without coming upon anything new. He noticed this, rubbed his forehead, and sat down in her boudoir. There, looking at her table, with the malachite blotting case lying at the top and an unfinished letter, his thoughts suddenly changed. He began to think of her, of what she was thinking and feeling. For the first time he pictured vividly to himself her personal life, her ideas, her desires, and the idea that she could and should have a separate life of her own seemed to him so alarming that he made haste to dispel it. It was the chasm which he was afraid to peep into. To put himself in thought and feeling in another person’s place was a spiritual exercise not natural to Alexey Alexandrovitch. He looked on this spiritual exercise as a harmful and dangerous abuse of the fancy.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  At half-past seven she had only just gone down into the drawing-room, when the footman announced, “Konstantin Dmitrievitch Levin.” The princess was still in her room, and the prince had not come in. “So it is to be,” thought Kitty, and all the blood seemed to rush to her heart. She was horrified at her paleness, as she glanced into the looking-glass. At that moment she knew beyond doubt that he had come early on purpose to find her alone and to make her an offer. And only then for the first time the whole thing presented itself in a new, different aspect; only then she realized that the question did not affect her only—with whom she would be happy, and whom she loved—but that she would have that moment to wound a man whom she liked. And to wound him cruelly. What for? Because he, dear fellow, loved her, was in love with her. But there was no help for it, so it must be, so it would have to be. “My God! shall I myself really have to say it to him?” she thought. “Can I tell him I don’t love him? That will be a lie. What am I to say to him? That I love someone else? No, that’s impossible. I’m going away, I’m going away.” She had reached the door, when she heard his step. “No! it’s not honest. What have I to be afraid of? I have done nothing wrong. What is to be, will be! I’ll tell the truth. And with him one can’t be ill at ease. Here he is,” she said to herself, seeing his powerful, shy figure, with his shining eyes fixed on her. She looked straight into his face, as though imploring him to spare her, and gave her hand. “It’s not time yet; I think I’m too early,” he said glancing round the empty drawing-room. When he saw that his expectations were realized, that there was nothing to prevent him from speaking, his face became gloomy. “Oh, no,” said Kitty, and sat down at the table. “But this was just what I wanted, to find you alone,” he began, not sitting down, and not looking at her, so as not to lose courage. “Mamma will be down directly. She was very much tired.... Yesterday....” She talked on, not knowing what her lips were uttering, and not taking her supplicating and caressing eyes off him. He glanced at her; she blushed, and ceased speaking. “I told you I did not know whether I should be here long ... that it depended on you....” She dropped her head lower and lower, not knowing herself what answer she should make to what was coming.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  When Levin went upstairs, his wife was sitting near the new silver samovar behind the new tea service, and, having settled old Agafea Mihalovna at a little table with a full cup of tea, was reading a letter from Dolly, with whom they were in continual and frequent correspondence. “You see, your good lady’s settled me here, told me to sit a bit with her,” said Agafea Mihalovna, smiling affectionately at Kitty. In these words of Agafea Mihalovna, Levin read the final act of the drama which had been enacted of late between her and Kitty. He saw that, in spite of Agafea Mihalovna’s feelings being hurt by a new mistress taking the reins of government out of her hands, Kitty had yet conquered her and made her love her. “Here, I opened your letter too,” said Kitty, handing him an illiterate letter. “It’s from that woman, I think, your brother’s....” she said. “I did not read it through. This is from my people and from Dolly. Fancy! Dolly took Tanya and Grisha to a children’s ball at the Sarmatskys’: Tanya was a French marquise.” But Levin did not hear her. Flushing, he took the letter from Marya Nikolaevna, his brother’s former mistress, and began to read it. This was the second letter he had received from Marya Nikolaevna. In the first letter, Marya Nikolaevna wrote that his brother had sent her away for no fault of hers, and, with touching simplicity, added that though she was in want again, she asked for nothing, and wished for nothing, but was only tormented by the thought that Nikolay Dmitrievitch would come to grief without her, owing to the weak state of his health, and begged his brother to look after him. Now she wrote quite differently. She had found Nikolay Dmitrievitch, had again made it up with him in Moscow, and had moved with him to a provincial town, where he had received a post in the government service. But that he had quarreled with the head official, and was on his way back to Moscow, only he had been taken so ill on the road that it was doubtful if he would ever leave his bed again, she wrote. “It’s always of you he has talked, and, besides, he has no more money left.” “Read this; Dolly writes about you,” Kitty was beginning, with a smile; but she stopped suddenly, noticing the changed expression on her husband’s face. “What is it? What’s the matter?” “She writes to me that Nikolay, my brother, is at death’s door. I shall go to him.” Kitty’s face changed at once. Thoughts of Tanya as a marquise, of Dolly, all had vanished. “When are you going?” she said. “Tomorrow.” “And I will go with you, can I?” she said. “Kitty! What are you thinking of?” he said reproachfully.

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  The city council members read the names of young men from this suburb who died in Vietnam. It is always the same list of thirty-two names. 34 Beneath Mrs. A’s house, the military, defense contractors, and the makers of nuclear waste toil and murder. She feels the thudding of their engines. She knows that the dead from the nearby aircraft plant are secretly buried there. The hidden trainloads of atomic waste kill her lawn and bubble to the surface in pools of red liquid to stain her garage floor. A city council member once went out to look, and Mrs. A fell weeping into his startled arms. 35 The Army Corps of Engineers, in league with the Douglas Aircraft Company, tunnels beneath Mrs. A’s house so that it threatens to slide into the pit. Mrs. A wrote President Carter. He held back the Corps of Engineers during his term. President Reagan had no such power; the toppling of her house into the Army’s excavation resumed. In Mrs. A’s closet was a string. When she pulled it, the digging stopped. But only for a while. I am aware of this because, as a city official, I receive Mrs. A’s extensive correspondence. 36 Mrs. A writes that the NASA moon shots were financed by the distribution of a pornographic film of her rape by a McDonald’s fry cook and a professional football team. Mrs. A wants the showings stopped. 37 I once received a well-printed flyer, with photographs and charts, calling on men of good will in both the United States and the Soviet Union to undertake a manned mission to Mars and, once there, to conduct a grand worship service for Jesus Christ. The author of the flyer, a retired military officer, called this ceremony on Mars “un beau geste.” 38 On another occasion, I received two sheets of ledger paper big enough for keeping hundreds of financial entries. The sheets were filled on both sides and from edge to edge with minute, clear handwriting. There were thousands of words in one, enormous paragraph. There is a neurological disorder, a kind of epilepsy, which compels its sufferers to write. 39 Someone from the state mental hospital sends the city a theme song. Someone else writes of divine retribution from Canada and the loss of the love of her husband. Another resident covers her doors and windows against the rays, and paints her house blue in welcome for alien visitors. Red traffic signals persecute a man on his way to work at night. He wants the city to make them all green. Another man carves the Venus de Milo from the stump of a tree rooted in his front yard. He receives considerable attention from the newspapers. Mrs. A argues that the cable television company wrecked the roof of her garden shed as the company’s men strung their cable to the electric pole behind her house.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Princess Shtcherbatskaya had herself been married thirty years ago, her aunt arranging the match. Her husband, about whom everything was well known beforehand, had come, looked at his future bride, and been looked at. The matchmaking aunt had ascertained and communicated their mutual impression. That impression had been favorable. Afterwards, on a day fixed beforehand, the expected offer was made to her parents, and accepted. All had passed very simply and easily. So it seemed, at least, to the princess. But over her own daughters she had felt how far from simple and easy is the business, apparently so commonplace, of marrying off one’s daughters. The panics that had been lived through, the thoughts that had been brooded over, the money that had been wasted, and the disputes with her husband over marrying the two elder girls, Darya and Natalia! Now, since the youngest had come out, she was going through the same terrors, the same doubts, and still more violent quarrels with her husband than she had over the elder girls. The old prince, like all fathers indeed, was exceedingly punctilious on the score of the honor and reputation of his daughters. He was irrationally jealous over his daughters, especially over Kitty, who was his favorite. At every turn he had scenes with the princess for compromising her daughter. The princess had grown accustomed to this already with her other daughters, but now she felt that there was more ground for the prince’s touchiness. She saw that of late years much was changed in the manners of society, that a mother’s duties had become still more difficult. She saw that girls of Kitty’s age formed some sort of clubs, went to some sort of lectures, mixed freely in men’s society; drove about the streets alone, many of them did not curtsey, and, what was the most important thing, all the girls were firmly convinced that to choose their husbands was their own affair, and not their parents’. “Marriages aren’t made nowadays as they used to be,” was thought and said by all these young girls, and even by their elders. But how marriages were made now, the princess could not learn from anyone. The French fashion—of the parents arranging their children’s future—was not accepted; it was condemned. The English fashion of the complete independence of girls was also not accepted, and not possible in Russian society. The Russian fashion of matchmaking by the offices of intermediate persons was for some reason considered unseemly; it was ridiculed by everyone, and by the princess herself. But how girls were to be married, and how parents were to marry them, no one knew. Everyone with whom the princess had chanced to discuss the matter said the same thing: “Mercy on us, it’s high time in our day to cast off all that old-fashioned business. It’s the young people have to marry; and not their parents; and so we ought to leave the young people to arrange it as they choose.” It was very easy for anyone to say that who had no daughters, but the princess realized that in the process of getting to know each other, her daughter might fall in love, and fall in love with someone who did not care to marry her or who was quite unfit to be her husband. And, however much it was instilled into the princess that in our times young people ought to arrange their lives for themselves, she was unable to believe it, just as she would have been unable to believe that, at any time whatever, the most suitable playthings for children five years old ought to be loaded pistols. And so the princess was more uneasy over Kitty than she had been over her elder sisters.