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 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.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Alexey Alexandrovitch asserted and believed that he had never in any previous year had so much official business as that year. But he was not aware that he sought work for himself that year, that this was one of the means for keeping shut that secret place where lay hid his feelings towards his wife and son and his thoughts about them, which became more terrible the longer they lay there. If anyone had had the right to ask Alexey Alexandrovitch what he thought of his wife’s behavior, the mild and peaceable Alexey Alexandrovitch would have made no answer, but he would have been greatly angered with any man who should question him on that subject. For this reason there positively came into Alexey Alexandrovitch’s face a look of haughtiness and severity whenever anyone inquired after his wife’s health. Alexey Alexandrovitch did not want to think at all about his wife’s behavior, and he actually succeeded in not thinking about it at all. Alexey Alexandrovitch’s permanent summer villa was in Peterhof, and the Countess Lidia Ivanovna used as a rule to spend the summer there, close to Anna, and constantly seeing her. That year Countess Lidia Ivanovna declined to settle in Peterhof, was not once at Anna Arkadyevna’s, and in conversation with Alexey Alexandrovitch hinted at the unsuitability of Anna’s close intimacy with Betsy and Vronsky. Alexey Alexandrovitch sternly cut her short, roundly declaring his wife to be above suspicion, and from that time began to avoid Countess Lidia Ivanovna. He did not want to see, and did not see, that many people in society cast dubious glances on his wife; he did not want to understand, and did not understand, why his wife had so particularly insisted on staying at Tsarskoe, where Betsy was staying, and not far from the camp of Vronsky’s regiment. He did not allow himself to think about it, and he did not think about it; but all the same though he never admitted it to himself, and had no proofs, not even suspicious evidence, in the bottom of his heart he knew beyond all doubt that he was a deceived husband, and he was profoundly miserable about it. How often during those eight years of happy life with his wife Alexey Alexandrovitch had looked at other men’s faithless wives and other deceived husbands and asked himself: “How can people descend to that? how is it they don’t put an end to such a hideous position?” But now, when the misfortune had come upon himself, he was so far from thinking of putting an end to the position that he would not recognize it at all, would not recognize it just because it was too awful, too unnatural.

• From Querelle (1953)

  the shop fronts were lit up. The Rue de Siam glimmered faintly. Gil walked on for a while, on the almost deserted Cours Dajot. He had not decided anything, not yet. He had no very clear idea of what would be happening an hour later, but a feeling of anguish darkened his entire vision of the world. He 104 I JEAN GENET was walking in a universe where the forms were still larval. To rise to that other, luminous world, where one dared to assume the function of thinking, one would, or so it seemed, have to wield a dagger. Parenthetically, and by your leave : if murder with an implement that is· sharp, pointed, or simply heavy enough, seems to give the murderer a measure of solace by bursting a kind of murky wineskin in which he had felt himself imprisoned, poison, on the other hand, cannot provide the same deliverance. Gil was choking. The fog, in conferring invisibility on him, gave him some comfort, but it was not capable of isolating him from the day before nor, certainly not, from the day to come. Given some powers of imagination Gil would have been able to rid himself of what had happened, but as the nature of his resenbnent was arid, . it deprived him of that possibility. The next day, and the days after the next_ day, he was doomed to live on in shame . .,Why the hell didn't I bust his head back then." Furiously he repeated this phrase that wasn't a question in any sense. He saw Thea's mean and sarcastic face. In his pockets, his fists clenched, his fingernails biting into the palms. As he was unable to question himself, let alone giye answers, he could only pursue his desolate line of thought so thoroughly that when he reached the balustrade in the emptiest comer of the square his spirit had reached down to rock-bottom humiliation. He turned his head toward the sea; in a loud voice, but choking. it back, he uttered a raucous cry: (4Aarrghh !" It was a relief, for a few seconds. After two strides, his dark pain was upon him again. HWhy oh why didn't I sock him in the teeth, that dirty sonofabitch? The others, the hell with them . . Let 'em think what they please, fuck'em. But him, I should of . . ." When Gil had first arrived in the yards, Thea had demonstrated a kind of paternal comradeship. Little by little, accepting a drink now and then, the young man came to accept the 105 I QUERELLE mason's authority. Not consciously : simply submitting to the fact that Thea did order, and did pay, for those rounds. Querelle was able to treat his officer with a fair amount of insolence, merely because they did not speak the same language.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  This boy was more often than anyone else a check upon their freedom. When he was present, both Vronsky and Anna did not merely avoid speaking of anything that they could not have repeated before everyone; they did not even allow themselves to refer by hints to anything the boy did not understand. They had made no agreement about this, it had settled itself. They would have felt it wounding themselves to deceive the child. In his presence they talked like acquaintances. But in spite of this caution, Vronsky often saw the child’s intent, bewildered glance fixed upon him, and a strange shyness, uncertainty, at one time friendliness, at another, coldness and reserve, in the boy’s manner to him; as though the child felt that between this man and his mother there existed some important bond, the significance of which he could not understand. As a fact, the boy did feel that he could not understand this relation, and he tried painfully, and was not able to make clear to himself what feeling he ought to have for this man. With a child’s keen instinct for every manifestation of feeling, he saw distinctly that his father, his governess, his nurse,—all did not merely dislike Vronsky, but looked on him with horror and aversion, though they never said anything about him, while his mother looked on him as her greatest friend. “What does it mean? Who is he? How ought I to love him? If I don’t know, it’s my fault; either I’m stupid or a naughty boy,” thought the child. And this was what caused his dubious, inquiring, sometimes hostile, expression, and the shyness and uncertainty which Vronsky found so irksome. This child’s presence always and infallibly called up in Vronsky that strange feeling of inexplicable loathing which he had experienced of late. This child’s presence called up both in Vronsky and in Anna a feeling akin to the feeling of a sailor who sees by the compass that the direction in which he is swiftly moving is far from the right one, but that to arrest his motion is not in his power, that every instant is carrying him further and further away, and that to admit to himself his deviation from the right direction is the same as admitting his certain ruin. This child, with his innocent outlook upon life, was the compass that showed them the point to which they had departed from what they knew, but did not want to know.

• From Querelle (1953)

  Nevertheless, as soon as Roger vanished, he became for Querelle a "mysterious link," more precious than he had realized until then. It was his absence that gave the boy such a rare quality and sudden importance. Querelle smiled, but could not help being worried by the fact that the boy was the go-between of two murderers, and, it seemed, a quick and lively one. He was now running along the imaginary connecting line whose very spirit he was, and he could choose to extend or shorten it, at his pleasure. Roger was, in fact, walking briskly. His separation from Querelle made him feel more solemn than before, because he knew that he was bringing Gil the essence of Querelle, in other words that in Querelle which he vaguely understood to be the motive force that propelled Querelle in Gil's direction. He knew that in him, a mere boy in short pants whose cuffs had been turned up over the solid thighs, now was vested all the pomp and circumstance due to ambassadors-and seeing the child's serious demeanor one could well understand why such delegates are always more heavily decorated than their masters. On his frail person, laden down .with a thousand ceremonial chains, converged Gil's almost haggard attention, as he sat there in his lair, and Querelle's patience, as he stood waiting by the gateway to the domain. Querelle took out a cigarette and lit it, then stuck both his hands back in the 161 I QUERELLE pockets of his pcacoat. He wasn't thinking at all. Nothing stirred in his imagination. His consciousness was attentive, soft and shapeless, though still a little troubled by the sudden importance of the boy he was waiting for. ''It's me. Roger." Quite close to him Gil's voice came in a whisper: "Is he beret' "Yes. I told him to wait for me. You want me to go and get him?" Sounding somewhat tense, Gil replied : "Yup. Bring him here. Get going." \Vhen Querelle arrived in front of the den, Roger prcr claimed, in a loud and clear voice: "This is it, we're here. Gil, we're here." The boy was overwhelmed by misery at the sudden feeling that his life was coming to an end with those very words. He felt himself shrinking, losing his raison d' etre. All the treasures with which he had been entrusted for a couple of minutes were now melting away, very quickly. He fully knew, now, the vanity of mankind, and how it melteth away like wax. He had labored faithfully to bring about a meeting that would abolish him. His whole life had been involved in this giant task of ten minutes' duration, and now his glory dimmed, almost disappeared, taking with it the high proud sense of joy that had made him swell up: to a size great enough to accommodate Querelle, whom he had described, whose words he had reported, and Gil, whom he had conveyed to Querelle. "Here, brought you some ciggies."

• From Querelle (1953)

  There's no way one could be just a sailor; that, that's a function, for others to believe in; but if you want to be somebody, you have to be what does not meet the eye." It was the same gratitude Gilbert Turko felt when he thought of his hemor- 137 I QUERELLE rhoids. \Vhen Querelle left one of the gardens of Alexandria, it was too late to throw the broken.aff branches into the street and then nervously cower behind some shrub, waiting for the favorable moment to vault across the garden wall. Where was there one could throw them, at all? Any beggar hunkered down in the dust, any Arab street kid would certainly notice a French sailor engaged in the process of getting rid of a whole load of tangerines still on the branch . It appeared best to hide them on his person . Querelle wanted to avoid any bizarre gesture that would ca11 attention to him, and thus he moved in plain view from garden to ship, in uninterrupted motion, simply slipping those branches into the neck opening of his sailor's jacket, letting some leaves and fruit stick out, turning h is chest, in honor of his star, into a living repository for them. But back on board he sensed the danger he was still running, would be running for quite a while, although it did not have the insistent quality of fear following a true crime : one foot sti11 on the gangway, the other suspended in air, he addressed a bewitching smile to the deity of his secret night. In his pants pocket he carried the necklace of gold coins and the two h2nds of Fatmah he had stolen in the villa of that tangerine garden. The gold lent him weight, terrestrial security. When he had distributed the foliage and the fruit to the other crewmen, languorous with hea t and boredom, and feeling suddenly pure, he experienced such a powerful sense of his own limpidity, in fact, that he had to watch hin1sel f every second while walking along the deck to his quarters, so as not to pull out the stolen treasures from his pocket in plain view of everybody. The same feeling of lightheartedness, confounding his single-minded belief in his star and his certainty of being a lost man, had uplifted him (his heart, light, like a balloon ) during h is walk on the road along the city ramparts \�hen-flashing into his mind with piercing clarity-a certain fact had become clear to him : the police had discovered a cigarette lighter in the vicinity of the murdered 138 I JEAN GENET

• From Querelle (1953)

  He laughed, but this time with some embarrassment. He felt nervous, what with the copper's paw on his shoulder and all. Querelle still did not understand that Mario had a crush on him, but his emotions were stirred by those questions, precise as those in an interrogation, by their urgency, by the insinuating tone of voice, by the method that seemed to be pushing for a confession, never mind what it would be. Querelle was aware of the strangeness of the surroundings and of the density of fog and night, further uniting the cop and his victim, together in this solitude that seemed to create a feeling of complicity. "I can't stand talking about it too much, it gives me a hardon." "Wow! No kidding." Querelle realized that this exclamation (as well as his previous admission that "it didn't disgust him" ) was only one more move in an entire game that would inevitably lead to an act he had begun tq suspect and that would put an end to his sense of freedom. He did not regret that he had agreed to head 204 I JEAN GENET this narrow path, but he was amazed at his own cunning, in going along with it, yet being so successful in concealing his own secret desire. At least he felt a slight sense of shame at performing with a real be-man, without recourse to the pretext of superior strength, an act which he might have dared to try out with, or on, a pederast without letting himself down, or with any manbut then only with the aid of some irresistible pretext. (4So you don't believe me?" Now Querelle could have simply replied ''Yes, I do," thus stopping the game right there. He smiled : (4Horseshit! Tell that to the Marines." ''I swear, it's true." "You're nuts. I don't believe you. It's too cold." "Why don't you see for yourself. Put your hand there." "No . . . I'm telling you, no. You don't even have one, it must've frozen off." They had stopped again. They looked at each other, smiling, defying their smiles. Mario raised his eyebrows in an exaggerated fashion, wrinkling his forehead, attempting the expression of a young boy totally astonished by the fact of having an erection at such an hour, in such a spot, and for so little reason. (4T h ouc 't 1 , '11 you see . . " . Querelle did not move. By slowly relaxing his smile, which made his upper lip tremble, he caused it to appear more subtle, more mocking than before. "No, I won't. I'm telling you, it's impossible." Querelle stretched out his hand, extended his fingers and hesitantly touched Mario's crotch, but only the material of his trousers. (That hesitation made both of them shiver with anticipation. )

• From Querelle (1953)

  79 I QUERELLE police force whose conduct must always be quite beyond re proach. (Those propositions appear contradictory. We shall see how that contradiction resolves itself in actuality.) Up to their necks in work we refuse even to admit, the police live under a curse, particularly the plainclothes men, who, when seen in the middle of (and protected by) the dark blue uniforms of the straight coppers, appear like thin-skinned, translucent lice, small fragile things easily crushed with a fingernail, whose very bodies have become blue from feeding off that other, the dark blue. That curse makes them immerse themselves in their efforts with a vengeance. Whenever the occasion arises, they then bring up the notion of pederasty-in itself, and fortunately, a mystery they are unable to unravel. The inspectors had a vague feeling that the murder of that sailor over by the ramparts was not quite run-of-the-mill: what they should have found there was some "sugar daddy," assassinated, abandoned on the grass, picked clean of his money and valuables. Instead of which they had found the body of the most likely type of suspect, with his money in his pockets. No doubt this anomaly worried them a little, and interfered with the progress of their ruminations, but it did not really bother them overmuch. Mario had not been given any specific orders to participate in the investigation of this case. Thus, at first, he paid only cursory attention to it, being more preoccupied with the danger he was in after Tony's discharge. Had he taken time to interest himself in the case, he would have been no more able than anyone else to explain it in terms of homosexual goings-on. Indeed, neither Mario nor any of the heroes of this book (excepting Lieutenant Seblon, bu t then Seblon is not in the book) is a pederast; for Mario, those people were of hvo kinds-those who wanted to get laid and paid for it and were known as sugar daddies, and, well, the others who catered to them. But then, quite suddenly, Mario became engrossed in the case. He felt a keen desire to unravel the plot, which he imagined carefully and tightly organized and