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 Querelle (1953)

  157 I QUERELLE the street kid (who naively persisted in his efforts to ferret out the place where the bad guys were sitting in judgment of the detective) walked past, he could simply read the letters back wards and thus be informed. As for Gil, he was busy rerunning the movie of his life, starting out from the murder and cranking it backwards, in order to justify his deed and make it appear inevitable. By reasoning in this fashion: "If I had never run int o Roger ... if I hadn't come to Brest ... if ... ," etc., he arrived at the conclusion that although the crime had taken its course through his arm, his body, his life, its true source lay outside of himself. This method of understanding his deed forced Gil into fatalism, which was a further obstacle to his desire to transcend the crime by sheer, deliberate force of will. At last, one night, he left the penitentiary. He managed to reach Roger's house. The darkness was total, further intensified by the fog. Brest lay sleeping. Without making any mistakes, using a couple of cunning detours, Gil arrived in Recouvrance without having encountered a soul. Standing in &ont of the house he realized, with some apprehension, that he had not yet thought of a way to make his presence known to Roger. Then, suddenly, eager to know if this trick would work, he smiled for the first time in three days, a quiet smile, and then started whistling, quietly: I-I e was a happy bandit, Nothing did he fear, His voice in the maquis Made the gendarmes weep ... Up on the second floor a window opened without a sound. Roger's voice floated down in a whisper: "Gil." Very cautiously, Gil moved closer. At the foot of the wall,

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  To be the wife of a man like Koznishev, after her position with Madame Stahl, was to her imagination the height of happiness. Besides, she was almost certain that she was in love with him. And this moment it would have to be decided. She felt frightened. She dreaded both his speaking and his not speaking. Now or never it must be said—that Sergey Ivanovitch felt too. Everything in the expression, the flushed cheeks and the downcast eyes of Varenka betrayed a painful suspense. Sergey Ivanovitch saw it and felt sorry for her. He felt even that to say nothing now would be a slight to her. Rapidly in his own mind he ran over all the arguments in support of his decision. He even said over to himself the words in which he meant to put his offer, but instead of those words, some utterly unexpected reflection that occurred to him made him ask: “What is the difference between the ‘birch’ mushroom and the ‘white’ mushroom?” Varenka’s lips quivered with emotion as she answered: “In the top part there is scarcely any difference, it’s in the stalk.” And as soon as these words were uttered, both he and she felt that it was over, that what was to have been said would not be said; and their emotion, which had up to then been continually growing more intense, began to subside. “The birch mushroom’s stalk suggests a dark man’s chin after two days without shaving,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, speaking quite calmly now. “Yes, that’s true,” answered Varenka smiling, and unconsciously the direction of their walk changed. They began to turn towards the children. Varenka felt both sore and ashamed; at the same time she had a sense of relief. When he had got home again and went over the whole subject, Sergey Ivanovitch thought his previous decision had been a mistaken one. He could not be false to the memory of Marie. “Gently, children, gently!” Levin shouted quite angrily to the children, standing before his wife to protect her when the crowd of children flew with shrieks of delight to meet them. Behind the children Sergey Ivanovitch and Varenka walked out of the wood. Kitty had no need to ask Varenka; she saw from the calm and somewhat crestfallen faces of both that her plans had not come off. “Well?” her husband questioned her as they were going home again. “It doesn’t bite,” said Kitty, her smile and manner of speaking recalling her father, a likeness Levin often noticed with pleasure. “How doesn’t bite?” “I’ll show you,” she said, taking her husband’s hand, lifting it to her mouth, and just faintly brushing it with closed lips. “Like a kiss on a priest’s hand.” “Which didn’t it bite with?” he said, laughing. “Both. But it should have been like this....” “There are some peasants coming....” “Oh, they didn’t see.” Chapter 6

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  The princess, sitting on the other side of the table with Marya Vlasyevna and Stepan Arkadyevitch, called Levin to her side, and began to talk to him about moving to Moscow for Kitty’s confinement, and getting ready rooms for them. Just as Levin had disliked all the trivial preparations for his wedding, as derogatory to the grandeur of the event, now he felt still more offensive the preparations for the approaching birth, the date of which they reckoned, it seemed, on their fingers. He tried to turn a deaf ear to these discussions of the best patterns of long clothes for the coming baby; tried to turn away and avoid seeing the mysterious, endless strips of knitting, the triangles of linen, and so on, to which Dolly attached special importance. The birth of a son (he was certain it would be a son) which was promised him, but which he still could not believe in—so marvelous it seemed—presented itself to his mind, on one hand, as a happiness so immense, and therefore so incredible; on the other, as an event so mysterious, that this assumption of a definite knowledge of what would be, and consequent preparation for it, as for something ordinary that did happen to people, jarred on him as confusing and humiliating. But the princess did not understand his feelings, and put down his reluctance to think and talk about it to carelessness and indifference, and so she gave him no peace. She had commissioned Stepan Arkadyevitch to look at a flat, and now she called Levin up. “I know nothing about it, princess. Do as you think fit,” he said. “You must decide when you will move.” “I really don’t know. I know millions of children are born away from Moscow, and doctors ... why....” “But if so....” “Oh, no, as Kitty wishes.” “We can’t talk to Kitty about it! Do you want me to frighten her? Why, this spring Natalia Golitzina died from having an ignorant doctor.” “I will do just what you say,” he said gloomily. The princess began talking to him, but he did not hear her. Though the conversation with the princess had indeed jarred upon him, he was gloomy, not on account of that conversation, but from what he saw at the samovar. “No, it’s impossible,” he thought, glancing now and then at Vassenka bending over Kitty, telling her something with his charming smile, and at her, flushed and disturbed. There was something not nice in Vassenka’s attitude, in his eyes, in his smile. Levin even saw something not nice in Kitty’s attitude and look. And again the light died away in his eyes. Again, as before, all of a sudden, without the slightest transition, he felt cast down from a pinnacle of happiness, peace, and dignity, into an abyss of despair, rage, and humiliation. Again everything and everyone had become hateful to him. “You do just as you think best, princess,” he said again, looking round.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  After drinking tea at the same well-to-do peasant’s with whom Levin had stayed on the way to Sviazhsky’s, and chatting with the women about their children, and with the old man about Count Vronsky, whom the latter praised very highly, Darya Alexandrovna, at ten o’clock, went on again. At home, looking after her children, she had no time to think. So now, after this journey of four hours, all the thoughts she had suppressed before rushed swarming into her brain, and she thought over all her life as she never had before, and from the most different points of view. Her thoughts seemed strange even to herself. At first she thought about the children, about whom she was uneasy, although the princess and Kitty (she reckoned more upon her) had promised to look after them. “If only Masha does not begin her naughty tricks, if Grisha isn’t kicked by a horse, and Lily’s stomach isn’t upset again!” she thought. But these questions of the present were succeeded by questions of the immediate future. She began thinking how she had to get a new flat in Moscow for the coming winter, to renew the drawing-room furniture, and to make her elder girl a cloak. Then questions of the more remote future occurred to her: how she was to place her children in the world. “The girls are all right,” she thought; “but the boys?” “It’s very well that I’m teaching Grisha, but of course that’s only because I am free myself now, I’m not with child. Stiva, of course, there’s no counting on. And with the help of good-natured friends I can bring them up; but if there’s another baby coming?...” And the thought struck her how untruly it was said that the curse laid on woman was that in sorrow she should bring forth children. “The birth itself, that’s nothing; but the months of carrying the child—that’s what’s so intolerable,” she thought, picturing to herself her last pregnancy, and the death of the last baby. And she recalled the conversation she had just had with the young woman at the inn. On being asked whether she had any children, the handsome young woman had answered cheerfully: “I had a girl baby, but God set me free; I buried her last Lent.” “Well, did you grieve very much for her?” asked Darya Alexandrovna. “Why grieve? The old man has grandchildren enough as it is. It was only a trouble. No working, nor nothing. Only a tie.” This answer had struck Darya Alexandrovna as revolting in spite of the good-natured and pleasing face of the young woman; but now she could not help recalling these words. In those cynical words there was indeed a grain of truth.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  And though she felt sure that a coldness was beginning, there was nothing she could do, she could not in any way alter her relations to him. Just as before, only by love and by charm could she keep him. And so, just as before, only by occupation in the day, by morphine at night, could she stifle the fearful thought of what would be if he ceased to love her. It is true there was still one means; not to keep him—for that she wanted nothing more than his love—but to be nearer to him, to be in such a position that he would not leave her. That means was divorce and marriage. And she began to long for that, and made up her mind to agree to it the first time he or Stiva approached her on the subject. Absorbed in such thoughts, she passed five days without him, the five days that he was to be at the elections. Walks, conversation with Princess Varvara, visits to the hospital, and, most of all, reading—reading of one book after another—filled up her time. But on the sixth day, when the coachman came back without him, she felt that now she was utterly incapable of stifling the thought of him and of what he was doing there, just at that time her little girl was taken ill. Anna began to look after her, but even that did not distract her mind, especially as the illness was not serious. However hard she tried, she could not love this little child, and to feign love was beyond her powers. Towards the evening of that day, still alone, Anna was in such a panic about him that she decided to start for the town, but on second thoughts wrote him the contradictory letter that Vronsky received, and without reading it through, sent it off by a special messenger. The next morning she received his letter and regretted her own. She dreaded a repetition of the severe look he had flung at her at parting, especially when he knew that the baby was not dangerously ill. But still she was glad she had written to him. At this moment Anna was positively admitting to herself that she was a burden to him, that he would relinquish his freedom regretfully to return to her, and in spite of that she was glad he was coming. Let him weary of her, but he would be here with her, so that she would see him, would know of every action he took.

• From Querelle (1953)

  84 I JEAN GENET being able to see through them perfectly well. And that day, when he emerged from the coal bunkers, he felt certain that his surprisingly black face, looking more massive than usual under its light coating of coal dust, would appear beautiful enough for the Lieutenant to lose his cool. Perhaps he would even have 41a confession to make"? ''Well, we'll see. Maybe he hasn't even heard ... " Within his body, his anxiety was gi � ing rise to a most ex quisite sensation. Querelle called his star: his smile. And the star appeared. Querelle kept on moving forward, planting his wide feet firmly on the deck. He gave a slight roll to his hips, narrow as they were!-to provide a little action there in the midriff region, where an inch of his white underpants showed above the wide, plaited leather belt, buckled at the back. He had of course registered, and not without spite, that the Lieu tenant's gaze often dwelt on that region of his physique, and he had a natural awareness of his own seduc�ive points. He though t of them in a serious manner, sometimes with a smile, that habitual, sad smile of his. He also swung his shoulders a little, but the motion, like that of his hips and his arms, was more discreet than usual, closer to himself, more internalized, one might say. He was hugging himself: or one might say, he was playing at being huggable. As he approached the Lieu tenant's cabin he was hoping that the officer would have noticed the abortive theft of his watch. He longed to be taken up on that. "I'll handle it. I'll sock him in the 1nouth . . . " But while he was turning the doorknob he realized he was hoping that the watch (which he had returned, as soon as he got back on board, to it s place in the drawer-while the Lieu tenant wasn't looking) had stopped, of its own accord-broken or run down or-he dared to think it-stopped by virtue of a particular kindness of destiny, or even out of a particular kind ness on the part of that already once-seduced wa � ch itself.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  More than that, he did not know what to say, how to look, how to move. To talk of outside things seemed to him shocking, impossible, to talk of death and depressing subjects—also impossible. To be silent, also impossible. “If I look at him he will think I am studying him, I am afraid; if I don’t look at him, he’ll think I’m thinking of other things. If I walk on tiptoe, he will be vexed; to tread firmly, I’m ashamed.” Kitty evidently did not think of herself, and had no time to think about herself: she was thinking about him because she knew something, and all went well. She told him about herself even and about her wedding, and smiled and sympathized with him and petted him, and talked of cases of recovery and all went well; so then she must know. The proof that her behavior and Agafea Mihalovna’s was not instinctive, animal, irrational, was that apart from the physical treatment, the relief of suffering, both Agafea Mihalovna and Kitty required for the dying man something else more important than the physical treatment, and something which had nothing in common with physical conditions. Agafea Mihalovna, speaking of the man just dead, had said: “Well, thank God, he took the sacrament and received absolution; God grant each one of us such a death.” Katya in just the same way, besides all her care about linen, bedsores, drink, found time the very first day to persuade the sick man of the necessity of taking the sacrament and receiving absolution. On getting back from the sick-room to their own two rooms for the night, Levin sat with hanging head not knowing what to do. Not to speak of supper, of preparing for bed, of considering what they were going to do, he could not even talk to his wife; he was ashamed to. Kitty, on the contrary, was more active than usual. She was even livelier than usual. She ordered supper to be brought, herself unpacked their things, and herself helped to make the beds, and did not even forget to sprinkle them with Persian powder. She showed that alertness, that swiftness of reflection which comes out in men before a battle, in conflict, in the dangerous and decisive moments of life—those moments when a man shows once and for all his value, and that all his past has not been wasted but has been a preparation for these moments. Everything went rapidly in her hands, and before it was twelve o’clock all their things were arranged cleanly and tidily in her rooms, in such a way that the hotel rooms seemed like home: the beds were made, brushes, combs, looking-glasses were put out, table napkins were spread. Levin felt that it was unpardonable to eat, to sleep, to talk even now, and it seemed to him that every movement he made was unseemly. She arranged the brushes, but she did it all so that there was nothing shocking in it.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  Her braids were done with tiny pearls and thin strands of blue ribbon. But Beauty, almost lost in her contemplation of all this, was suddenly shocked to realize the Lady was looking at her. "Oooooh, yes, it is the Prince's lovely one," she said, and now she advanced, and Beauty felt the Lady's hand lifting her face. "And how sweet she is, how truly beautiful." Beauty shut her eyes, trying to restrain her heaving breaths. She did not believe she could endure the imperious touch of this young Lady. And yet there was nothing she could do. "O, I should so like to have her take Princess Lizetta's place, it would be a treat for everyone," said the Lady. "But that is impossible, my Lady," said Lord Gregory. "The Prince is most possessive of her. I cannot allow her to participate in such a spectacle." "But surely we'll see more of her. Will she be run on the Bridle Path?" "I feel certain, in time," said Lord Gregory. "There is no accounting for the whim of the Prince. But here, you may examine her if you wish. There is no rule prohibiting it." He lifted Beauty by her wrists and forced her hips forward with the handle of the paddle. "Open your eyes and keep them down," he whispered. Beauty could not bear to see this lovely Lady's hands as they moved towards her. But Lady Juliana touched her breasts, and then her smooth stomach. "Why she is radiant and so full of tender spirit." Lord Gregory laughed softly. "Yes, she is, and you are so discerning to value it." "They turn out all the better for that," said Lady Juliana with quiet wonder. She pinched Beauty's cheek as she had Princess Lizetta's secret lips. "O, what I would give for a quiet hour alone with her in my chambers." "In time, in time," said Lord Gregory. "Yes, and I bet she fights the paddle so, with her tender spirit." "Only with her spirit," said Lord Gregory. "She is obedient." "I can see that. Well, my girl, I must leave you. Be confident that you are exquisite. I wish I had you over my knee. I'd paddle you until sundown. You'd play a lot of little games running from me in the garden, you would." And then she kissed Beauty warmly on the mouth, and left as quickly as she had come, in a flurry of burgundy velvet and flying braids. Just before Beauty took the sleeping potion from Leon she begged to know the meaning of what she had heard. "What is the Bridle Path?" she asked in a whisper, "and the village, my Lord, what does it mean to be sent there!"

• From Querelle (1953)

  247 I QUERELLE could he enter into it as if it were a sympathetic and malleable element. That love every artist feels for his material, in his case the n1aterial did not reciprocate. Thus he could only wait and worry. In th at one glimmer of hope of salvation he somehow connected the revenge of the dockers with the glaring evidence for Querelle's guilt. During the day he talked and cracked jokes with his colleagues whom he had never told about the threats that had been addressed to him. Almost every evening he met Querelle by the railroad embankment. It had not occurred to him that the discovery of the cigarette lighter lying next to Vic's dead body could indicate complicity behveen Gil and the sailor; thus he hadn't thought of putting Querelle under surveillance. On his way back from the old prison Querelle came by the embankn1ent. He felt no friendly emotion toward the detective, but kept meeting him out of a habit that was based on his being at Mario's mercy. He also believed that the relationship afforded him some protection. He felt the roots growing. In the dark of one evening he whispered: . ''If you caught me swiping something, would you put me in the cooler?" Taken literally, th e expression "you could have knocked him down with a feather" isn't exactly true, yet the state of fragility to which it reduces the person who provokes it obliges us to use it: "you could have knocked" Mario "down with a feather." His reply, though, was foxy enough: usure, why not? I'd be doing my duty." "So it would be your duty to have me put away? That's not very f u nny!" "That's the way it is, though. And if you killed someone, I'd send you o n your way to the old chopper." "I see." Back on his feet again after what neither he nor the detective would have gone so fa r as to call an act of love, Querelle be came a man again, facing another man. He had a little smile on his face as he stood there, buttoning up, closing the buckle

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  In that box on the left were the Kartasovs. Vronsky knew them, and knew that Anna was acquainted with them. Madame Kartasova, a thin little woman, was standing up in her box, and, her back turned upon Anna, she was putting on a mantle that her husband was holding for her. Her face was pale and angry, and she was talking excitedly. Kartasov, a fat, bald man, was continually looking round at Anna, while he attempted to soothe his wife. When the wife had gone out, the husband lingered a long while, and tried to catch Anna’s eye, obviously anxious to bow to her. But Anna, with unmistakable intention, avoided noticing him, and talked to Yashvin, whose cropped head was bent down to her. Kartasov went out without making his salutation, and the box was left empty. Vronsky could not understand exactly what had passed between the Kartasovs and Anna, but he saw that something humiliating for Anna had happened. He knew this both from what he had seen, and most of all from the face of Anna, who, he could see, was taxing every nerve to carry through the part she had taken up. And in maintaining this attitude of external composure she was completely successful. Anyone who did not know her and her circle, who had not heard all the utterances of the women expressive of commiseration, indignation, and amazement, that she should show herself in society, and show herself so conspicuously with her lace and her beauty, would have admired the serenity and loveliness of this woman without a suspicion that she was undergoing the sensations of a man in the stocks. Knowing that something had happened, but not knowing precisely what, Vronsky felt a thrill of agonizing anxiety, and hoping to find out something, he went towards his brother’s box. Purposely choosing the way round furthest from Anna’s box, he jostled as he came out against the colonel of his old regiment talking to two acquaintances. Vronsky heard the name of Madame Karenina, and noticed how the colonel hastened to address Vronsky loudly by name, with a meaning glance at his companions. “Ah, Vronsky! When are you coming to the regiment? We can’t let you off without a supper. You’re one of the old set,” said the colonel of his regiment. “I can’t stop, awfully sorry, another time,” said Vronsky, and he ran upstairs towards his brother’s box. The old countess, Vronsky’s mother, with her steel-gray curls, was in his brother’s box. Varya with the young Princess Sorokina met him in the corridor. Leaving the Princess Sorokina with her mother, Varya held out her hand to her brother-in-law, and began immediately to speak of what interested him. She was more excited than he had ever seen her. “I think it’s mean and hateful, and Madame Kartasova had no right to do it. Madame Karenina....” she began. “But what is it? I don’t know.” “What? you’ve not heard?”

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “I assume that a salary is the price paid for a commodity, and it ought to conform with the law of supply and demand. If the salary is fixed without any regard for that law, as, for instance, when I see two engineers leaving college together, both equally well trained and efficient, and one getting forty thousand while the other is satisfied with two; or when I see lawyers and hussars, having no special qualifications, appointed directors of banking companies with immense salaries, I conclude that the salary is not fixed in accordance with the law of supply and demand, but simply through personal interest. And this is an abuse of great gravity in itself, and one that reacts injuriously on the government service. I consider....” Stepan Arkadyevitch made haste to interrupt his brother-in-law. “Yes; but you must agree that it’s a new institution of undoubted utility that’s being started. After all, you know, it’s a growing thing! What they lay particular stress on is the thing being carried on honestly,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch with emphasis. But the Moscow significance of the word “honest” was lost on Alexey Alexandrovitch. “Honesty is only a negative qualification,” he said. “Well, you’ll do me a great service, anyway,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, “by putting in a word to Pomorsky—just in the way of conversation....” “But I fancy it’s more in Volgarinov’s hands,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch. “Volgarinov has fully assented, as far as he’s concerned,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, turning red. Stepan Arkadyevitch reddened at the mention of that name, because he had been that morning at the Jew Volgarinov’s, and the visit had left an unpleasant recollection. Stepan Arkadyevitch believed most positively that the committee in which he was trying to get an appointment was a new, genuine, and honest public body, but that morning when Volgarinov had—intentionally, beyond a doubt—kept him two hours waiting with other petitioners in his waiting room, he had suddenly felt uneasy. Whether he was uncomfortable that he, a descendant of Rurik, Prince Oblonsky, had been kept for two hours waiting to see a Jew, or that for the first time in his life he was not following the example of his ancestors in serving the government, but was turning off into a new career, anyway he was very uncomfortable. During those two hours in Volgarinov’s waiting room Stepan Arkadyevitch, stepping jauntily about the room, pulling his whiskers, entering into conversation with the other petitioners, and inventing an epigram on his position, assiduously concealed from others, and even from himself, the feeling he was experiencing.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  As soon as she had said it, she felt that however warm his feelings were to her, he had not forgiven her for that. “Yes,” he said, “the letter was so strange. First, Annie ill, and then you thought of coming yourself.” “It was all the truth.” “Oh, I don’t doubt it.” “Yes, you do doubt it. You are vexed, I see.” “Not for one moment. I’m only vexed, that’s true, that you seem somehow unwilling to admit that there are duties....” “The duty of going to a concert....” “But we won’t talk about it,” he said. “Why not talk about it?” she said. “I only meant to say that matters of real importance may turn up. Now, for instance, I shall have to go to Moscow to arrange about the house.... Oh, Anna, why are you so irritable? Don’t you know that I can’t live without you?” “If so,” said Anna, her voice suddenly changing, “it means that you are sick of this life.... Yes, you will come for a day and go away, as men do....” “Anna, that’s cruel. I am ready to give up my whole life.” But she did not hear him. “If you go to Moscow, I will go too. I will not stay here. Either we must separate or else live together.” “Why, you know, that’s my one desire. But for that....” “We must get a divorce. I will write to him. I see I cannot go on like this.... But I will come with you to Moscow.” “You talk as if you were threatening me. But I desire nothing so much as never to be parted from you,” said Vronsky, smiling. But as he said these words there gleamed in his eyes not merely a cold look, but the vindictive look of a man persecuted and made cruel. She saw the look and correctly divined its meaning. “If so, it’s a calamity!” that glance told her. It was a moment’s impression, but she never forgot it. Anna wrote to her husband asking him about a divorce, and towards the end of November, taking leave of Princess Varvara, who wanted to go to Petersburg, she went with Vronsky to Moscow. Expecting every day an answer from Alexey Alexandrovitch, and after that the divorce, they now established themselves together like married people. PART SEVEN Chapter 1 The Levins had been three months in Moscow. The date had long passed on which, according to the most trustworthy calculations of people learned in such matters, Kitty should have been confined. But she was still about, and there was nothing to show that her time was any nearer than two months ago. The doctor, the monthly nurse, and Dolly and her mother, and most of all Levin, who could not think of the approaching event without terror, began to be impatient and uneasy. Kitty was the only person who felt perfectly calm and happy.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Before they rose from the table, when all of them were smoking, Vronsky’s valet went up to him with a letter on a tray. “From Vozdvizhenskoe by special messenger,” he said with a significant expression. “Astonishing! how like he is to the deputy prosecutor Sventitsky,” said one of the guests in French of the valet, while Vronsky, frowning, read the letter. The letter was from Anna. Before he read the letter, he knew its contents. Expecting the elections to be over in five days, he had promised to be back on Friday. Today was Saturday, and he knew that the letter contained reproaches for not being back at the time fixed. The letter he had sent the previous evening had probably not reached her yet. The letter was what he had expected, but the form of it was unexpected, and particularly disagreeable to him. “Annie is very ill, the doctor says it may be inflammation. I am losing my head all alone. Princess Varvara is no help, but a hindrance. I expected you the day before yesterday, and yesterday, and now I am sending to find out where you are and what you are doing. I wanted to come myself, but thought better of it, knowing you would dislike it. Send some answer, that I may know what to do.” The child ill, yet she had thought of coming herself. Their daughter ill, and this hostile tone. The innocent festivities over the election, and this gloomy, burdensome love to which he had to return struck Vronsky by their contrast. But he had to go, and by the first train that night he set off home. Chapter 32 Before Vronsky’s departure for the elections, Anna had reflected that the scenes constantly repeated between them each time he left home, might only make him cold to her instead of attaching him to her, and resolved to do all she could to control herself so as to bear the parting with composure. But the cold, severe glance with which he had looked at her when he came to tell her he was going had wounded her, and before he had started her peace of mind was destroyed. In solitude afterwards, thinking over that glance which had expressed his right to freedom, she came, as she always did, to the same point—the sense of her own humiliation. “He has the right to go away when and where he chooses. Not simply to go away, but to leave me. He has every right, and I have none. But knowing that, he ought not to do it. What has he done, though?... He looked at me with a cold, severe expression. Of course that is something indefinable, impalpable, but it has never been so before, and that glance means a great deal,” she thought. “That glance shows the beginning of indifference.”

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  What had he to do, indeed? He did not care for cards; he did not go to a club. Spending the time with jovial gentlemen of Oblonsky’s type—she knew now what that meant ... it meant drinking and going somewhere after drinking. She could not think without horror of where men went on such occasions. Was he to go into society? But she knew he could only find satisfaction in that if he took pleasure in the society of young women, and that she could not wish for. Should he stay at home with her, her mother and her sisters? But much as she liked and enjoyed their conversations forever on the same subjects—“Aline-Nadine,” as the old prince called the sisters’ talks—she knew it must bore him. What was there left for him to do? To go on writing at his book he had indeed attempted, and at first he used to go to the library and make extracts and look up references for his book. But, as he told her, the more he did nothing, the less time he had to do anything. And besides, he complained that he had talked too much about his book here, and that consequently all his ideas about it were muddled and had lost their interest for him. One advantage in this town life was that quarrels hardly ever happened between them here in town. Whether it was that their conditions were different, or that they had both become more careful and sensible in that respect, they had no quarrels in Moscow from jealousy, which they had so dreaded when they moved from the country. One event, an event of great importance to both from that point of view, did indeed happen—that was Kitty’s meeting with Vronsky. The old Princess Marya Borissovna, Kitty’s godmother, who had always been very fond of her, had insisted on seeing her. Kitty, though she did not go into society at all on account of her condition, went with her father to see the venerable old lady, and there met Vronsky. The only thing Kitty could reproach herself for at this meeting was that at the instant when she recognized in his civilian dress the features once so familiar to her, her breath failed her, the blood rushed to her heart, and a vivid blush—she felt it—overspread her face. But this lasted only a few seconds. Before her father, who purposely began talking in a loud voice to Vronsky, had finished, she was perfectly ready to look at Vronsky, to speak to him, if necessary, exactly as she spoke to Princess Marya Borissovna, and more than that, to do so in such a way that everything to the faintest intonation and smile would have been approved by her husband, whose unseen presence she seemed to feel about her at that instant.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  I also dismissed him as one crazy guy—but a year later, newspapers carried reports of rural militia members in Montana who gathered on the ranch of one of them, threatened to shoot down all helicopters, and had the weapons to do it. I wondered if my driver was among them. Still, when I came back to New York and said, “You know, there are ultra-right-wing groups out there, and they’re well armed,” urbanites would reply, “Just a few nuts, nothing to worry about.” Only later did the media begin to take extremist groups seriously. By then they had committed racist murders in several cities—starting with the liberal Jewish talk show host Alan Berg, who was shot down in his driveway by a white nationalist group—then also bombing a government building in Oklahoma City, shooting Jewish children in a child care center in Los Angeles, and attempting to bomb a Martin Luther King parade in Spokane. I still don’t see reports in newspapers about white supremacists who are trying to establish an armed and separatist homeland in the rural Northwest and parts of Canada, yet when I ask drivers or gas station attendants or other down-home authorities, they are quite matter-of-fact about the local Aryan Brotherhood, or methamphetamine labs operating with impunity in small towns, or certain rural areas where it’s best not to go. Since drivers have time and a captive audience, they can also be vectors of modern myths. In Boulder, for example, I learned that Jack Kennedy was the Lindbergh baby. A Salt Lake City driver told me that “godless Communists created the women’s movement,” and a Dallas driver said feminism was “a Jewish plot to destroy the Christian family,” something I would hear a lot from right-wing Christian fundamentalists. Because it’s a long ride to the Denver airport, I got the entire story of the Trilateral Commission as part of an international Jewish conspiracy that stretched all the way from the killing of Jesus Christ to David Rockefeller, the founder of this private group of leaders who came from the United States, Europe, and Japan. I thought he had won the Conspiracy Prize—until another driver picked me up at Newark Airport and was sure that the Trilateral Commission was behind the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11. No kidding. I can also tell which new immigrant groups are going to what cities, since driving is so often a first job. In Washington, I always get a disproportionate number of drivers from African countries. They may not know the fastest route, but they instruct me on more important issues. From the late 1960s to the present, drivers from Ethiopia and Eritrea kept me up to date on the armed conflict between those two countries. The United States, the Soviet Union, and Castro’s Cuba all supported Ethiopia in a thirty-year war—assuming that this much larger country would defeat Eritrea. But according to drivers, it was always clear that Eritrea would prevail.

• From Querelle (1953)

  36 I JEAN GENET sailor's, and standing up, he always kept his legs well apart. This murderer had traveled a great deal . . . ," we know that this description of Campi, beheaded April 30, 1884, fits like a glove. Being an interpretation, it is exact. Yet his mates were able to say of Querelle : "What a funny guy," for he presented them, almost daily, with another disconcerting and scandalous vision of himself. He shone among them with the brightness of a true freak. Sailors of our Fighting Navy exhibit a certain honesty which they owe to the sense of glory that attracts them to the service. If they wanted to go in for smuggling or any other form of trafficking they would not really know how to _ go about it. Heavily and lazily, because of the boredom inherent in their task, they perform it in a manner that seems to us like an act of faith . But Querelle kept his eye on the main ch ance. He felt no nostalgia for his time as a petty hoodlum-he had never really outgrown it-but he continued, under the protection of the French Bag, his dangerous exploits. All his early teens he had spent in the company of dockers and merchant seamen. He knew their game. Querelle strode along, his face damp and burning, without thinking about anything in particular. He felt a little uneasy, haunted by the unformulated glimmer of a suspicion th at his exploits would gain him no glory in the eyes of Mario and Nona, who themselves were (and were for each other) glory personified. On reaching th e Recouvrance bridge he went down the steps to the landing stage. It was then that it occurred to him, while passing the Customs House, that he was letting his six kilos of opium go too ch eap. But then again it was important. to get business off to a good start. He walked to the quayside to wait for the patrol boat that would come to return seamen and officers to the Vengeur which was lying at anchor out in the Roads. He checked his watch : ten of four. The boat would be there in ten minutes. He took a tum up and down to keep

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Kouzma had not thought of leaving out a clean shirt, and on receiving instructions to pack up everything and send it round to the Shtcherbatskys’ house, from which the young people were to set out the same evening, he had done so, packing everything but the dress suit. The shirt worn since the morning was crumpled and out of the question with the fashionable open waistcoat. It was a long way to send to the Shtcherbatskys’. They sent out to buy a shirt. The servant came back; everything was shut up—it was Sunday. They sent to Stepan Arkadyevitch’s and brought a shirt—it was impossibly wide and short. They sent finally to the Shtcherbatskys’ to unpack the things. The bridegroom was expected at the church while he was pacing up and down his room like a wild beast in a cage, peeping out into the corridor, and with horror and despair recalling what absurd things he had said to Kitty and what she might be thinking now. At last the guilty Kouzma flew panting into the room with the shirt. “Only just in time. They were just lifting it into the van,” said Kouzma. Three minutes later Levin ran full speed into the corridor, not looking at his watch for fear of aggravating his sufferings. “You won’t help matters like this,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch with a smile, hurrying with more deliberation after him. “It will come round, it will come round ... I tell you.” Chapter 4 “They’ve come!” “Here he is!” “Which one?” “Rather young, eh?” “Why, my dear soul, she looks more dead than alive!” were the comments in the crowd, when Levin, meeting his bride in the entrance, walked with her into the church. Stepan Arkadyevitch told his wife the cause of the delay, and the guests were whispering it with smiles to one another. Levin saw nothing and no one; he did not take his eyes off his bride. Everyone said she had lost her looks dreadfully of late, and was not nearly so pretty on her wedding day as usual; but Levin did not think so. He looked at her hair done up high, with the long white veil and white flowers and the high, stand-up, scalloped collar, that in such a maidenly fashion hid her long neck at the sides and only showed it in front, her strikingly slender figure, and it seemed to him that she looked better than ever—not because these flowers, this veil, this gown from Paris added anything to her beauty; but because, in spite of the elaborate sumptuousness of her attire, the expression of her sweet face, of her eyes, of her lips was still her own characteristic expression of guileless truthfulness. “I was beginning to think you meant to run away,” she said, and smiled to him. “It’s so stupid, what happened to me, I’m ashamed to speak of it!” he said, reddening, and he was obliged to turn to Sergey Ivanovitch, who came up to him.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  The narrow room, in which they were smoking and taking refreshments, was full of noblemen. The excitement grew more intense, and every face betrayed some uneasiness. The excitement was specially keen for the leaders of each party, who knew every detail, and had reckoned up every vote. They were the generals organizing the approaching battle. The rest, like the rank and file before an engagement, though they were getting ready for the fight, sought for other distractions in the interval. Some were lunching, standing at the bar, or sitting at the table; others were walking up and down the long room, smoking cigarettes, and talking with friends whom they had not seen for a long while. Levin did not care to eat, and he was not smoking; he did not want to join his own friends, that is Sergey Ivanovitch, Stepan Arkadyevitch, Sviazhsky and the rest, because Vronsky in his equerry’s uniform was standing with them in eager conversation. Levin had seen him already at the meeting on the previous day, and he had studiously avoided him, not caring to greet him. He went to the window and sat down, scanning the groups, and listening to what was being said around him. He felt depressed, especially because everyone else was, as he saw, eager, anxious, and interested, and he alone, with an old, toothless little man with mumbling lips wearing a naval uniform, sitting beside him, had no interest in it and nothing to do. “He’s such a blackguard! I have told him so, but it makes no difference. Only think of it! He couldn’t collect it in three years!” he heard vigorously uttered by a round-shouldered, short, country gentleman, who had pomaded hair hanging on his embroidered collar, and new boots obviously put on for the occasion, with heels that tapped energetically as he spoke. Casting a displeased glance at Levin, this gentleman sharply turned his back. “Yes, it’s a dirty business, there’s no denying,” a small gentleman assented in a high voice. Next, a whole crowd of country gentlemen, surrounding a stout general, hurriedly came near Levin. These persons were unmistakably seeking a place where they could talk without being overheard. “How dare he say I had his breeches stolen! Pawned them for drink, I expect. Damn the fellow, prince indeed! He’d better not say it, the beast!” “But excuse me! They take their stand on the act,” was being said in another group; “the wife must be registered as noble.” “Oh, damn your acts! I speak from my heart. We’re all gentlemen, aren’t we? Above suspicion.” “Shall we go on, your excellency, _fine champagne?_” Another group was following a nobleman, who was shouting something in a loud voice; it was one of the three intoxicated gentlemen.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Varvara Andreevna, when I was very young, I set before myself the ideal of the woman I loved and should be happy to call my wife. I have lived through a long life, and now for the first time I have met what I sought—in you. I love you, and offer you my hand.” Sergey Ivanovitch was saying this to himself while he was ten paces from Varvara. Kneeling down, with her hands over the mushrooms to guard them from Grisha, she was calling little Masha. “Come here, little ones! There are so many!” she was saying in her sweet, deep voice. Seeing Sergey Ivanovitch approaching, she did not get up and did not change her position, but everything told him that she felt his presence and was glad of it. “Well, did you find some?” she asked from under the white kerchief, turning her handsome, gently smiling face to him. “Not one,” said Sergey Ivanovitch. “Did you?” She did not answer, busy with the children who thronged about her. “That one too, near the twig,” she pointed out to little Masha a little fungus, split in half across its rosy cap by the dry grass from under which it thrust itself. Varenka got up while Masha picked the fungus, breaking it into two white halves. “This brings back my childhood,” she added, moving apart from the children beside Sergey Ivanovitch. They walked on for some steps in silence. Varenka saw that he wanted to speak; she guessed of what, and felt faint with joy and panic. They had walked so far away that no one could hear them now, but still he did not begin to speak. It would have been better for Varenka to be silent. After a silence it would have been easier for them to say what they wanted to say than after talking about mushrooms. But against her own will, as it were accidentally, Varenka said: “So you found nothing? In the middle of the wood there are always fewer, though.” Sergey Ivanovitch sighed and made no answer. He was annoyed that she had spoken about the mushrooms. He wanted to bring her back to the first words she had uttered about her childhood; but after a pause of some length, as though against his own will, he made an observation in response to her last words. “I have heard that the white edible funguses are found principally at the edge of the wood, though I can’t tell them apart.” Some minutes more passed, they moved still further away from the children, and were quite alone. Varenka’s heart throbbed so that she heard it beating, and felt that she was turning red and pale and red again.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “And so am I.” “You’re going, no doubt, to hear Patti?” said Tushkevitch. “Patti? You suggest the idea to me. I would go if it were possible to get a box.” “I can get one,” Tushkevitch offered his services. “I should be very, very grateful to you,” said Anna. “But won’t you dine with us?” Vronsky gave a hardly perceptible shrug. He was at a complete loss to understand what Anna was about. What had she brought the old Princess Oblonskaya home for, what had she made Tushkevitch stay to dinner for, and, most amazing of all, why was she sending him for a box? Could she possibly think in her position of going to Patti’s benefit, where all the circle of her acquaintances would be? He looked at her with serious eyes, but she responded with that defiant, half-mirthful, half-desperate look, the meaning of which he could not comprehend. At dinner Anna was in aggressively high spirits—she almost flirted both with Tushkevitch and with Yashvin. When they got up from dinner and Tushkevitch had gone to get a box at the opera, Yashvin went to smoke, and Vronsky went down with him to his own rooms. After sitting there for some time he ran upstairs. Anna was already dressed in a low-necked gown of light silk and velvet that she had had made in Paris, and with costly white lace on her head, framing her face, and particularly becoming, showing up her dazzling beauty. “Are you really going to the theater?” he said, trying not to look at her. “Why do you ask with such alarm?” she said, wounded again at his not looking at her. “Why shouldn’t I go?” She appeared not to understand the motive of his words. “Oh, of course, there’s no reason whatever,” he said, frowning. “That’s just what I say,” she said, willfully refusing to see the irony of his tone, and quietly turning back her long, perfumed glove. “Anna, for God’s sake! what is the matter with you?” he said, appealing to her exactly as once her husband had done. “I don’t understand what you are asking.” “You know that it’s out of the question to go.” “Why so? I’m not going alone. Princess Varvara has gone to dress, she is going with me.” He shrugged his shoulders with an air of perplexity and despair. “But do you mean to say you don’t know?...” he began.