Awe

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Walking toward a large flickering light rising into the sky, I gradually saw that it came from a bonfire that was even taller than the men and women moving around it. On our side were rough wooden shelters and dozens of long picnic tables, all lit with lanterns or bare bulbs hanging from the trees. They were laden with enough food to last the night. There were old-fashioned cauldrons of stew, platters of fried chicken, dozens of deep-dish fruit pies, and mounds of fry bread made with the white flour, lard, and sugar that government rations had turned into a time-honored and unhealthy treat. Alcohol was not allowed in this sacred space, but there were coolers of soft drinks and urns of coffee. Family groups were eating or talking quietly—not hushed, as in a church, but not loud or boisterous either. People were watching the dancers from lawn chairs, some far from the fire and wrapped in blankets against the chill, others closer and just resting before rejoining the dancing. On the other side of the huge bonfire, I could see a shadowy group of men chanting deep-toned call-and-response songs. Dancers spiraled around the huge bonfire, the innermost circle barely moving and the outermost one increasing in speed like a whip until only the young and strong could keep up. Charlie invited me to join with him, and it was daunting, like trying to get on a moving train. Once inside, I realized that the dancers were not so much stomping as caressing the earth with each sliding step. So many together made a deep whooshing sound. We formed a curved line, like a huge living nautilus shell, with women elders at its heart around the fire. I knew from Wilma that their heavy leggings were sewn with small tortoise shells, and each shell was filled with tiny pebbles, so as their feet and rattling shells hit the ground, there was a sound I’d never heard before, yet it was right and familiar. Women elders were keeping the rhythm of life. I knew that Wilma should be dancing with these women elders at the center near the fire. But could she? I sat with her at the outer edge of the firelight as she prepared for a ritual that has survived centuries of land loss, warfare, lethal epidemics, outlawed languages and spiritual practices, and other attempts to take away home, culture, pride, family, and life itself. I watched as Wilma wrapped thick strips of cloth from knee to ankle, covering the steel brace that she could not walk without, adding the weight of tortoise shells and stones by her own choice. She moved out of the dark, past the dancers at the speeding end of the spiral, into the inner circle of women moving around the fire. And then she danced. —IT’S A FEW YEARS LATER, and I know that Wilma still has health problems. Lately, she has had a series of tests for fatigue and back pains.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  When Ferraro mounted the stage, she also got cheers—but fewer and not as loud. How could this be? She was making history, and I was not. I said so to an experienced reporter. He looked at me as if I’d said there was oxygen in the air. “Americans don’t like politicians much,” he explained patiently. “And if they do trust Ferraro, they credit the women’s movement—and you’re part of that.” This really drove home for me that in the future, any of us who were recognizable as part of a social justice movement had to use ourselves to support the candidates we believed in. However controversial our movements might be, at least voters know that they stand for principles. Being backed by one was a signal that politicians are not all alike. —IN THE BEGINNING of my campaigning movement style, I thought, It’s as if fate has sent me a good experience so I’ll keep showing up. And there kept on being more and more terrific women to show up for in the years that followed. Indeed, 1992 came to be called the Year of the Woman, though as Senator Barbara Mikulski pointed out, “We’re not a fad, a fancy, or a year.” Later, she would prove her point by being elected five times and serving thirty years. That quantum 1992 leap in the number of women in Congress was born out of the aftermath of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. Watching the dignified Anita Hill face an all-white and all-male Senate Judiciary Committee—and then seeing Thomas confirmed for the Supreme Court—had inspired more women to be elected to Congress in that single year than had been elected in any previous decade—though they still made up only a little over 10 percent of a body that should have been more like 50/50. This record wouldn’t be surpassed until 2013, with 20 women in the Senate and 81 in the House. But the most widespread and lasting impact of the Senate Judiciary hearings was not the Year of the Woman—and perhaps not even the ascension to the Supreme Court of a very right-wing and young Clarence Thomas, likely to be there for a long time; it was the new national understanding of sexualized intimidation as a means of keeping females in a subordinate place. The whole country learned that sexual harassment was illegal. Millions of women learned they were not alone in their experience of it. The use of sex to humiliate and dominate would never seem normal again. III.As long as I’ve been campaigning, I’ve heard two questions: “When will we have a woman president?” and “When will we have a black president?” Ironically, the 2008 primary campaign between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, which gave us the chance for both, was the best contest in terms of candidates and the worst in terms of conflict.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  He says this not with an edge but with a smile. Because I ask, he tells me that the mounds around this country were spiritual centers or astrological observatories or burial sites. Most are pyramids, with openings inside for viewing solstices and equinoxes, but others are flat mounds at global magnetic points where seeds were spread out to make them more fruitful. All were centuries in the making, with digging up and moving tons of earth. Sometimes those basins were turned into lakes or fish hatcheries. Burial mounds tell us the most, because they contain seashells from the Gulf of Mexico, or obsidian from Wyoming, or carved mica from the Carolinas, or even the teeth of Rocky Mountain grizzly bears inlaid with pearls—also bowls and jewelry made of silver and copper from Canada, turtle shells from the Atlantic, carved semiprecious beads from Central America, and textiles from everywhere. They tell how far the ancients traveled or traded. By now I feel like I’m in an alternate reality. He says the mounds were such feats of construction that Europeans didn’t believe people they regarded as savages could have ancestors who created them. One popular theory was that the Egyptians lived here—and then mysteriously left. Another was that the Chinese, the first sailors, had come and gone. I ask if the mound builders were his ancestors. He says they might have been, but with all the mixed heritage in this country, they could be my ancestors, too. Nobody knows what they called themselves—the mounds are named after the places they were found: Adena, Hopewell, and so on. Most of the big mounds were along the Mississippi River. People on this continent then known as Turtle Island had cultures as advanced as any on earth. Suddenly, it seems ridiculous that we just came from a city airport named for Columbus, a terrible navigator who insisted to his dying day that he was in India—which is why people here are called Indians. As the Native women in Houston said, “It could have been worse—he could have thought he was in Turkey.” If you’ve been genocided and left out of history, as they explained, you need a sense of humor to survive. When I tell my host this, he looks at me as if I’m just beginning to get it. Though I’ve been assuming this kind and patient man was sent to pick me up, I realize I don’t know his role. He says mildly that he’s one of the conference organizers. If I hadn’t asked, he would have been content to remain a driver. So much for hierarchy. As we pull into our destination, I ask how he keeps on working, despite ignorance like mine on one hand and all the commercial imitations on the other. “In Indian Country,” he says, “we have a different sense of time.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  A sign on the lunchroom wall brought it home: YOU CANNOT THINK YOURSELF INTO RIGHT LIVING. YOU LIVE YOURSELF INTO RIGHT THINKING. —NATIVE ELDERS IV.Whenever I was on new turf, I asked about the vertical history of people who had lived there in the long past or who might still be there. I tried never to give a speech without including Native examples, just as we do other groups in this diverse country. It was like casting bread upon the waters. It almost always came back buttered—with new knowledge. • On a book tour in my own college town of Northampton, Massachusetts, I try out my question about original cultures. A very old and scruffy-looking white guy at the back of the bookstore says he’s heard there are abandoned fields nearby that have an odd pattern of large bumps in the earth every few feet, like a giant rubber bathmat. They’ve been there since time immemorial and are supposed to be an Indian method of planting. I enlist the help of a Smith College librarian. We discover the bumps are milpa, small mounds of earth on which complementary crops were planted. Unlike linear plowing, which encourages water runoff and soil erosion, the circular pattern traps rainfall. Each mound is planted with a cluster of the Three Sisters that were the staples of Indian agriculture: corn, beans, and squash. The corn provided a stalk for the beans to climb, while also shading the vulnerable beans. The ground cover from the squash stabilized the soil, and the bean roots kept the soil fertile by providing nitrogen. As a final touch, marigolds and other natural pesticides were planted around each mound to keep harmful insects away. Altogether it was a system so perfect that in some Central American countries too poor to adopt linear plowing with machinery, artificial pesticides, and monocrops of agribusiness, the same milpa have been producing just fine for four thousand years.19 Not only that, but milpa can be planted in forests without clear-cutting the trees; at most, by removing a few branches to let sunlight through on a mound. This method was a major reason why three-fifths of all food staples in the world were developed in the Americas. • I’m in Oklahoma City for a Women of the Year lunch honoring women business leaders. This is not a city where it seems like a good idea to ask about Indian Country. It is so conservative that its major newspaper prints Bible quotations on the front page. Also I’m distracted by making fund-raising calls on which depends the fate of Ms. magazine. Its brief and accidental owner is threatening to close it unless we come up with the purchase price pronto—a form of extortion, since he knows its staff cares too much to let it go. After lunch a middle-aged woman with an American flag in her lapel tells me that she is haunted by a story her grandmother told her.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  But the more time I spend with the Gallaudet students, the more I enter into a world where liveliness of expression is a universal art form. Because their words are kinetic and their faces expressive, I feel as if I’m fully present in conversation in a rare way. I know how much I would be missing without a signer as the bridge, but an effort is being made to include me. Young women tell me how misinterpreted they feel in, say, a room full of hearing men, given the stereotype of deaf women as doubly helpless, no matter how strong they really are. I learn how much less likely a deaf woman is, statistically speaking, to be employed or married or in a long-term relationship—even less than her male counterparts—given this double standard. Yet both the men and women are so fast, subtle, and nuanced in talking to me and to each other that I feel as if my audible words are like bricks, and their visual ones are sea shells and feathers. Ever since Judy Heumann and other disability activists made the point of inclusion in Houston in 1977, feminist speakers have been better about asking that a meeting provide signing and be wheelchair accessible, although it doesn’t always happen. At Gallaudet, however, there is not just one signer where the audience can see him or her and I cannot, but one on each side of the stage, and also on each of a dozen or so special platforms around the audience. This means I can see a chorus of motion while I’m speaking. There is also the signing of lyrics and poetry. It’s like watching a ballet—a democratic ballet that everyone could learn if we tried. By the time I leave the signing world for the world of the hearing, I’m not quite the same person. I’ve seen an expressive, visual world that isn’t like the one I’ve been walking around in. Coming home, I feel let down. Where are all those expressive people? Five years later, I read that the student movement there, with the wonderfully direct name Deaf President Now , has succeeded. In 1988 Gallaudet University finally hires its first deaf president and even appoints a first deaf chair of its board of trustees. This is a long overdue victory on a campus where Abraham Lincoln authorized the first degrees. I also see that on other campuses, activists are framing deafness and disability as a civil rights issue, not as a medical problem that needs fixing. They are developing a whole new field called disability studies. Like black studies and women’s studies, these programs begun by a social justice movement are about changing the system to fit people, not the other way around. Since disability may be a state that people both enter and leave—from skiing accidents to combat injuries, from giving birth to aging and crutches—ramps instead of steps turn out to be important to most people at some time in their lives.

• From Querelle (1953)

  4 I JEAN GENET the Great Bear, the Pole Star or the Southern Cross; it (we are still discussing this particular disguise, as used by a criminal ) it allows him to assume dark continents where the sun sets and rises, where the moon sanctions murder under roofs of bamboo beside motionless rivers teeming with alligators; it gives him the opportunity to act within the illusion of a mirage, to strike while one of his feet is still resting upon a beach in Oceania and the ot her propelling him across th� waters toward Europe; it grants him oblivion in advance, as sailors always "return from far away"; it allows him to consider landlubbers as mere vegetation. It cradles the criminal, it enfolds him-in the tight fit of his sweater, in the amplitude of his bell-bottoms. It casts a sleep spell on the already fascinated victim. We shall talk about the sailor's mortal flesh. We ourselves have witnessed scenes of se duction. In that very long sentence - beginning "it envelops him in clouds . . . ," we did indulge in facile poeticisms, each one of the propositions being merely an argument in favor of the author's personal proclivities. It is, admittedly, under the sign of a very singular inner feeling that we would set down the ensuing drama. We would also like to say that it addresses itself to in· verts . The notion of love or lust appears as a natural corollary to the notion of Sea and Murder-and it is, moreover, the notion of lave against nature. No doubt the sailors who are transported by ("animated by" would appear more exact, we'll see that later on) the desire and need to murder, apprenticed themselves first to the Merchant Navy, thus are veterans of long voyages, nour· ished on ships' biscuit and the cat-o' -nine-tails, used to leg-irons for any little mistake, paid off in some obscure port, signed on again to handle some questionable cargo; and yet, it is difficult, in a city of fogs and granite, to brush past the huskies of the Fighting Navy, trained and trimmed by and for deeds we like to think of as daring, those shoulders, profiles, earrings, those tough and turbulent rumps, those strong and supple boys, without imagining them capable of murders that seem entirely justified

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Then in front of me I saw two cars placing themselves in such a manner as to completely block my way. With a graceful movement I turned off the road, and after two or three big bounces, rode up a grassy slope, among surprised cows, and there I came to a gentle rocking stop. A kind of thoughtful Hegelian synthesis linking up two dead women. I was soon to be taken out of the car (Hi, Melmoth, thanks a lot, old fellow)—and was, indeed, looking forward to surrender myself to many hands, without doing anything to cooperate, while they moved and carried me, relaxed, comfortable, surrendering myself lazily, like a patient, and deriving an eerie enjoyment from my limpness and the absolutely reliable support given me by the police and the ambulance people. And while I was waiting for them to run up to me on the high slope, I evoked a last mirage of wonder and hopelessness. One day, soon after her disappearance, an attack of abominable nausea forced me to pull up on the ghost of an old mountain road that now accompanied, now traversed a brand new highway, with its population of asters bathing in the detached warmth of a pale-blue afternoon in late summer. After coughing myself inside out, I rested a while on a boulder, and then, thinking the sweet air might do me good, walked a little way toward a low stone parapet on the precipice side of the highway. Small grasshoppers spurted out of the withered roadside weeds. A very light cloud was opening its arms and moving toward a slightly more substantial one belonging to another, more sluggish, heavenlogged system. As I approached the friendly abyss, I grew aware of a melodious unity of sounds rising like vapor from a small mining town that lay at my feet, in a fold of the valley. One could make out the geometry of the streets between blocks of red and gray roofs, and green puffs of trees, and a serpentine stream, and the rich, ore-like glitter of the city dump, and beyond the town, roads crisscrossing the crazy quilt of dark and pale fields, and behind it all, great timbered mountains. But even brighter than those quietly rejoicing colors—for there are colors and shades that seem to enjoy themselves in good company—both brighter and dreamier to the ear than they were to the eye, was that vapory vibration of accumulated sounds that never ceased for a moment, as it rose to the lip of granite where I stood wiping my foul mouth.

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  When the war began, he sold a successful grain business in Chicago and raised a volunteer company of artillery at his own expense. When the war ended he came to Los Angeles, bought the San Jacinto Rancho, and raised sheep. He later became a real estate speculator. With the founding of Willmore’s American Colony, Bouton began to speculate in water. He bought a section of land north of Willmore City where the low hills showed that the underlying rock had been forced upward. Signal Hill and the Dominguez Hills mark the southwest margin of the “artesian belt” between the Los Angeles and San Gabriel rivers. Bouton’s land included a wet season marsh. It had once been a bed of the Los Angeles River. Bouton knew the residents of Long Beach, about five miles away, needed a reliable source of water. He knew the new city’s wells went down only eighty feet. The wells ran nearly dry in summer. The Long Beach wells were on the wrong side of the underground barrier between the “artesian belt” and the ocean. Bouton’s property was on the right side. 258 General Bouton brought in his first producing well at 339 feet. He immediately sold stock in a new water company. Most of the company’s stock was bought by the owners of the Terminal Railroad. Bouton began another well, a few dozen feet away. When the second well came in at 750 feet, the force of the water ripped the two-inch-thick iron cap from the wellhead. Cobblestones and gravel rocketed out of the twelve-inch casing. For days, the jet of water stood eighty feet above the well mouth. The well shot four million gallons of water a day into the air, turning the well site into a temporary lake. Special rail excursions from Los Angeles brought gawkers to watch the water gushing from Bouton’s well. Local papers said the column of water, shining with the afternoon sun behind it, could be seen from as far away as Whittier, ten miles north. 259 The water from General Bouton’s well was slightly yellow and tasted of hydrogen sulfide. Bouton said the yellow color came from the buried peat beds through which the water flowed. The peat made the water naturally soft. He also said the water was well known in Los Angeles as a cure for kidney and rheumatic diseases. He said that Professor E. W. Hilgard and Professor R. H. Loughbridge, chemists from the state university at Berkeley, had examined the water. They would testify to its healthful properties. 260 The Bouton Well, when it was finally capped, supplied all of Long Beach’s water for nearly ten years. Bouton’s company marketed the water with the slogan, “It does not see the light of day until it flashes and sparkles from the faucet in your home.” The water came in such abundance and with so little effort that people in Long Beach thought there was a lake of pure, fresh water in a cavern under the city.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  At the end of the book he describes how he and his wife first perceived, through the stratagems thrown up to confound the eye, the ocean liner waiting to take them and their son to America: “It was most satisfying to make out among the jumbled angles of roofs and walls, a splendid ship’s funnel, showing from behind the clothesline as something in a scrambled picture—Find What the Sailor Has Hidden—that the finder cannot unsee once it has been seen.” The Eye (1930) is well titled; the apprehension of “reality” (a word that Nabokov says must always have quotes around it) is first of all a miracle of vision, and our existence is a sequence of attempts to unscramble the “pictures” glimpsed in that “brief crack of light.” Both art and nature are to Nabokov “a game of intricate enchantment and deception,” and the process of reading and rereading his novels is a game of perception, like those E. H. Gombrich writes about in Art and Illusion —everything is there , in sight (no symbols lurking in murky depths), but one must penetrate the trompe-l’oeil , which eventually reveals something totally different from what one had expected. This is how Nabokov seems to envision the game of life and the effect of his novels: each time a “scrambled picture” has been discerned “the finder cannot unsee” it; consciousness has been expanded or created. The word “game” commonly denotes frivolity and an escape from the exigencies of the world, but Nabokov confronts the void by virtue of his play-concept. His “game of worlds” (to quote John Shade in Pale Fire ) proceeds within the terrifyingly immutable limits defined by the “two eternities of darkness” and is a search for order—for “some kind / Of correlated pattern in the game”—which demands the full consciousness of its players. The author and the reader are the “players,” and when in Speak, Memory Nabokov describes the composition of chess problems he is also telescoping his fictional practices. If one responds to the author’s “false scents” and “specious lines of play,” best effected by parody, and believes, say, that Humbert’s confession is “sincere” and that he exorcises his guilt, or that the narrator of Pnin is really perplexed by Pnin’s animosity toward him, or that a Nabokov book is an illusion of a reality proceeding under the natural laws of our world—then one not only has lost the game to the author but most likely is not faring too well in the “game of worlds,” one’s own unscrambling of pictures. Speak, Memory rehearses the major themes of Nabokov’s fiction: the confrontation of death; the withstanding of exile; the nature of the creative process; the search for complete consciousness and the “free world of timelessness.” In the first chapter he writes, “I have journeyed back in thought—with thought hopelessly tapering off as I went—to remote regions where I groped for some secret outlet only to discover that the prison of time is spherical and without exits.”

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  [image "With Wilma Mankiller and Charlie Soap’s truck, Tahlequah, Oklahoma, 1991. Courtesy of Annie Leibovitz" file=Image00021.jpg] WITH WILMA MANKILLER AND CHARLIE SOAP’S TRUCK, TAHLEQUAH, OKLAHOMA, 1991. COURTESY OF ANNIE LEIBOVITZ [image "VIIi." file=Image00022.jpg] What Once Was Can Be AgainI used to think there were only two possibilities. The first was what many believed: that equality between males and females was impossible and contrary to human nature. The second was what many hoped: that equality would be possible in the future for the first time. After the Houston Conference and spending more time with women and men from Indian Country, I thought there might be a third: this balance between females and males had existed in the past, and for a few, it still did. There were people to learn from. When new people guide us, we see a new country. I.It’s the fall of 1995. I’m at the Columbus, Ohio, airport, waiting at the baggage claim as instructed. I’m going to speak at a conference of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society, a national group that teaches Native students science and engineering by using Native examples—thus allowing them to excel without feeling they have to abandon their history and cultures. Since Native students often prosper in cooperative rather than competitive classrooms—as do a lot of female students, regardless of where they come from—I’ve been asked to talk about the feminist movement and efforts to change classrooms into learning circles. Actually, boys, too, often do better when they aren’t always in a hierarchy, so the ideas of this group could improve education in general.1 After a few minutes of waiting, I notice a heavyset man in a windbreaker leaning against the wall. I walk over and ask if he’s waiting for me—and he is. Holding up a sign seemed like an invasion of privacy, he says, so he’s been waiting patiently for the crowd to thin out. On the long drive to the conference center, we pass a turnoff with a small sign: SERPENT MOUND . I ask what this is. He doesn’t seem surprised, but he just explains that it’s an ancient earthwork, one of the many around this country. Some are shaped like enormous birds and animals, others are circles or pyramids, some are as tall as a three-story building and surrounded by a hundred smaller mounds you can see only from the air. This one is a snake about three feet high and a quarter of a mile long; the oldest surviving mound of its kind, maybe two or three thousand years old. I’m into my third decade of traveling around this country, and I know none of this. I tell him my family comes from southern Ohio, yet the Serpent Mound is news to me. As if to make me feel better, he says he has friends who went to England to see Stonehenge, and when he asked if they would like to see even older sites here, they said no.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  In form, Pale Fire is a grotesque scholarly edition, while Lolita is a burlesque of the confessional mode, the literary diary, the Romantic novel that chronicles the effects of a debilitating love, the Doppelgänger tale, and, in parts, a Duncan Hines tour of America conducted by a guide with a black imagination, a parodic case study, and, as the narrator of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight says of his half brother’s first novel, The Prismatic Bezel , “It is also a wicked imitation of many other … literary habit[s].” Knight’s procedures summarize Nabokov’s: As often was the way with Sebastian Knight he used parody as a kind of springboard for leaping into the highest region of serious emotion. J. L. Coleman has called it “a clown developing wings, an angel mimicking a tumbler pigeon,” and the metaphor seems to me very apt. Based cunningly on a parody of certain tricks of the literary trade, The Prismatic Bezel soars skyward. With something akin to fanatical hate Sebastian Knight was ever hunting out the things which had once been fresh and bright but which were now worn to a thread, dead things among living ones; dead things shamming life, painted and repainted, continuing to be accepted by lazy minds serenely unaware of the fraud, (p. 91) “But all this obscure fun is, I repeat, only the author’s springboard” (p. 92), says the narrator, whose tone is justifiably insistent, for although Nabokov is a virtuoso of the minor art of literary burlesque, which is at best a kind of literary criticism, he knows that the novelist who uses parody is under an obligation to engage the reader emotionally in a way that Max Beerbohm’s A Christmas Garland (1912) does not. The description of The Prismatic Bezel and the remainder of Chapter Ten in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight indicate that Nabokov is fully aware of this necessity, and, like Knight, he has succeeded in making parody a “springboard.” There is thus an important paradox implicit in Nabokov’s most audacious parodies: Lolita makes fun of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864), but Humbert’s pages are indeed notes from underground in their own right, and Clare Quilty is both a parody of the Double as a convention of modern fiction and a Double who formulates the horror in Humbert’s life. With the possible exception of Joyce, Nabokov is alone among modern writers in his ability to make parody and pathos converge and sometimes coincide.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  C A N T O X X I X Beatrice gazes for a moment upon that point of light wherein every where is here and every when is now, and therein reads the questions Dante would fain have her answer. It was not to acquire any good for himself, but that his reflected light might itself have the joy of conscious existence, that God, in his timeless eternity, uttered himself as love in created beings, themselves capable of loving. It is vain to ask what God was doing before the creation, for Time has no relevance except within the range of creation; nor was the first creation itself successive, or temporal at all; for pure form or act (the angels) pure matter or potentiality (the materia prima) and inseparably united act and potentiality (the material heavens) issued into simultaneous being. Jerome was wrong (as Scripture and reason testify) in thinking that the angels were created long before the heavens over which it is the office of certain of them to preside. Dante now knows where the angels were created (in God’s eternity) and when (contemporaneously with Time and with the Heavens) and how (all loving); but has yet to learn how soon certain fell (ere one might count twenty) and why (because of Satan’s pride), and how the less presumptuous ones recognized the source of their swift and wide range of understanding, and so received grace (the acceptance of which was itself a merit), and were confirmed. This instruction were enough, did not the prevalence of erroneous teaching (honest and dishonest) make it needful to add that the angels, ever rejoicing in the direct contemplation of God, see all things always, and therefore exercise no changing stress of attention, and therefore need no power of memory, since their thought never having lost immediate hold of aught needs not to recall aught. Beatrice goes on to denounce the vain and flippant teaching by which the faithful are deluded, and especially the unauthorized pardonings; and finally, returning to the subject of the angels, explains that though in number they surpass the power of human language of conception, yet each has his own specific quality of insight and of resultant love. Such is the wonder of the divine love which breaks himself upon such countless mirrors, yet remains ever one. WHEN BOTH the two children of Latona, covered by the Ram and by the Scales, make the horizon their girdle at one same moment, as long as from the point when the zenith balanceth the scale, till one and the other from that belt unbalanceth itself, changing its hemisphere, 1 so long, with a smile traced on her countenance, did Beatrice hold her peace, gazing fixedly on the point which had o’ermastered me; then she began: “I tell, not ask, that which thou fain wouldst hear; for I have seen it where every where and every when is focussed.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Until then, I had imagined myself alone in believing that spiders should be the totem of writers. Both go into a space alone and spin out of their own bodies a reality that has never existed before. Until this ride, I’d felt good in nature only if it was near the ocean. Perhaps because an ocean beach had always been our goal during the travels in my childhood, or perhaps because my experiences of midwestern green expanses had been cold and lonely, the ocean was the only part of nature that I, a city and village person, really enjoyed. But this was different. The great expanse of ivory-to-beige-to-rose sand, the seeming nothingness that turned out to be a delicate universe of plant life as soon as you looked closer—all this was laid out before us as we rode in the late afternoon light. I tried to explain all this to Leslie, a little ashamed of confessing any discomfort in nature to this woman who was so at home in it, yet mystified as to why I was undepressed and unreminded of midwestern childhood sadness here, so far from any ocean. “Well, of course,” Leslie said. “The desert used to be the ocean floor.” Suddenly, I had a moment of seeing this land as a living being in its own time span, as she did. Clearly, Columbus never “discovered” America, in either sense of that word. The people who knew it were already here. V.Wilma did not run for a third term as principal chief; she had received a diagnosis of cancer and needed chemotherapy. I knew she dreaded the regular visits to the hospital for weeks of outpatient infusions. She had already spent way too much of her life in hospitals, and she was not as invulnerable as she seemed. Her two daughters had been with her faithfully in past health crises, but they had jobs and lives in Oklahoma. I asked Wilma if she would let me stay with her in Boston, instead of going on a scheduled trip to Australia that I could easily do another time—hoping but not believing that she, always the strong one, would say yes—but she actually did. Of all the gifts she had given me, that was the greatest. Wilma and I stayed in a big old-fashioned house that friends of hers had left for the summer. Every morning we went to the hospital, where chemicals were dripped slowly into her veins, then we came home to watch movies we had rented, including every episode of Helen Mirren’s Prime Suspect, a depiction of female strength and complexity that Wilma loved. For me, those weeks in Boston, with Wilma, became a lesson in her ability to be “of good mind,” in her phrase, which also meant a people’s ability to survive. Her hope was to preserve what she called The Way, to keep it alive, for that future moment when the current obsession with excess and hierarchy imploded.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Sometimes it was almost dawn before we went home with families who fed us and gave us straw mats or charpoys, wooden frames strung with hemp, to sleep on. It was the first time I witnessed the ancient and modern magic of groups in which anyone may speak in turn, everyone must listen, and consensus is more important than time. I had no idea that such talking circles had been a common form of governance for most of human history, from the Kwei and San in southern Africa, the ancestors of us all, to the First Nations on my own continent, where layers of such circles turned into the Iroquois Confederacy, the oldest continuous democracy in the world. Talking circles once existed in Europe, too, before floods, famines, and patriarchal rule replaced them with hierarchy, priests, and kings. I didn’t even know, as we sat in Ramnad, that a wave of talking circles and “testifying” was going on in black churches of my own country and igniting the civil rights movement. I certainly didn’t guess that, a decade later, I would see consciousness-raising groups, women’s talking circles, giving birth to the feminist movement. All I knew was that some deep part of me was being nourished and transformed right along with the villagers. I could see that, because the Gandhians listened, they were listened to. Because they depended on generosity, they created generosity. Because they walked a nonviolent path, they made one seem possible. This was the practical organizing wisdom they taught me: If you want people to listen to you, you have to listen to them. If you hope people will change how they live, you have to know how they live. If you want people to see you, you have to sit down with them eye-to-eye. I certainly didn’t know that a decade or so after I returned home, on-the-road organizing would begin to take up most of my life. —IT WOULD BE ALMOST twenty years before I visited India again. By then, in the late 1970s, the civil rights and anti–Vietnam War movements at home had inspired more change, including among women who loved and were crucial to those movements, yet were rarely equal within them.2 They realized the need for an independent and inclusive feminist movement that would take on the personal and global politics of gender. This contagion was going on in many countries. Altogether, a new consciousness was spreading as women met or read about one another, whether in small meetings and underground feminist publications or at global events like the UN Conference on Women in Mexico City in 1975. The dry tinder of inequality was everywhere, just waiting to be set on fire. Devaki Jain, a Gandhian economist and a friend from my earlier time living in India, invited me back toward the end of the 1970s to talk with some of these new women’s groups. It was as if she and I had been having the same realizations by long-distance telepathy.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  On my own again, I look out at the barren sand and tortured rocks of the Badlands, stretching for miles. I’ve walked there, and I know that, close up, the barren sand reveals layers of pale rose and beige and cream, and the rocks turn out to have intricate womblike openings. Even in the distant cliffs, caves of rescue appear. What seems to be one thing from a distance is very different close up. I tell you this story because it’s the kind of lesson that can be learned only on the road. And also because I’ve come to believe that, inside, each of us has a purple motorcycle. We have only to discover it—and ride.

• From Querelle (1953)

  As Vic had the collar of his peacoat turned up, the blood, instead of spurting over Querelle, ran down the inside of his coat and over his jersey. His eyes bulging the dying man staggered, his hand moving in a most delicate gesture, letting go, abandoning himself in an almost voluptuous posture that recalled, even in this land of fog, the dulcet clime of the bedchamber in which the Armenian had been murdered-whose image Vic's gesture now recreated in Querelle's memory. Querelle supported him firmly with his left arm and gently lowered him down onto the grass where he expired. The murderer straightened his back. He was a thing, in a world where danger does not exist, because one is a thing. Beautiful, immobile, dark thing, within whose cavities, the void becoming vocal, Querelle could hear it surge forth to escape with the sound, to surround him and to protect him. Vic was not dead, he was a youth whom that astonishing thing, sonorous and empty, with a mouth half-open and half-hidden, with 62 I JEAN GENET

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Not only had I never made any such complaints, but at political meetings, I had given my suggestions to whatever man was sitting next to me, knowing that if a man offered them, they would be taken more seriously. You white women, Mrs. Greene said kindly, as if reading my mind, if you don’t stand up for yourselves, how can you stand up for anybody else? As streams of people surged toward the Lincoln Memorial and the speakers’ platform, the three of us got separated. I used my press credentials to climb the steps, hoping to see them. But when I turned around, all I could see was an ocean of upturned faces. It was a scene I will never forget. Stretching over the expanse of green, past the reflecting pool, past the Washington Monument, all the way to the Capitol, there were a quarter of a million people. The sea of humanity looked calm, peaceful, not even pressing to come closer to the speakers, as if each one felt responsible for proving that the fears of violence and disorder were wrong. We were like a nation within a nation. From nowhere, a thought rose up: I wouldn’t be anywhere else on this earth. Martin Luther King, Jr., read his much-anticipated speech in a deep and familiar voice. I’d always imagined that if I were present at the creation of history, I would know it only long afterward, yet this was history in the moment. As King ended his speech, I heard Mahalia Jackson call out, “Tell them about the dream, Martin!” And he did begin the “I have a dream” litany from memory, with the crowd calling out to him after each image—Tell it! What would be most remembered had been least planned. I hoped Mrs. Greene heard a woman speak up—and make all the difference. —FIFTY YEARS LATER I stood again with thousands who gathered at the Lincoln Memorial to celebrate the anniversary of that first march—and this time there were women’s voices. Bernice King, who had been an infant at home when her father gave that first speech, spoke about the absence of women in 1963. There was also Oprah Winfrey, who had been a nine-year-old girl in Mississippi when Dr. King spoke, and Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of John F. Kennedy, the president who the marchers had hoped would disobey his political advisers, leave the White House, and just appear—but he never did. Finally, there was President Barack Obama, twice elected president of the United States, a possibility even Dr. King hadn’t dreamed of. This was huge progress, yet nothing can make up for truths untold. As Dr.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  Then—as folk under masks seem other than before, if they do off the semblance not their own wherein they hid them,— so changed before me into ampler joyance the flowers and the sparks, so that I saw both the two courts of heaven manifested. O splendour 3 of God whereby I saw the lofty triumph of the truthful realm, give me the power to tell how I beheld it. A light there is up yonder which maketh the Creator visible unto the creature, who only in beholding him hath its own peace; and it so far outstretcheth circle-wise that its circumference would be too loose a girdle for the sun. All its appearance is composed of rays reflected from the top of the First Moved, which draweth thence its life and potency. And as a hill-side reflect itself in water at its foot, as if to look upon its own adornment when it is rich in grasses and in flowers, so, mounting o’er the light, around, around, casting reflection in more than thousand ranks I saw all that of us hath won return up

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  I.In 1963, a time of controversy over civil rights and Vietnam, political scared network executives, and satire still evoked George S. Kaufman’s show business adage “Satire is what closes on Saturday night.” Though TW3 would eventually become the parent of the much sillier Laugh-In, then of such true heirs as Saturday Night Live, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and The Colbert Report, the continuity acceptance department, otherwise known as the censors, was in a snit of nervousness. Because the show really was live, if anyone departed from the script, the only remedy was to bleep a word or pull the plug completely. Censors also once tried to convince us that the Fairness Doctrine of the Federal Communications Commission required writing a prowar joke for every antiwar joke. Fortunately, they couldn’t think of a prowar joke either. But limits lead to invention. My favorite skit got past “the suits,” as we mercilessly called all network executives, by hiring a juggler to toss huge butcher knives into the air and keep them circling overhead while the audience barely breathed. After what seemed an eternity, a stagehand appeared with a vaudeville-type placard: THE NUCLEAR ARMS RACE . Thanks to Surrealism in Everyday Life, I could comment on such events as the high-rise bordellos being subsidized by the government of Holland. All I had to do was comb through the newspapers of the world every Saturday morning—while also watching Soul Train, thus learning new disco moves at the same time—and search for the sort of events about which one says, “You can’t make this stuff up!” I was the only “girl writer,” probably because the power to make people laugh is also a power, so women have been kept out of comedy. Polls show that what women fear most from men is violence, and what men fear most from women is ridicule. Later, when Tina Fey was head writer and star of Saturday Night Live, she could still say, “Only in comedy does an obedient white girl from the suburbs count as diversity.” TW3 was fun. It was pioneering. It couldn’t last. But what did last was Surrealism in Everyday Life as a category in my mind. Never again would I be able to confront the unimaginable without imagining an award for it. When I began to travel as an organizer and was plunged into irrational juxtapositions on the road, I finally understood why laughter is a mark of wanderers, from the holy fools of Old Russia to the roadies of rock music. It’s the surprise, the unexpected, the out of control. It turns out that laughter is the only free emotion—the only one that can’t be compelled. We can be made to fear. We can even be made to believe we’re in love because, if we’re kept dependent and isolated for long enough, we bond in order to survive. But laughter explodes like an aha!

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  As when we look upon a picture or a script, glorious but at first imperfectly mastered by us, and as our eyes slowly adjust themselves, the details rise and assert themselves and take their places, and all the while that the impression changes and deepens the thing that we look upon changes not nor even seems to change, but only we to see it clearer, so Dante’s kindling vision reads deeper and deeper into the unchanging glory of the triune Deity, till his mind fastens itself upon the contemplation of the union (in the second Person) of the circle of Deity and the featured countenance of humanity—the unconditioned self-completeness of God that reverent thought asserts and the character and features which the heart demands and which its experience proclaims,—but his powers fail to grapple with the contradiction till the reconciliation is brought home to him in a flash of exalted insight. Then the vision passes away and may not be recalled, but already all jarring protest and opposition to the divine order has given way in the seer’s heart to oneness of wish and will with God, who himself is love. “VIRGIN MOTHER, daughter of thy son, lowly and uplifted more than any creature, fixed goal of the eternal counsel, thou art she who didst human nature so ennoble that its own Maker scorned not to become its making. 1 In thy womb was lit again the love under whose warmth in the eternal peace this flower hath thus unfolded Here art thou unto us the meridian torch of love and there below with mortals art a living spring of hope. Lady, thou art so great and hast such worth, that if there be who would have grace yet betaketh not himself to thee, his longing seeketh to fly without wings. Thy kindliness not only succoureth whoso requesteth, but doth oftentimes freely forerun request. In thee is tenderness, in thee is pity, in thee munificence, 2 in thee united whatever in created being is of excellence. Now he who from the deepest pool of the universe even to here hath seen the spirit lives one after one imploreth thee, of grace, for so much power as to be able to uplift his eyes more high towards final bliss; and I, who never burned for my own vision more than I do for his, proffer thee all my prayers and pray they be not scant that thou do scatter for him every cloud of his mortality with prayers of thine, so that the joy supreme may be unfolded to him. And further do I pray thee, Queen who canst all that thou wilt, that thou keep sound for him, after so great a vision, his affections. Let thy protection vanquish human ferments; see Beatrice, with how many Saints, for my prayers folding hands.” Those eyes, of God beloved and venerated, fixed upon him who prayed, showed us how greatly devout prayers please her.