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 The Divine Comedy (1950)

  I would have thee know, that, when I went the other time, down here to the deep Hell, 3 this rock had not yet fallen. But certainly, if I distinguish rightly, short while before He 4 came, who took from Dis the great prey of the upmost circle, on all sides the deep loathsome valley trembled so, that I thought the universe felt love, 5 whereby, as some believe, the world has oft-times been converted into chaos; and in that moment, here, and elsewhere, this ancient rock made such downfall. 6 But fix thy eyes upon the valley: for the river of blood draws nigh, in which boils every one who by violence injures others.” O blind cupidity both wicked and foolish, which so incites us in the short life, and then, in the eternal, steeps us so bitterly! I saw a wide fosse bent arcwise, as embracing all the plain, according to what my Guide had told me; and between it and the foot of the bank were Centaurs, 7 running one behind the other, armed with arrows, as they were wont on earth to go in hunting. Perceiving us descend, they all stood still; and from the band three came forth with bows and javelins chosen first. And one of them cried from far: “To what torment come ye, ye that descend the coast? Tell from thence; if not, I draw the bow.” My Master said: “Our answer we will make to Chiron, 8 there near at hand; unhappily thy will was always thus rash.” Then he touched me and said: “This is Nessus, who died for the fair Dejanira, and of himself took vengeance for himself; he in the middle, who is looking down upon his breast, is the great Chiron, he who nursed Achilles; that other is Pholus, who was so full of rage. Around the foss they go by thousands, piercing with their arrows whatever spirit wrenches itself out of the blood farther than its guilt has allotted for it.” We drew near those rapid beasts; Chiron took an arrow, and with the notch put back his beard upon his jaws. When he had uncovered his great mouth, he said to his companions: “Have ye perceived that the one behind moves what he touches? The feet of the dead are not wont to do so.” And my good Guide, who was already at the breast of him, where the two natures are consorted, replied: “Indeed he is alive, and solitary thus have I to show him the dark valley; necessity brings him to it, and not sport. From singing Alleluiah, came She who gave me this new office; he is no robber, nor I a thievish spirit.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  Later I would sleep with Steven, later I would hear of Anya dancing on a table in a leopardskin bodysuit, cleavage Venu- sians never dreamed of, later I would hear how she fucked like a big blond cat, clawing and screeching From Venus she came— but that first time in Veggie Kingdom I was so starstuck I dropped my water glass—CRASH—Anya turned toward me and her blue dress twirled with her, thin and translucent as dragonfly wings. Steven put me on the mailing list of The Venusian Tattler, a newsletter that would keep me abreast of Anya’s radio and TV appearances. “If astronauts landed on Venus,” Anya’d tell her avid or skeptical host, “it would appear empty—save to the most enlightened—because Venus exists on a higher vibra tory rate than here on Earth. We, the creative, evolved inhabi tants of Venus all have blue eyes and blond hair. Life on Venus is more permeable than on your planet—that’s why this dress I’m wearing is full of holes.” I learned from Anya that life “on the physical” is but a phase, and therefore thoughts are ac tions—and that Jesus Christ was a lower initiate who diluted the Venusian teachings to match the (lower) consciousness of his era. On Venus, people could walk through trees or visit shimmering temples filled with all the great books that ever have been or ever will be written. Venusians didn’t need to read these books—through osmotic transference their higher selves were directly linked to the wisdom of the universe. I placed a copy of One Touch of Venus under my pillow—in my little flat on Valparaiso Street in San Francisco’s North Beach—so that while I slept its secret teachings would drift into my etheric body, and I would understand with a depth that I never before dreamed possible. The inner Anya knew this, knew that I was tuned in to the higher vibrations of her late night talk-radio chatter, knew that I was ready to take the next step. The following Thursday night, Friday morning, really, I wrapped myself in my pink chenille bathrobe and switched on my “portable” Zenith radio, black and chrome it was, mono, built like a tank. Anya flirted with the deejay as usual. I propped a pillow against the wall, leaned back in my bed, and lit a ciga rette, comforted by her high bell-like giggles. “You’re some far-

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  There seemed to be no windows, & beyond irregular pools of electric light lay mysterious, abundant semidarkness. I came to a sort of dead end, a tall, stuffy place like an airing cupboard, a store-room perhaps, with a young boy barefoot, climbing up & down the shelves, checking stock, a pressure-lamp in his raised hand, his black face concentrating, dazzling in the plane of light that he swung about him. I stayed & watched, mesmerised, feeling that nothing else mattered. Down he clambered, his supple child’s body comically bursting out of his khaki cotton uniform. When he saw me he smiled. I smiled back—though I was at the very edge of the field of light, & perhaps he cd not really see me. He kept on smiling—an immense, gentle, jolly smile—not yet a vendor’s smile, nothing calculating in it. He was a pure Negro, from far south evidently, like the people we are going to, quite different from the crossbred scamps who haunt the quays. I turned & went back, & as I did so he called out, ‘Welcome Port Said, m’sieur’—in a heartbreaking voice, its boy’s clarity just cracking into manhood. I was inordinately, unaccountably moved by this—except that I knew it for what it was, a profound call of my nature, answered first at school by Webster, muffled, followed obscurely but inexorably since. Was it merely lust? Was it only baffled desire? I knew again, as I had known when a child myself, confronting a man for the first time, that paradox of admiration, of loss of self, of dedication … call it what you will. Back in the sunshine—fiercely hot now, so that I at once put on my topi, & walked out conscious of some inner effort of self-effacement, of humility wrestling with grandeur & compassion—the scamps, repelled from Simon Artz’s door by a fearsome old Arab with a peaked cap and a cane, flocked about me, some pushy & assertive but others festive and friendly, trying to take me by the hand. I had the absurd vision of myself as a doting schoolmaster leading off his charges on some special treat, & for the first time I had to assert myself, strike out airily with my hand to repel the little demons. Then I felt childlike myself, very pink & white, laughable in my indignation, & my authority much too big for me, as if bought in anticipation of my ‘growing into it’.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Whether out of guilt or a justifying belief that the original occupants were not fully human, history was replaced by the myth of almost uninhabited lands. Thinking about our schooling in different decades and parts of the country, all three of us in that kitchen discover that we were taught more about ancient Greece and Rome than about the history of the land we live on. We learned about the pyramid builders of Egypt but not the pyramid builders of the Mississippi River. The next day Deborah drives us to Flint Ridge, an ancient quarry that once yielded flint for Native tools used in hunting, farming, and building. By local legend, Indians hurled themselves to their deaths from this ridge rather than be slaughtered by the enemy. We need some healing, and find it at the Serpent Mound. There it is, a grass-covered, undulating serpent stretching out for a quarter of a mile on a plateau above a valley. It seems to emerge from the earth, rather than to be built on it. From a globe or comet in its mouth to a tightly coiled tail, its direction was thought to be random until astronomers realized that the head points to the sunset at the summer solstice, and the tail to the sunrise at winter solstice. Radiocarbon dating traces its age back to at least two thousand years ago, not the few centuries originally thought. This is the largest of the effigy mounds surviving here, and also in the world. Like so many other mounds, it would have been destroyed to make room for construction if money hadn’t been raised to save it, in this case with the help of a group of women at the Peabody Museum of Massachusetts. There is a small wooden viewing tower, and pamphlets from the State of Ohio, but they focus on facts—for instance, the Serpent Mound is as long as four football fields—not on meaning. In The Sacred Hoop, Paula Gunn Allen, a Native poet, mythologist, and scholar, explains that Serpent Woman was one of the names of the quintessential original spirit “that pervades everything, that is capable of powerful song and radiant movement, and that moves in and out of the mind…she is both Mother and Father to all people and all creatures. She is the only creator of thought, and thought precedes creation.”4 In Western mythology, she might be compared to Medusa, the serpent-haired Greek goddess whose name means Knowing Woman or Protectress. She once was all-powerful—until patriarchy came along in the form of a mythic young man who chopped off her head. He was told to do this by Athena, who sprang full-blown from the mind of her father, Zeus—a goddess thought up by patriarchy and therefore motherless. There is history in what is dismissed as prehistory.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  “Amidst all the rest that I have shown thee, since we entered by the gate whose threshold is denied to none, thy eyes have discerned nothing so notable as the present stream, which quenches all the flames above it.” These were words of my Guide: wherefore I prayed him to bestow on me the food, for which he had bestowed the appetite. “In the middle of the sea lies a waste country,” he then said, “which is named Crete, under whose King the world once was chaste.8 A mountain is there, called Ida, which once was glad with waters and with foliage; now it is deserted like an antiquated thing. Rhea of old chose it for the faithful cradle of her son;9 and the better to conceal him, when he wept, caused cries to be made on it. Within the mountain stands erect a great Old Man,10 who keeps his shoulders turned towards Damietta, and looks at Rome as if it were his mirror. His head is shapen of fine gold, his arms and his breast are pure silver; then he is of brass to the cleft; from thence downwards he is all of chosen iron, save that the right foot is of baked clay; and he rests more on this than on the other. Every part, except the gold, is broken with a fissure that drops tears, which collected perforate that grotto. Their course descends from rock to rock into this valley; they form Acheron, Styx, and Phlegethon, then, by this narrow conduit, go down to where there is no more descent; they form Cocytus,11 and thou shalt see what kind of lake that is: here therefore I describe it not.” And I to him: “If the present rill thus flows down from our world, why does it appear to us only on this bank?” And he to me: “Thou knowest that the place is round, and though thou hast come far, always to the left, descending towards the bottom, thou has not yet turned through the entire circle: wherefore if aught new appears to us, it ought not to bring wonder on thy contenance.” And I again: “Master, where is Phlegethon and Lethe found: for thou speakest not of the one, and sayest the other is formed by this rain?” “In all thy questions truly thou pleasest me,” he answered; “but the boiling of the red water might well resolve one of those thou askest. Lethe thou shalt see, but out of this abyss,12 there where the spirits go to wash themselves, when their guilt is taken off by penitence.” Then he said: “Now it is time to quit the wood; see that thou follow me; the margins which are not burning, form a path and over them all fire is quenched.”

• From Querelle (1953)

  examined every crack in the stone wall along the ditch . At one spot the brambles grew thicker and closer to the wall. Their roots were caught in the masonry. Querelle looked closer. The place appealed to him. No one had followed him there. No one was behind him, nor was there anyone on top of the wall. He was all alone in the old moat. \Vith his hands thrust deep into his pockets, to protect them from being scratched, he deliberately forced his way through the shrubs. Then, for a moment, he just stood at the foot of the wall, looking at the masonry. He discovered the stone he would have to pry loose in order to create a niche in the wall : a small sailcloth bag, containing some gold, rings, broken bracelets, earrings, and some Italian gold coins, did not need a lot of space. He stared at the wall for a long time. He hypnotized himself. Soon he had induced a form of sleep, of self-forgetfulness, and this allowed him to become part of his surroundings. He saw himself entering the wall, its every detail clearly apparent. His body penetrated it. There were eyes in the tips of his ten fingers; even all his muscles had eyes. Soon he became the wall, and remained so for a moment; he felt every detail of its stones alive in him, the cracks like wounds, invisible blood flowing from them, with his soul and his silent cries; he felt a spider tickling the minute cavern between two of his fingers, a leaf gently attach ing itself to one of h is damp stones. Finally, becoming aware of himself again, flattened against the wall and feeling its damp, rough contours, he made an effort to leave it gain, to step out of it, but as he did so he was marked by 1t forever, by this most particular spot near the ramparts, and i t would remain in his bodily memory and he would be certain to find it again in five or ten years' time. As he turned to leave he remembered, without giving it much thought, that there had been another murder in Brest. In the morning paper he had seen a photograph of Gil, and he had recognized the smiling singer. Aboard Le Vengeur, Qucrelle had lost nothing of his sulky arrogance and irritability. Despite his duties as a steward he 132 I JEAN GENET

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  hand, and moved herself quickly and with unaffected gait towards the shepherd Paris, shewing by honest signs and tokens and promising that he should be Lord of all Asia if he would judge her the fairest of the three, and give her the apple of gold. The other maiden, which seemed by her armour to be Minerva, was accompanied with two young men, armed and brandishing their naked swords in their hands, whereof one was named Terror, and the other Fear; and behind them approached one sounding his flute in the Dorian manner, now with shrill notes and now with deep tones to provoke and stir the dancers as the trumpet stirreth men to battle: this maiden began to dance and shake her head, throwing her fierce and terrible eyes upon Paris, and promising that if it pleased him to give her the victory of beauty, she would make him by her protection the most strong and victorious man alive. Then came Venus and presented herself, smiling very sweetly, in the middle of the theatre, with much favour of all the people. She was accompanied with a great number of little boys, whereby you would have judged them to be all Cupids, so plump and fair were they, and either to have flown from heaven or else from the river of the sea, for they had little wings and little arrows, and the residue of their habit according in each point, and they bare in their hands torches lighted, as though it had been the day and feast of marriage of their lady. Then came in a great multitude of fair maidens: on the one side were the most comely Graces; on the other side the most beautiful Seasons, carrying garlands and loose flowers which they strewed before her; and they danced very nimbly therewith, making great honour to the goddess of pleasure with these flowers of the spring. 531 LUCIUS. APULEIUS dientes. Iam tibiae multiforabiles cantus Lydios dulciter consonant: quibus spectatorum pectora suave mulcentibus, longe suavior Venus placide commoveri cunctantique lente vestigio et leniter fluctuante spinula et sensim annutante capite coepit incedere, mollique tibiarum sono delicatis respondere gestibus et nunc mite conniventibus, nunc acre comminanti- bus gestire pupulis et nonnunquam saltare solis ocu- lis. Haec ut primum ante iudicis conspectum facta est, nisu brachiorum polliceri videbatur, si fuisset deabus ceteris antelata, daturam se nuptam Paridi forma praecipuam suique similem: tunc animo volenti Phrygius iuvenis malum quod tenebat aureum, velut victoriae calculum, puellae tradidit. 33 Quid ergo miramini si! vilissima capita, immo foren- sia pecora, immo vero togati vulturii, si toti nunc iudi- ces sententias suas pretionundinantur, cümrerum exor- dio inter deos et homines agitatum iudicium corruperit gratia, et originalem sententiam magni Iovis consiliis electus iudex rusticanus et opilio lucro libidinis ven- diderit cum totius etiam suae stirpis exitio? Sic Hercule et aliud sequens iudicium inter inclitos Achivorum duces celebratum, vel cum falsis insimu- lationibus eruditione doctrinaque praepollens Pala- medes proditionis damnatur, vel cum virtute Martia

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  24 Mane factum est, et perfectis sollemnibus processi | duodecim sacratus stolis, habitu quidem religioso sátis, , sed effari de eo nullo vinculo prohibeor, quippe ques | tune temporis videre praesentes plurimi. Namque in. ipso aedis sacrae meditullio ante. deae simulacrum constitutum tribunal ligneum iussus superstiti, byssina quidem sed floride depicta veste conspicuus, et humeris dependebat pone tergum talorum tenus pretiosa chlamida: quaqua tamen viseres, colore vario circumnotatis insignibar animalibus; hine dracones Indici, inde grypes Hyperborei quos in speciem pinnatae alitis generat mundus alter: hane Olympiacam stolam sacrati nuncupant. At manu 58€ THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK XI Thou wouldest peradventure demand, thou studious reader, what was said and done there: verily I would tell thee if it were lawful for me to tell, thou wouldest know if it were convenient for thee to hear ; but both thy ears and my tongue should incur the like pain of rash curiosity Howbeit I will not long torment thy mind, which peradventure is somewhat religious and given to some devotion ; listen there- fore, and believe it to be true. Thou shalt under- stand that I approached near unto hell, even to the gates of Proserpine, and after that I was ravished throughout all the elements, I returned to my proper place : about midnight I saw the sun brightly shine, I saw likewise the gods celestial and the gods infernal, before whom I presented myself and wor- shipped them. Behold now have I told thee, which although thou hast heard, yet it is necessary that thou conceal it ; wherefore this only will I tell, which may be declared without offence for the under- standing of the profane. When morning came and that the solemnities were finished, I came forth sanctified with twelve stoles and in a religious habit, whereof I am not forbidden, to speak, considering that many persons saw me at that time There I was commanded to stand upon a pulpit of wood which stood in the middle of the temple, before the figure and remem- brance of the goddess; my vestment was of fine linen, covered and embroidered with flowers; I had a precious cope upon my shoulders, hanging down behind me to the ground, whereon were beasts wrought of divers colours, as Indian dragons, and Hyperborean griffins, whom in form of birds the other part of the world doth engender: the priests commonly call such a habit.an Olympian stole. In : 581

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Then I mused in my mind and said unto Milo: * Of truth now it is my first experience and proof of divination, neither is it any marvel, for although this light is but a small light and made by the hands of man, yet hath it a remembrance of that great and heavenly light as of its parent, and by its divine spirit of prophecy doth both know and shew unto us, what he will do in the skies above: for I knew among us at Corinth a certain man of Assyria, who by his answers set the whole city in a turmoil, and for the gain of money would tell every man his 67 LUCIUS: APULEIUS emerendis edicit in vulgus: qui dies copulas nup- tiarum affirmet, qui fundamenta moenium perpetuet, qui negotiatori commodus, qui viatori celebris, qui navigiis opportunus ; mihi denique proventum huius peregrinationis inquirenti multa respondit et oppido mira et satis varia: nunc enim gloriam satis floridam, nunc historiam magnam et incredundam fabulam et . libros me futurum." 13 Ad haec renidens Milo * Qua” inquit « Corporis habitudine praeditus quove nomine nuncupatus hic iste Chaldaeus est?" * Procerus" inquam “Et suffuseulus, Diophanes nomine. « Ipse est," ait * Nec ullus alius: nam et hic apud nos multa multis similiter effatus non parvas stipes, immo vero mer- cedes opimas iam consecutus fortunam scaevam, an saevam verius dixerim, miser incidit. Nam die quadam cum frequentis populi circulo consaeptus coronae circumstantium fata donaret, Cerdo quidam nomine negotiator accessit eum diem commodum peregrinationi cupiens: quem cum electum desti- nasset ille, iam deposita crumena, iam profusis num- mulis, iam dinumeratis centum denarium, quos mercedem divinationis auferret, ecce quidam de nobilibus adulescentulus a tergo arrepens eum lacinia prehendit et conversum amplexus exosculatur artis- sime. At ille ubi primum consaviatus eum iuxtim se ut assidat effecit, et attonitus repentinae visionis stupore et praesentis negotii quod gerebat oblitus, 68 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK II fortune: to some he would tell the days they should marry; to others he would tell when they should build, so that their edifices should continue; to others when they should best go about their affairs ; to others when they should travel by land ; to others when they should go by sea; and to me (enquiring of my journey hither) he declared many things strange and variable. For sometimes he said that I should win glory enough, sometimes that mine should be a great history, sometimes an incredible tale and the subject of books."

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  5$ Adistum modum fusis precibus et adstructis miseris lamentationibus, rursus mihi marcentem animum in eodem illo cubili sopor cireumfusus oppressit, Necdum satis conniveram, et ecce pelago medio venerandos diis etiam vultus attollens emergit divina facies: ac dehine paulatim toto corpore pellueidum simulacrum excusso pelago ante me constitisse visum est, Eius mirandam speciem ad vos etiam referre conitar, si ta- men mihi disserendi tribuerit facultatem paupertas oris humani, vel ipsum numen eius dapsilem copiam elocutilis facundiae subministraverit. Iam primum crines uberrimi prolixique et sensim intorti per divina colla passive dispersi molliter defluebant. Corona multiformis variis floribus sublimem destrinxerat verticem, cuius media quidem super frontem plana rotunditas in modum speculi vel immo argumentum lunae candidum lumen emicabat, dextra laevaque sulcis insurgentium viperarum cohibita, spicis etiam Cerialibus desuper porrectis — Vestis! multicolor bysso tenui pertexta, nunc albo candore lucida, nune croceo flore lutea, nune roseo rubore flammida, et, quae longe longeque etiam meum confutabat obtutum, palla nigerrima splendescens atro nitore, quae cir- ! A word or more has dropped out of the text. Bursian’s vestis seems the simplest suggestion. 542 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK XI pursued me. Grant peace and rest, if it please Thee, to my adversities, for I have endured enough labour and peril. Remove from me the hateful shape of mine ass, and render me to my kindred and to mine own self Lucius: and if I have offended in any point Thy divine majesty, let me rather die if I may not live.” When I had ended this oration, discovering my plaints to the goddess, I fortuned to fall again asleep upon that same bed ; and by and by (for mine eyes were but newly closed) appeared to me from the midst of the sea a divine and venerable face, worshipped even of the gods themselves. ‘Then, by little and little, I seemed to see the whole figure of her body, bright and mounting out of the sea and standing before me : wherefore I purpose to describe her divine semblance, if the poverty of my human speech will suffer me, or her divine power give me a power of eloquence rich enough to express it. First she had a great abundance of hair, flowing and curling, dispersed and scattered about her divine neck ; on the crown of her head she bare many garlands interlaced with flowers, and in the middle of her forehead was a plain circlet in fashion of a mirror, or rather resembling the moon by the light that it gave forth ; and this was borne up on either side by serpents that seemed to rise from the furrows of the earth, and above it were blades of corn set out. Her vestment was of finest linen yielding divers colours, somewhere white and shining, somewhere yellow like the crocus flower, somewhere rosy red, somewhere flaming; and (which troubled my sight and spirit sore) her cloak was utterly dark and obscure covered with shining black, and being 543

• 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)

  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 My Life on the Road (2015)

  I’m learning and you’re learning—and more will.” —WHEN I TELL THIS story to my friend Alice Walker, I discover that she too has always wanted to see the mounds. Like so many African Americans, Alice has Native Americans in her family tree. As William Loren Katz, a favorite historian of Alice’s, once wrote, “Europeans forcefully entered the African blood stream, but Native Americans and Africans merged by choice, invitation and love.”2 Her friend Deborah Matthews, who grew up near these Ohio mounds and had a Cherokee great-grandmother, offers to show us what she learned in her childhood. In the summer of 1997, I leave my home in New York, Alice and Deborah leave their respective homes in California, and we meet at the motel where Alice and I will be staying—though with the added comfort of meals in the nearby homey kitchen of Deborah’s mother, a generous woman Alice calls by her middle name, Magnolia. On the first day, Deborah shows us the mounds in her small hometown of Newark. One is a round, slightly raised grassy area about the size of a city block, with ancient curved edges still visible under bushes and refuse. Surrounded by working-class houses with families sitting on front porches in the August heat, it is an open space with kids playing near public restrooms. A second is Moundbuilders Golf Course at the Moundbuilders Country Club, just outside town. A third is the Great Circle Earthworks, which is protected as a state park. Its thirty acres are surrounded by a wall that even after two thousand years of erosion is still fifteen feet high. At the center are four mounds in the shape of a bird, its beak pointing toward the entrance. Deborah says excavations have revealed an altar inside the bird’s body, and dowsing has identified energy lines along the top of the wall. She came here as a little girl on family outings. “If we ventured outside the wall,” she remembers, “our elders would say, ‘Just follow the circle and it will bring you back to us.’ ” In Magnolia’s kitchen, we eat homemade peach cobbler and talk about differences in the way countries treat their past. At Stonehenge in England, there are guards and tape-recorded tours. Modern Greeks picnic among the ruins and are intimate with their ancient history. Both can count themselves as descendants of past glories. Here, people arrived from another continent and, by war, disease, and persecution, they eliminated 90 percent of the residents. From 1492 to the end of the Indian Wars, an estimated fifteen million people were killed. A papal bull had instructed Christians to conquer non-Christian countries and either kill all occupants or “reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”3 From Africa to the Americas, slavery and genocide were blessed by the church, and riches from the so-called New World shored up the papacy and European monarchs.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  On visits to India, for instance, I see the phrase sex work as the only English words in the Bengali signs that mark Sonagachi in Kolkata—one of the biggest and poorest red-light districts in the world—though no one disputes the fact that many are born into or sold into its brothels. I hear the phrase accepted by university students in India when they’re addressing the inhabitants of red-light districts, despite the fact that the Self-Employed Women’s Association, a union of 1.8 million of the poorest women in India—the ones who carry bricks to construction sites or sell vegetables in the street, by far the group most representative of poor women—voted against including prostitution as a job like any other. As its founder, Ela Bhatt, said, “Work is worship, noble and dignified.” Once in Las Vegas, I meet a friend who knows the sex industry there. We start off gently by going to one of the big hotels in the afternoon and having a drink at a topless bar. As a cover for two women alone asking questions, we say we are the wives of men about to arrive for a business convention and want to find places where it’s safe for our husbands to have a little adventure after all these years on the factory line. It’s always seemed to me that if I told a bald-faced lie I would be found out in a minute, but we try it on the male manager and it works. He says we can talk to one of the topless pole dancers during her break. She seems glad to get rest and a Coke, pulls a shawl over her three strategically placed pasties, and explains that she started out as a waitress, but soon she was told she would have to strip or be fired. Now she has just been told that she will lose her job stripping unless she also agrees to go into the Champagne Room. I have to say that I believed those separate rooms were only for lap dancing at the cost of a bottle of champagne, but it turns out I’m naïve. They are also for fast sex. She knows she is being drawn into prostitution, one step at a time in the routine way, but she needs the money. Because she is glad to have someone to talk to, we learn that she had to quit high school to earn money because her mother is sick, but she really hopes to write movies one day. She wants to tell the story of her life in the real Las Vegas, not this fancy hotel, but her one-room apartment with her mother. I end by giving her my real email address, if not my name, and watch her get up on stage, suddenly transformed by a blue spotlight and a phony smile. Then we drive in our rented car to tell our same old wives’ tale at two big brothels in the county where they are completely legal.

• From Querelle (1953)

  131 I QUERELLE examined every crack in the stone wall along the ditch. At one spot the brambles grew thicker and closer to the wall. Their roots were caught in the masonry. Qu erelle looked closer. The place appealed to him. No one had followed him there. No one was behind him, nor was there anyone on top of the wall. He was all alone in the old moat. \Vith his hands thrus t deep into hi s pockets, to protect them from being scratched, he deliber ately forced his way through the shrubs. Then, for a moment, he just stood at the foot of the wall, looking at the masonry. He discovered the stone he would have to pry loose in order to create a niche in the wall: a small sailcloth bag, containing some gold, rings, broken bracelets, earrings, and some Italian gold coi ns, did not need a lot of space. He stared at the wall for a long time. He hypnotized himself. Soon he had induced a form of sleep, of self-forgetfulness, and this allowed him to become part of his surroundings. He saw himself entering the wall, its every detail clearly apparent. His body penetrated it. There were eyes in the tips of his ten fingers; even all his muscles had eyes. Soon he became the wall, and remained so for a moment; he felt every detail of its stones alive in him, the cracks like wounds, invisible blood flowing from them, with his soul and hi s silent cries; he felt a spider tickling the minut e cavern between tw o of his fin gers, a leaf gently attaching itself to one of his damp stones. Finally, becoming aware of himself again, flattened against the wall and feeling its damp, rough contours, he made an effort to leave it gain, to step out of it, but as he did so he was marked by 1t forever, by this most particular spot ne ar the ramparts, and it would remain in his bodily memory and he would be certain to find it again in five or ten years' time. As he turned to leave he remembered, without giving it much thought, that there had been another murder in Brest. In the morning paper he had seen a photograph of Gil, and he had recognized the smiling singer. Aboard Le Vengeur, Qucrelle had lost nothing of his sulky arrogance and irrit ability. Despite his duties as a steward he

• 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 How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  The Gulf War in Iraq was launched, in part, because Saddam Hussein’s half-brother thought he could read the emotions of the American negotiators and informed Saddam that the United States wasn’t serious about attacking. The subsequent war claimed the lives of 175,000 Iraqis and hundreds of coalition forces. 8 We are, I believe, in the midst of a revolution in our understanding of emotion, the mind, and the brain—a revolution that may compel us to radically rethink such central tenets of our society as our treatments for mental and physical illness, our understanding of personal relationships, our approaches to raising children, and ultimately our view of ourselves. Other scientific disciplines have seen revolutions of this kind, each one a momentous shift away from centuries of common sense. Physics moved from Isaac Newton’s intuitive ideas about time and space to Albert Einstein’s more relative ideas, and eventually to quantum mechanics. In biology, scientists carved up the natural world into fixed species, each having an ideal form, until Charles Darwin introduced the concept of natural selection. Scientific revolutions tend to emerge not from a sudden discovery but by asking better questions. How are emotions made, if they aren’t simply triggered reactions? Why do they vary so much, and why have we believed for so long that they have distinctive fingerprints? These questions in and of themselves can be delightfully interesting to ponder. But taking pleasure in the unknown is more than just a scientific indulgence. It’s part of the spirit of adventure that makes us human. In the pages that follow, I invite you to share that adventure with me. Chapters 1–3 introduce the new science of emotion: how psychology, neuroscience, and related disciplines are moving away from the search for emotion fingerprints and instead asking how emotions are constructed. Chapters 4–7 explain how, exactly, emotions are made. And chapters 8–12 explore the practical, real-world implications of this new theory of emotions on our approaches to health, emotional intelligence, child-rearing, personal relationships, systems of law, and even human nature itself. To close the book, chapter 13 reveals how the science of emotion illuminates the age-old mystery of how a human brain creates a human mind. Acknowledgments They say that it takes a village to raise a child, and this book, which my daughter took to calling her “baby brother,” was no exception. The sheer number of people who contributed their comments, criticism, science, and support over the past three and a half years is a testament to both the richness of the subject area and the wonderful friends, family, and colleagues that I am so fortunate to know. This book had a nontraditional family with more than the usual number of parents.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  In Minnesota, a young woman from Women of All Red Nations, a group born of the activism of the 1970s that forms local women’s circles and also speaks out on everything from land rights to health dangers, explained to me that Native nations were often matrilineal: that is, clan identity passed through the mother, and a husband joined a wife’s household, not vice versa. Matrilineal does not mean matriarchal, which, like patriarchal, assumes that some group has to dominate—a failure of the imagination. Rather, female and male roles were distinct but flexible and equally valued. Women were usually in charge of agriculture and men of hunting, but one was not more important than the other. Women were also quite able to decide when and whether to have children. Sometimes when Native women came up to talk to me after meetings, they listed traditional herbs used as contraceptives or abortifacients, whether or not they were still in use. They knew that in the 1970s the Indian Health Service of the U.S. government admitted that thousands of Native women had been sterilized without their informed consent. Some called it a long-term strategy for taking over Indian lands, and others said it was the same racism that had sterilized black women in the South. Both the traditionalists and the young radicals of the American Indian Movement called it “slow genocide.” It also took away women’s ultimate power. I discovered that Native languages, Cherokee and others—like Bengali and other ancient languages—didn’t have gendered pronouns like he and she. A human being was a human being. Even the concept of chief, an English word of French origin, reflected a European assumption that there had to be one male kinglike leader. In fact, caucus, a word derived from the Algonquin languages, better reflected the layers of talking circles and the goal of consensus that were at the heart of governance. Men and women might have different duties, but the point was balance. For instance, men spoke at meetings, but women appointed and informed the men who spoke. I found plenty of non-Native testimony to this different way of life. For instance, in the early days of this nation, white women teachers in Native schools wrote about feeling safer in tribal communities than in their own. Ethnographers and journalists described the rarity of rape. Abuse of women was right up there with theft and murder as one of three reasons a man could not become a sachem, or wise leader. Anything that is prohibited must have existed, but it shocked Europeans by its rarity. I found testimonies like that of General James Clinton—no friend of the Indians he hunted down—who wrote in 1779, “Bad as these savages are, they never violate the chastity of any woman, [not even] their prisoner.”11 In California, I sat at a lunch table with a professor of premonotheistic spirituality, plus several women from some of the tribes in this state that has more Native Americans than any other.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  “And you will dance at powwows,” said one with a smile. They put the flower medallion around my neck, explained it was beaded in the style of the Woodlands people, and told me it would keep me safe. “You’ll need it if you keep supporting us,” said one with a hug. Then they left as mysteriously as they had come. —I WOULD INDEED WEAR my shawl while dancing at powwows in the future. I wore the necklace whenever I had to do something I was afraid of, like appearing before an Establishment group that made me feel as if I’d just emerged from East Toledo, a trailer park, or both. I wore it so often that I had to preserve the remaining beads in a bowl. After I came home from Houston, I slept for days. Then I began to read what other women were writing about it. One account was from Billie Nave Masters, who had read the Native American resolution from the floor, the part with poetry. “If people do not take you seriously when it is a question of survival,” she wrote, “Indians accept this as another loss in a history of many losses, and just walk away. But those ways were set aside in Houston…the most intense and meaningful experience I will have in my lifetime.”16 We came from such different lives, yet we felt the same way about Houston. For Billie, it was rare to find a public event with any inclusion of Indian Country at all. For me, it was a glimpse of a way of life in which the circle, not a hierarchy, was the goal. Without this glimpse of what once was—and so could be again—I wouldn’t have traveled in the same way, seen the same country, or become the same person. [image "Starting out on another trip, New York City, 1980. © Mary Ellen Mark" file=Image00011.jpg] STARTING OUT ON ANOTHER TRIP, NEW YORK CITY, 1980. © MARY ELLEN MARK [image "III." file=Image00012.jpg] Why I Don’t DriveW hy am I writing an on-the-road book when I don’t have a driver’s license, much less own a car? I’m so used to traveling as I do that I didn’t anticipate this question. I was once as obsessed as anybody else with driving as a symbol of independence. I signed up for a driver’s ed course in my senior year of high school, though I had no car or access to one. I wasn’t looking so much to be a driver as to symbolize the difference between my mother’s life and mine. She was a passive passenger, so a driver’s license would begin my escape. In the words of so many daughters who don’t yet know that a female fate is not a personal fault, I told myself: I’m not going to be anything like my mother. When I was in college and read Virginia Woolf’s revolutionary demand for “a room of one’s own,” I silently added, and a car.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  All he knew and felt was that what was happening was what had happened nearly a year before in the hotel of the country town at the deathbed of his brother Nikolay. But that had been grief—this was joy. Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life; they were loop-holes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which there came glimpses of something sublime. And in the contemplation of this sublime something the soul was exalted to inconceivable heights of which it had before had no conception, while reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it. “Lord, have mercy on us, and succor us!” he repeated to himself incessantly, feeling, in spite of his long and, as it seemed, complete alienation from religion, that he turned to God just as trustfully and simply as he had in his childhood and first youth. All this time he had two distinct spiritual conditions. One was away from her, with the doctor, who kept smoking one fat cigarette after another and extinguishing them on the edge of a full ashtray, with Dolly, and with the old prince, where there was talk about dinner, about politics, about Marya Petrovna’s illness, and where Levin suddenly forgot for a minute what was happening, and felt as though he had waked up from sleep; the other was in her presence, at her pillow, where his heart seemed breaking and still did not break from sympathetic suffering, and he prayed to God without ceasing. And every time he was brought back from a moment of oblivion by a scream reaching him from the bedroom, he fell into the same strange terror that had come upon him the first minute. Every time he heard a shriek, he jumped up, ran to justify himself, remembered on the way that he was not to blame, and he longed to defend her, to help her. But as he looked at her, he saw again that help was impossible, and he was filled with terror and prayed: “Lord, have mercy on us, and help us!” And as time went on, both these conditions became more intense; the calmer he became away from her, completely forgetting her, the more agonizing became both her sufferings and his feeling of helplessness before them. He jumped up, would have liked to run away, but ran to her. Sometimes, when again and again she called upon him, he blamed her; but seeing her patient, smiling face, and hearing the words, “I am worrying you,” he threw the blame on God; but thinking of God, at once he fell to beseeching God to forgive him and have mercy. Chapter 15