Contentment

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.

Page 45 of 189 · 20 per page

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  He liked the work so much that he had several times tried his hand at mowing since. He had cut the whole of the meadow in front of his house, and this year ever since the early spring he had cherished a plan for mowing for whole days together with the peasants. Ever since his brother’s arrival, he had been in doubt whether to mow or not. He was loath to leave his brother alone all day long, and he was afraid his brother would laugh at him about it. But as he drove into the meadow, and recalled the sensations of mowing, he came near deciding that he would go mowing. After the irritating discussion with his brother, he pondered over this intention again. “I must have physical exercise, or my temper’ll certainly be ruined,” he thought, and he determined he would go mowing, however awkward he might feel about it with his brother or the peasants. Towards evening Konstantin Levin went to his counting house, gave directions as to the work to be done, and sent about the village to summon the mowers for the morrow, to cut the hay in Kalinov meadow, the largest and best of his grass lands. “And send my scythe, please, to Tit, for him to set it, and bring it round tomorrow. I shall maybe do some mowing myself too,” he said, trying not to be embarrassed. The bailiff smiled and said: “Yes, sir.” At tea the same evening Levin said to his brother: “I fancy the fine weather will last. Tomorrow I shall start mowing.” “I’m so fond of that form of field labor,” said Sergey Ivanovitch. “I’m awfully fond of it. I sometimes mow myself with the peasants, and tomorrow I want to try mowing the whole day.” Sergey Ivanovitch lifted his head, and looked with interest at his brother. “How do you mean? Just like one of the peasants, all day long?” “Yes, it’s very pleasant,” said Levin. “It’s splendid as exercise, only you’ll hardly be able to stand it,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, without a shade of irony. “I’ve tried it. It’s hard work at first, but you get into it. I dare say I shall manage to keep it up....” “Really! what an idea! But tell me, how do the peasants look at it? I suppose they laugh in their sleeves at their master’s being such a queer fish?” “No, I don’t think so; but it’s so delightful, and at the same time such hard work, that one has no time to think about it.” “But how will you do about dining with them? To send you a bottle of Lafitte and roast turkey out there would be a little awkward.” “No, I’ll simply come home at the time of their noonday rest.” Next morning Konstantin Levin got up earlier than usual, but he was detained giving directions on the farm, and when he reached the mowing grass the mowers were already at their second row.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  They had just come back from Moscow, and were glad to be alone. He was sitting at the writing-table in his study, writing. She, wearing the dark lilac dress she had worn during the first days of their married life, and put on again today, a dress particularly remembered and loved by him, was sitting on the sofa, the same old-fashioned leather sofa which had always stood in the study in Levin’s father’s and grandfather’s days. She was sewing at _broderie anglaise_. He thought and wrote, never losing the happy consciousness of her presence. His work, both on the land and on the book, in which the principles of the new land system were to be laid down, had not been abandoned; but just as formerly these pursuits and ideas had seemed to him petty and trivial in comparison with the darkness that overspread all life, now they seemed as unimportant and petty in comparison with the life that lay before him suffused with the brilliant light of happiness. He went on with his work, but he felt now that the center of gravity of his attention had passed to something else, and that consequently he looked at his work quite differently and more clearly. Formerly this work had been for him an escape from life. Formerly he had felt that without this work his life would be too gloomy. Now these pursuits were necessary for him that life might not be too uniformly bright. Taking up his manuscript, reading through what he had written, he found with pleasure that the work was worth his working at. Many of his old ideas seemed to him superfluous and extreme, but many blanks became distinct to him when he reviewed the whole thing in his memory. He was writing now a new chapter on the causes of the present disastrous condition of agriculture in Russia. He maintained that the poverty of Russia arises not merely from the anomalous distribution of landed property and misdirected reforms, but that what had contributed of late years to this result was the civilization from without abnormally grafted upon Russia, especially facilities of communication, as railways, leading to centralization in towns, the development of luxury, and the consequent development of manufactures, credit and its accompaniment of speculation—all to the detriment of agriculture. It seemed to him that in a normal development of wealth in a state all these phenomena would arise only when a considerable amount of labor had been put into agriculture, when it had come under regular, or at least definite, conditions; that the wealth of a country ought to increase proportionally, and especially in such a way that other sources of wealth should not outstrip agriculture; that in harmony with a certain stage of agriculture there should be means of communication corresponding to it, and that in our unsettled condition of the land, railways, called into being by political and not by economic needs, were premature, and instead of promoting agriculture, as was expected of them, they were competing with agriculture and promoting the development of manufactures and credit, and so arresting its progress; and that just as the one-sided and premature development of one organ in an animal would hinder its general development, so in the general development of wealth in Russia, credit, facilities of communication, manufacturing activity, indubitably necessary in Europe, where they had arisen in their proper time, had with us only done harm, by throwing into the background the chief question calling for settlement—the question of the organization of agriculture.

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

  OUTRO This story was not an urgent story, not a story of trauma or joy, and so it had to find its motivation elsewhere. The gathering of material and some of the other exercises in this book were the engine that created the story. Looking back, I see that the image of the chair arrived early, in chapter 1 , but became a symbol only as I began to think about visual metaphor in chapter 7 . Further, many of the insights found in my live example in the Change Your Life chapter emerged as relevant themes in the new story. In fact many of them do, even if they aren’t explicitly asked in the story. For instance: • Have I become old and uncommunicative? • Everything decays. • We never really know each other. • Who knows what trouble is underneath our behaviors? What this shows me is that themes I am most interested in keep popping up again and again. This is probably true of you, too. The goal of a memoir, I think, is continuity. So much in this life and world seeks to fracture us, if not downright destroy us. Through the telling of our own story, we find the signs in our life that say “I have existed, and I exist, and this is how and why.” Through telling our story, we create our own meaning. Through the process of writing and drawing our story, we can understand ourselves, communicate with parts of ourselves, and sometimes find ourselves face-to-face with our own complexity. With our own largeness. Through sharing, we assert our indivuality, our expansiveness, and our humanity. It’s a gift others can share, but ultimately it’s a gift to ourselves.

• From Querelle (1953)

  She held out the small flame, to the tip of his cigarette, and she saw Querelle gazing at her. It embarrassed her a little, and without thinking she repeated the phrase she had hit upon from the start, and which had remained in her mouth, stuck to her palate : "My dear, there you are." "Thank you, Madame Lysiane." Neither Robert nor Querelle was sufficiently interested in love-making to experiment with new positions. Yet they did not Z19 I QUERELLE regard it as a mere occasion of physical satisfaction. In his games with Querelle, Nono saw signs of a violent and somewhat flashy lewdness that he recognized in himself. This sailor sprawling on the carpet who presented him his muscular and hairy buttocks, right there in the midst of all the velvet upholstery, performed an act with him that would not have looked out of place in one of those orgiastic convents where the nuns let themselves be fucked by billygoats. It was fun and games, but it sure made a man feel like a man. Looking at the black anus surrounded by brushy hair, so frankly offered up between the long, slightly tanned, heavy thighs emerging from the tangle of pulled-down pants, Norbert opened up his own trousers, raised the bottom of his shirt a little, to really look the devil of a fellow, and stood there for a few seconds and contemplated himself in this posture, comparable, in his mind, to that of a triumphant hunter or warrior. He knew he was not taking any risks, as no trace of sentimentality marred the purity of his game. No passion, no sir. "Smells rich," he would say, or "Let's slip it to you," or "What a pretty one." It was just a game, no problems. Two strapping fellows with smiles on their faces, and one of them-without any drama, no fuss-offered his asshole to the other one. "Having a good time." Then there was the added pleasure of cheating_ the girls. "If they knew what the buddies are doing, spunking around; boy would they start bitching. This sailorboy here, he'll never make a fuss about it. Getting · screwed in the ass is what he likes. Nothing wrong with that." There was also an element of compassion in Norbert's making love to Querelle. It seemed to him, not that the sailor had fallen in love with him, but that he needed th�se sessions in order to go on living. Norbert had a certain respect for himfirst of all because he had shown himself to be a shrewd dealer 2.20 I JEAN GENET when he sold that package of opium, and also because he was a strong man. He could not help admiring the sailor's young and supple musculature. Querelle felt no affection for Nona, but became aware of something else developing between them, joining him to Nona.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  For a long while Levin could not get to sleep. He heard the horses munching hay, then he heard the peasant and his elder boy getting ready for the night, and going off for the night watch with the beasts, then he heard the soldier arranging his bed on the other side of the barn, with his nephew, the younger son of their peasant host. He heard the boy in his shrill little voice telling his uncle what he thought about the dogs, who seemed to him huge and terrible creatures, and asking what the dogs were going to hunt next day, and the soldier in a husky, sleepy voice, telling him the sportsmen were going in the morning to the marsh, and would shoot with their guns; and then, to check the boy’s questions, he said, “Go to sleep, Vaska; go to sleep, or you’ll catch it,” and soon after he began snoring himself, and everything was still. He could only hear the snort of the horses, and the guttural cry of a snipe. “Is it really only negative?” he repeated to himself. “Well, what of it? It’s not my fault.” And he began thinking about the next day. “Tomorrow I’ll go out early, and I’ll make a point of keeping cool. There are lots of snipe; and there are grouse too. When I come back there’ll be the note from Kitty. Yes, Stiva may be right, I’m not manly with her, I’m tied to her apron-strings.... Well, it can’t be helped! Negative again....” Half asleep, he heard the laughter and mirthful talk of Veslovsky and Stepan Arkadyevitch. For an instant he opened his eyes: the moon was up, and in the open doorway, brightly lighted up by the moonlight, they were standing talking. Stepan Arkadyevitch was saying something of the freshness of one girl, comparing her to a freshly peeled nut, and Veslovsky with his infectious laugh was repeating some words, probably said to him by a peasant: “Ah, you do your best to get round her!” Levin, half asleep, said: “Gentlemen, tomorrow before daylight!” and fell asleep. Chapter 12 Waking up at earliest dawn, Levin tried to wake his companions. Vassenka, lying on his stomach, with one leg in a stocking thrust out, was sleeping so soundly that he could elicit no response. Oblonsky, half asleep, declined to get up so early. Even Laska, who was asleep, curled up in the hay, got up unwillingly, and lazily stretched out and straightened her hind legs one after the other. Getting on his boots and stockings, taking his gun, and carefully opening the creaking door of the barn, Levin went out into the road. The coachmen were sleeping in their carriages, the horses were dozing. Only one was lazily eating oats, dipping its nose into the manger. It was still gray out-of-doors. “Why are you up so early, my dear?” the old woman, their hostess, said, coming out of the hut and addressing him affectionately as an old friend.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  At home Kouzma told Levin that Katerina Alexandrovna was quite well, and that her sisters had not long been gone, and he handed him two letters. Levin read them at once in the hall, that he might not overlook them later. One was from Sokolov, his bailiff. Sokolov wrote that the corn could not be sold, that it was fetching only five and a half roubles, and that more than that could not be got for it. The other letter was from his sister. She scolded him for her business being still unsettled. “Well, we must sell it at five and a half if we can’t get more,” Levin decided the first question, which had always before seemed such a weighty one, with extraordinary facility on the spot. “It’s extraordinary how all one’s time is taken up here,” he thought, considering the second letter. He felt himself to blame for not having got done what his sister had asked him to do for her. “Today, again, I’ve not been to the court, but today I’ve certainly not had time.” And resolving that he would not fail to do it next day, he went up to his wife. As he went in, Levin rapidly ran through mentally the day he had spent. All the events of the day were conversations, conversations he had heard and taken part in. All the conversations were upon subjects which, if he had been alone at home, he would never have taken up, but here they were very interesting. And all these conversations were right enough, only in two places there was something not quite right. One was what he had said about the carp, the other was something not “quite the thing” in the tender sympathy he was feeling for Anna. Levin found his wife low-spirited and dull. The dinner of the three sisters had gone off very well, but then they had waited and waited for him, all of them had felt dull, the sisters had departed, and she had been left alone. “Well, and what have you been doing?” she asked him, looking straight into his eyes, which shone with rather a suspicious brightness. But that she might not prevent his telling her everything, she concealed her close scrutiny of him, and with an approving smile listened to his account of how he had spent the evening. “Well, I’m very glad I met Vronsky. I felt quite at ease and natural with him. You understand, I shall try not to see him, but I’m glad that this awkwardness is all over,” he said, and remembering that by way of trying not to see him, he had immediately gone to call on Anna, he blushed. “We talk about the peasants drinking; I don’t know which drinks most, the peasantry or our own class; the peasants do on holidays, but....”

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Going shooting, granny. Do I go this way to the marsh?” “Straight out at the back; by our threshing floor, my dear, and hemp patches; there’s a little footpath.” Stepping carefully with her sunburnt, bare feet, the old woman conducted Levin, and moved back the fence for him by the threshing floor. “Straight on and you’ll come to the marsh. Our lads drove the cattle there yesterday evening.” Laska ran eagerly forward along the little path. Levin followed her with a light, rapid step, continually looking at the sky. He hoped the sun would not be up before he reached the marsh. But the sun did not delay. The moon, which had been bright when he went out, by now shone only like a crescent of quicksilver. The pink flush of dawn, which one could not help seeing before, now had to be sought to be discerned at all. What were before undefined, vague blurs in the distant countryside could now be distinctly seen. They were sheaves of rye. The dew, not visible till the sun was up, wetted Levin’s legs and his blouse above his belt in the high growing, fragrant hemp patch, from which the pollen had already fallen out. In the transparent stillness of morning the smallest sounds were audible. A bee flew by Levin’s ear with the whizzing sound of a bullet. He looked carefully, and saw a second and a third. They were all flying from the beehives behind the hedge, and they disappeared over the hemp patch in the direction of the marsh. The path led straight to the marsh. The marsh could be recognized by the mist which rose from it, thicker in one place and thinner in another, so that the reeds and willow bushes swayed like islands in this mist. At the edge of the marsh and the road, peasant boys and men, who had been herding for the night, were lying, and in the dawn all were asleep under their coats. Not far from them were three hobbled horses. One of them clanked a chain. Laska walked beside her master, pressing a little forward and looking round. Passing the sleeping peasants and reaching the first reeds, Levin examined his pistols and let his dog off. One of the horses, a sleek, dark-brown three-year-old, seeing the dog, started away, switched its tail and snorted. The other horses too were frightened, and splashing through the water with their hobbled legs, and drawing their hoofs out of the thick mud with a squelching sound, they bounded out of the marsh. Laska stopped, looking ironically at the horses and inquiringly at Levin. Levin patted Laska, and whistled as a sign that she might begin. Laska ran joyfully and anxiously through the slush that swayed under her.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Oh, I shan’t remember all that, if you tell it to me.... But what possesses you to have to do with railways and Jews?... Take it as you will, it’s a low business.” Stepan Arkadyevitch did not say to Bartnyansky that it was a “growing thing”—Bartnyansky would not have understood that. “I want the money, I’ve nothing to live on.” “You’re living, aren’t you?” “Yes, but in debt.” “Are you, though? Heavily?” said Bartnyansky sympathetically. “Very heavily: twenty thousand.” Bartnyansky broke into good-humored laughter. “Oh, lucky fellow!” said he. “My debts mount up to a million and a half, and I’ve nothing, and still I can live, as you see!” And Stepan Arkadyevitch saw the correctness of this view not in words only but in actual fact. Zhivahov owed three hundred thousand, and hadn’t a farthing to bless himself with, and he lived, and in style too! Count Krivtsov was considered a hopeless case by everyone, and yet he kept two mistresses. Petrovsky had run through five millions, and still lived in just the same style, and was even a manager in the financial department with a salary of twenty thousand. But besides this, Petersburg had physically an agreeable effect on Stepan Arkadyevitch. It made him younger. In Moscow he sometimes found a gray hair in his head, dropped asleep after dinner, stretched, walked slowly upstairs, breathing heavily, was bored by the society of young women, and did not dance at balls. In Petersburg he always felt ten years younger. His experience in Petersburg was exactly what had been described to him on the previous day by Prince Pyotr Oblonsky, a man of sixty, who had just come back from abroad: “We don’t know the way to live here,” said Pyotr Oblonsky. “I spent the summer in Baden, and you wouldn’t believe it, I felt quite a young man. At a glimpse of a pretty woman, my thoughts.... One dines and drinks a glass of wine, and feels strong and ready for anything. I came home to Russia—had to see my wife, and, what’s more, go to my country place; and there, you’d hardly believe it, in a fortnight I’d got into a dressing gown and given up dressing for dinner. Needn’t say I had no thoughts left for pretty women. I became quite an old gentleman. There was nothing left for me but to think of my eternal salvation. I went off to Paris—I was as right as could be at once.” Stepan Arkadyevitch felt exactly the difference that Pyotr Oblonsky described. In Moscow he degenerated so much that if he had had to be there for long together, he might in good earnest have come to considering his salvation; in Petersburg he felt himself a man of the world again.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Oh, yes; I did not want to disturb you,” said Lidia Ivanovna, gazing tenderly at him; “sit here with us.” “One has only not to close one’s eyes to shut out the light,” Alexey Alexandrovitch went on. “Ah, if you knew the happiness we know, feeling His presence ever in our hearts!” said Countess Lidia Ivanovna with a rapturous smile. “But a man may feel himself unworthy sometimes to rise to that height,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, conscious of hypocrisy in admitting this religious height, but at the same time unable to bring himself to acknowledge his free-thinking views before a person who, by a single word to Pomorsky, might procure him the coveted appointment. “That is, you mean that sin keeps him back?” said Lidia Ivanovna. “But that is a false idea. There is no sin for believers, their sin has been atoned for. _Pardon,_” she added, looking at the footman, who came in again with another letter. She read it and gave a verbal answer: “Tomorrow at the Grand Duchess’s, say.” “For the believer sin is not,” she went on. “Yes, but faith without works is dead,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, recalling the phrase from the catechism, and only by his smile clinging to his independence. “There you have it—from the epistle of St. James,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch, addressing Lidia Ivanovna, with a certain reproachfulness in his tone. It was unmistakably a subject they had discussed more than once before. “What harm has been done by the false interpretation of that passage! Nothing holds men back from belief like that misinterpretation. ‘I have not works, so I cannot believe,’ though all the while that is not said. But the very opposite is said.” “Striving for God, saving the soul by fasting,” said Countess Lidia Ivanovna, with disgusted contempt, “those are the crude ideas of our monks.... Yet that is nowhere said. It is far simpler and easier,” she added, looking at Oblonsky with the same encouraging smile with which at court she encouraged youthful maids of honor, disconcerted by the new surroundings of the court. “We are saved by Christ who suffered for us. We are saved by faith,” Alexey Alexandrovitch chimed in, with a glance of approval at her words. _“Vous comprenez l’anglais?”_ asked Lidia Ivanovna, and receiving a reply in the affirmative, she got up and began looking through a shelf of books.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Why 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. But by the time I came home from India, communal travel had come to seem natural to me. I had learned that being isolated in a car was not always or even usually the most rewarding way to travel: I would miss talking to fellow travelers and looking out the window. How could I enjoy getting there when I couldn’t pay attention? I stopped making excuses for being the rare American who didn’t want to own a car. I even stopped citing environmental excuses, or explaining that Jack Kerouac didn’t drive either. As he said, he didn’t “know how to drive, just typewrite.” I did sometimes quote public opinion polls that rated New Yorkers as the happiest of Americans. Why? Because in the nondriving capital of the nation, we actually see each other in the street instead of being isolated in speeding tin cans. But the truth is, I didn’t decide on not driving. It decided on me. Now when I’m asked with condescension why I don’t drive—and I am still asked—I just say: Because adventure starts the moment I leave my door.

• From Querelle (1953)

  Jar glance she took in all its treasures, considering every detail : the bureau, the wardrobe with its door mirror, the dressing table, the two armchairs, the oval paintings in their gilded frames, the crystal vases, the chandelier. It was her oyster and the gentle gleam of mother-of-pearl, surrounding herself, who was the royal pearl : the nacre of blue satin, of well-cut glass, of curtains, of wallpaper, of lamps. And the pearl of her bosom and (while thinking of it with pleasure, she could only evoke the other end by assuming a mischievous air, a roguish smile, her little finger in her mouth ) and, well, let us say it, the double pearl of her rump. She was happy, and perfectly in line ,with the tradition of those women they used to call "ruined," "fallen," feckless, bitches in heat, ravishing dolls, sweet sluts, instant princesses, hot numbers, great lays, succulent morsels, everybody's darlings . . . Every night, in order to abandon herself fully and to exhaustion to love and sunshine, Madame Lysiane had to assure herself of her material wealth. Only then could she feel certain that on waking she would find herself in a wonderful chamber, worthy of the curves of her physique, so lavish in its aspect that it would permit her, the next day, to see love disseminated in the warmest comers of this room. Slowly, as if absent-mindedly, and as if they were a wave of liquid, she let one of her legs slide between Robert's hairy calves. At the foot of the bed, those three living feet-trying so very hard for a moment to be the thoughtful brow of this great composite body whose feet, otherwise, bore the features of separate and hostile 181 I QUE.RELLE sexes-three feet joined together, embracing to the best of their clumsy ability. Robert crushed his cigarette out on the marble top of the night table, turned toward Lysiane, and kissed her; but after the first kiss she raised both her hands to his head, held it between them, pushed it back and gazed at it : "You know, you're beautiful." He smiled. As he had nothing to say, he attempted another kiss. He did not know how to look at her, not loving her, and this awkwardness resulted in his looking very severe and manly. At the same time, the tremulous intensity of the lovelorn look in his mistress' eyes-that seemed to shatter as it struck his face-made him feel big and strong. "He can afford to," Madame Lysiane thought. By which she meant : he can afford to appear impassive, he is such a fiery one. And Robert remained impassive. The already voluptuous flames lit up in the woman's eyes went on battering against, yet caressing, the hard little stones in her lover's face. (Madame Lysiane had very beautiful eyes. ) "My darling."

• From Querelle (1953)

  182 I JEAN GENET nocturnal earth, parted her short hairs and started tickling her with the' tip of his tongue. She always wished for this moment, without particularly wanting to think about it. She wanted to remain pure, to remain a hove the women she had under her command. Altho.ugh she encouraged them to work on perver sions, she could not admit any indulgence in such on her part. She had t . o remain normal. Her big and heavy thighs were her moral arbiters. She hated the instability of immorality and licentiousness. The knowledge of having suc h beautiful thighs and buttocks gave her a feeling of strength . They were her citadel. The word we'll use here did not shock her sensibility any longer, she had r�peated it so often to herself, ever since she heard a docker make use of it: her "prose.' ' Her sense of responsibility and her self-confidence were firmly ' anchored in the depths of her "prose." She clung to Robert who turned his body toward her a few degrees and gently, simply, without helping it along with his hand, put his prick in. Madame Lysiane sighed. She smiled, offering up the velvety night full of stars that extended throughout all of her insides right up to her mouth, as well as her white and pearly skin with its blue veins. She gave herself as usual, yet she was aware-for several days, but particularly that evening-of the pain that the great similarity of the two brothers had begun to cause her. While this worry prevented her from being a happy lover, she still managed a very beautiful flourish of her ann as she swung it up and outward from under the sheet, to put out the light. , You are alone in the world, at night, in the solitude of an end- Jess esplanade. Your double statue reflects itself in each one of its halves. You are solitaries, and live in that double solitude of yours. 0 0 0

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  My driver and the waitress exchange news about who’s still working, who’s still married, who jackknifed a semi on black ice, and who was driving a rig that got blown over in a tornado. At least, I think that’s what they’re saying. Words like anteater, which is a kind of rig, and bear, which means a law enforcement officer, need translation. A bearded driver in cowboy boots sits down next to me. He orders lemon meringue pie, a side of chocolate ice cream, a pot of tea, and a can of motor oil. The waitress slides each item down the Formica counter to exactly the right spot in front of him, all with the skill of a great pool player. I compliment her. From there we get to talking about women truck drivers. She says there are a few more these days. Fleet owners have begun to hire them because they listen to their trainers and have better safety records. Still, women get ribbed and talked dirty to on CB radio. She respects them for hanging in there, and even driving eighteen-wheelers. What started as husband-and-wife teams, the pioneers of job sharing—one sleeping in the back of the cab while the other drove—has now become a crack in the glass ceiling of jobs with good pay. Over by the booths, one older white guy and two young black men are feeding coins into an old-fashioned jukebox and arguing about the relative merits of rappers versus classics like Stevie Wonder and Sam Cooke. They seem to agree that Brook Benton’s “Rainy Night in Georgia” is the truckers’ anthem, and play it three times straight. “Just wait,” my driver says. “The next place has real truckers’ music.” Back on the shining highway, he explains that truck stops aren’t chains of sameness like McDonald’s; they’re more like idiosyncratic relatives. Each one offers down-home food, talk, music, and timelessness, plus trucker necessities, from motor oil to mosquito spray, all sold over the counter. When we turn off again and head into another warm, tacky, welcoming world, the jukebox features such songs as “Girl on the Billboard,” “A Tombstone Every Mile,” and “18 Wheels and a Dozen Roses,” the last being the ode of a trucker coming home to his wife. Truckers are such constant listeners that they dictate pop music hits. Also, Nashville produces specialty truckers’ songs as a profitable category. Who knew? At our third stop, I sit next to a truck-driving wife. She started teaming up with her husband as a defensive measure. “Pimps work the truck stops,” she explains. “They drop off girls to work the cabs as they pull up, then take them to the next stop. I know because I had a niece who got caught up with drugs, and her pimp beat her to death for trying to get out. I used to hate the girls.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  I remember going from city to city, buying doughnuts and coffee for men who loaded boxes of magazines onto the trucks at dawn, hoping they would persuade newsstand dealers to at least open our boxes. Soon I was also traveling state by state to campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment, or for new women candidates who represented women’s majority needs and views, or for male candidates who were doing this, too, or to fund-raise for various parts of this movement that I cared about so much. In the 1980s, I published my first real book, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, and discovered the author’s tour as a new kind of road trip. There were actually author’s escorts—often freelancers themselves—who knew each city and schlepped authors around to book signings and media appearances. That plus two more books and tours in the 1990s made me realize that bookstores were the great community centers. Anybody could come, whether they could afford a book or not, and the spaces reserved for talks and signings invited talking circles. Since no computer can provide this companionship, the more personal the store, the more likely it is to survive. I know that some authors hate book tours—and maybe I would, too, if I had to keep repeating the plot of one novel—but I grew to love these spontaneous gatherings in shopping malls, university bookstores, and specialty bookshops that couldn’t be replaced by the big chains, all the spaces with coffee, comfortable chairs, and the presence of books that allow people to browse and discover interests they didn’t know they had. Recently when a book of mine was published in India,10 I did a tour of bookstores from Jaipur and New Delhi to Kolkata. Those, too, range from big cheerful chains to small, discussion-filled, art-filled shops. Altogether, if I had to pick one place to hang out anywhere, from New York to Cape Town and Australia to Hong Kong, a bookstore would be it. Every author also creates a world of her or his own. I watched Bette Midler signing every last book for her hundreds of fans lined up around the block, all while wearing a perky hat made to look like a piano. Oliver North of the Iran-Contra arms scandal had two guards carrying poorly concealed guns, took no questions, and signed copies of Under Fire: An American Story—The Explosive Autobiography of Oliver North. Ai-jen Poo, who won a MacArthur “genius” award for her organizing of domestic workers, turned book signings into rallies. No one left one of her events without knowing that living longer is not a crisis, it’s a blessing, that the twelve million Americans over eighty-five will double in number by 2035, that many more home care workers will be needed, and that these workers deserve the same legal rights as workers anywhere else. Altogether, I can’t imagine technology replacing bookstores completely, any more than movies about a country replace going there.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Not at all, not at all. Not once since I’ve been married have I said that things could have been better than they are....” “Truly?” she said, looking into his eyes. He had said it without thinking, simply to console her. But when he glanced at her and saw those sweet truthful eyes fastened questioningly on him, he repeated it with his whole heart. “I was positively forgetting her,” he thought. And he remembered what was before them, so soon to come. “Will it be soon? How do you feel?” he whispered, taking her two hands. “I have so often thought so, that now I don’t think about it or know anything about it.” “And you’re not frightened?” She smiled contemptuously. “Not the least little bit,” she said. “Well, if anything happens, I shall be at Katavasov’s.” “No, nothing will happen, and don’t think about it. I’m going for a walk on the boulevard with papa. We’re going to see Dolly. I shall expect you before dinner. Oh, yes! Do you know that Dolly’s position is becoming utterly impossible? She’s in debt all round; she hasn’t a penny. We were talking yesterday with mamma and Arseny” (this was her sister’s husband Lvov), “and we determined to send you with him to talk to Stiva. It’s really unbearable. One can’t speak to papa about it.... But if you and he....” “Why, what can we do?” said Levin. “You’ll be at Arseny’s, anyway; talk to him, he will tell what we decided.” “Oh, I agree to everything Arseny thinks beforehand. I’ll go and see him. By the way, if I do go to the concert, I’ll go with Natalia. Well, good-bye.” On the steps Levin was stopped by his old servant Kouzma, who had been with him before his marriage, and now looked after their household in town. “Beauty” (that was the left shaft-horse brought up from the country) “has been badly shod and is quite lame,” he said. “What does your honor wish to be done?” During the first part of their stay in Moscow, Levin had used his own horses brought up from the country. He had tried to arrange this part of their expenses in the best and cheapest way possible; but it appeared that their own horses came dearer than hired horses, and they still hired too. “Send for the veterinary, there may be a bruise.” “And for Katerina Alexandrovna?” asked Kouzma. Levin was not by now struck as he had been at first by the fact that to get from one end of Moscow to the other he had to have two powerful horses put into a heavy carriage, to take the carriage three miles through the snowy slush and to keep it standing there four hours, paying five roubles every time. Now it seemed quite natural. “Hire a pair for our carriage from the jobmaster,” said he. “Yes, sir.”

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Though I had imagined my life would be that of a journalist and observer, sure that I didn’t want to be responsible for the welfare of others as I had been for my mother, I found myself committed to colleagues and a magazine that made me lie awake at night wondering if we could make the payroll. Yet this responsibility had become a community, not a burden. I had wanted to escape my traveling childhood, yet I was traveling and making the discovery that ordinary people are smart, smart people are ordinary, decisions are best made by the people affected by them, and human beings have an almost infinite capacity for adapting to the expectations around us—which is both the good and the bad news. Finally, I could see that the love of independence and possibilities that I absorbed from my father now had a purpose. All movements need a few people who can’t be fired. When you’re dependent, it’s very hard not to be worried about the approval of whoever and whatever you’re dependent on. For me, a mix of freedom and insecurity felt like home and allowed me to become an itinerant organizer. This is not a calling you will learn about from a career counselor, or get recruited for, or even see in a movie. It’s unpredictable and often means patching together a livelihood from speaking fees, writing, foundations, odd jobs, friends, and savings. But other than becoming a rock musician or a troubadour, nothing else allows you to be a full-time part of social change. It satisfies my addiction to freedom that came from my father, and my love of community that came from seeing the price my mother paid for having none. That’s why, if I had to name the most important discovery of my life, it would be the portable community of talking circles; groups that gather with all five senses, and allow consciousness to change. Following them has given me a road that isn’t solitary like my father’s, or unsupported like my mother’s. They taught me to talk as well as listen. They also showed me that writing, which is solitary, is fine company for organizing, which is communal. It just took me a while to discover that both can happen wherever you are. II.In 1963 I was making a living as a freelance journalist, writing profiles of celebrities and style pieces—not the kind of reporting I had imagined when I came home from India. I read that Martin Luther King, Jr., was leading a March on Washington, a massive campaign for jobs, justice, new legislation, and federal protection for civil rights marchers who were being beaten, jailed, and sometimes murdered in the South, all with police collusion. However, I couldn’t get an assignment to write about it. True, I did have a long-sought assignment to write a profile of James Baldwin—who would be speaking at the march—but following him around amid multitudes seemed impossible, intrusive, or both.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  I think my classmates were mystified by my wall-to-wall cheerfulness and mistook it for some odd midwestern trait. I spent an undergraduate year in Europe, pretending to study while actually traveling, because I was sure I would never get to Europe again. After graduation I lived for a summer with my mother, who was well enough to live first in a rooming house, then with my sister, who had married and created an apartment for our mother in her home. Then I went to India on a fellowship, and spent nearly two years there wandering and writing. But at home again, I couldn’t find a job that used what I had learned there. I wandered more, worked in student politics, and finally began to make a freelance living as a writer in New York, always in the familiar land of the temporary. I found an apartment and a roommate but kept on living out of boxes and suitcases. In city streets, I often looked into lighted windows and repeated the mantra of my childhood: Everybody has a home but me. Meanwhile my mother worked part time in a gift shop near where she lived with my sister, and pursued interests that included Eastern philosophy and an Episcopalian church she loved because it allowed the homeless to sleep in its pews. She would never be able to live on her own, but when she visited me in New York, she seemed both proud and scared that I was where she had once wished to be. —I LEARNED FROM MY FATHER’S postcards that he had revisited his show business dreams by buying the contract of a young Italian pop singer. He drove the singer and his wife to gigs at bars and roadhouses, but the singer got few callbacks, made no records, and, according to my father, ate a lot, as did his wife. My father sent him back to his job at an aircraft factory and became a solitary traveler again. When he heard that semiprecious stones could be bought on the cheap in Latin America, he financed a trip by selling his car. However, when he arrived in Ecuador, he encountered an earthquake, few bargains, and a woman from Germany who wanted to marry a U.S. citizen in order to enter this country, something he didn’t confide in me until after they were divorced. He also made the sole personal comment of our lifetime together: “You know how people say you lose interest in sex after sixty? Well, it isn’t true.” When he discovered he would be financially responsible for his ex-wife in this country, he urged her to return and come back on her own—which he was lucky she was willing to do. Altogether, he ended his Latin American adventure more broke than when he began. Later, this woman who was so briefly my stepmother called to ask me where she could send my father a birthday card.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  I had a kitchen that worked, a real desk to spread papers on, and a welcoming room where visiting friends could stay, something I’d always wanted as a child when I was living with my mother in places too sad to invite anyone. Though it was a little late after fifty, I even began to save money. After months of nesting—and shopping for such things as sheets and candles with a pleasure that bordered on orgasmic—an odd thing happened: I found myself enjoying travel even more. Now that being on the road was my choice, not my fate, I lost the melancholy feeling of Everybody has a home but me. I could leave—because I could return. I could return—because I knew adventure lay just beyond an open door. Instead of either/or, I discovered a whole world of and. Long before all these divisions opened between home and the road, between a woman’s place and a man’s world, humans followed the crops, the seasons, traveling with their families, our companions, our animals, our tents. We built campfires and moved from place to place. This way of traveling is still in our cellular memory. Living things have evolved as travelers. Even migrating birds know that nature doesn’t demand a choice between nesting and flight. On journeys as long as twelve thousand miles, birds tuck their beaks under wings and rest on anything from ice floes to the decks of ships at sea. Then, once they arrive at their destination, they build a nest and select each twig with care. I wish the road had spared my father long enough to show him the possibilities of and instead of either/or. If he’d been around when I finally created a home, I might have had something to teach him, as well as time to thank him for the lessons he taught me. I wish my mother hadn’t lived an even more polarized life of either/or. Like so many women before her—and so many even now—she never had a journey of her own. With all my heart, I wish she could have followed a path she loved. I pause for a moment as I write these words. My hand, long-fingered like my father’s, rests on my desk where I do work I love, in rooms that were my first home—and probably will be my last. I’m surrounded by images of friends and chosen objects that knew someone’s touch before mine—and will know others after I am gone. I notice that my middle finger lifts and falls involuntarily, exactly as my father’s did. I recognize in myself, as I did in him, a tap of restlessness. It’s time to leave—there is so much out there to do and say and listen to. I can go on the road—because I can come home. I come home—because I’m free to leave. Each way of being is more valued in the presence of the other.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  When Levin went into the kitchen to call his coachman he saw the whole family at dinner. The women were standing up waiting on them. The young, sturdy-looking son was telling something funny with his mouth full of pudding, and they were all laughing, the woman in the clogs, who was pouring cabbage soup into a bowl, laughing most merrily of all. Very probably the good-looking face of the young woman in the clogs had a good deal to do with the impression of well-being this peasant household made upon Levin, but the impression was so strong that Levin could never get rid of it. And all the way from the old peasant’s to Sviazhsky’s he kept recalling this peasant farm as though there were something in this impression that demanded his special attention. Chapter 26 Sviazhsky was the marshal of his district. He was five years older than Levin, and had long been married. His sister-in-law, a young girl Levin liked very much, lived in his house; and Levin knew that Sviazhsky and his wife would have greatly liked to marry the girl to him. He knew this with certainty, as so-called eligible young men always know it, though he could never have brought himself to speak of it to anyone; and he knew too that, although he wanted to get married, and although by every token this very attractive girl would make an excellent wife, he could no more have married her, even if he had not been in love with Kitty Shtcherbatskaya, than he could have flown up to the sky. And this knowledge poisoned the pleasure he had hoped to find in the visit to Sviazhsky. On getting Sviazhsky’s letter with the invitation for shooting, Levin had immediately thought of this; but in spite of it he had made up his mind that Sviazhsky’s having such views for him was simply his own groundless supposition, and so he would go, all the same. Besides, at the bottom of his heart he had a desire to try himself, put himself to the test in regard to this girl. The Sviazhskys’ home-life was exceedingly pleasant, and Sviazhsky himself, the best type of man taking part in local affairs that Levin knew, was very interesting to him.

• 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.