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.

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• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  In certain lists of terms the result of comparison may be to find no-difference, or equality in place of difference. Here also intermediaries may be skipped, and mediate comparison be carried on with the general result expressed by the axiom of mediate equality, "equals of equals are equal," which is the great principle of the mathematical sciences. This too as a result of the mind's mere acuteness, and in utter independence of the order in which experiences come associated together. Symbolically, again: a = b = c = d . . , with the same consequence as regards expunging terms which we saw before. CLASSIFICATORY SERIES. Thus we have a rather intricate system of necessary and immutable ideal truths of comparison, a system applicable to terms experienced in any order of sequence or frequency, or even to terms never experienced or to be experienced, such as the mind's imaginary constructions would be. These truths of comparison result in Classifications. It is, for some unknown reason, a, great æsthetic delight for the mind to break the order of experience, and class its materials in serial orders, proceeding from step to step of difference, and to contemplate untiringly the crossings and inosculations of the series among themselves. The first steps in most of the sciences are purely classificatory. Where facts fall easily into rich and intricate series (as plants and animals and chemical compounds do), the mere sight of the series fill the mind with a satisfaction sui generis; and a world whose real materials naturally lend themselves to serial classification is pro tanto a more rational world, a world with which the mind will feel more intimate, than with a world in which they do not. By the pre-evolutionary naturalists, whose generation has hardly passed away, classifications were supposed to be ultimate insights into God's mind, filling us with adoration of his ways. The fact that Nature lets us make them was a proof of the presence of his Thought in her bosom. So far as the facts of experience can not be serially classified, therefore, so far experience fails to be rational in one of the ways, at least, which we crave. THE LOGIC-SERIES.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  "The thing you ask of me is both difficult and useless. Although I have passed all my days in this place, I have neither counted the houses nor inquired into the number of the inhabitants; and as to what one person loads on his mules and the other stows away in the bottom of his ship, that is no business of mine. But, above all, as to the previous history of this city, God only knows the amount of dirt and confusion that the infidels may have eaten before the coming of the sword of Islam. It were unprofitable for us to inquire into it. "O my soul! O my lamb! seek not after the things which concern thee not. Thou camest unto us and we welcomed thee: go in peace. "Of a truth thou hast spoken many words and there is no harm done, for the speaker is one and the listener is another. After the fashion of thy people thou hast wandered from one place to another, until thou art happy and content in none. We (praise be to God) were born here, and never desire to quit it. Is it possible, then, that the idea of a general intercourse between mankind should make any impression on our understandings? God forbid! "Listen, O my son! There is no wisdom equal unto the belief in God! He created the world, and shall we liken ourselves unto Him in seeking to penetrate into the mysteries of His creation? Shall we say, Behold this star spinneth round that star, and this other star with a tail goeth and cometh in so many years! Let it go! He from whose hand it came will guide and direct it. "But thou wilt say unto me, Stand aside, O man, for I am more learned than thou art, and have seen more things. If thou thinkest that thou art in this respect better than I am, thou art welcome. I praise God that I seek not that which I require not. Thou art learned in the things I care not for; and as for that which thou has seen, I spit upon it. Will much knowledge create thee a double belly, or wilt thou seek Paradise with thine eyes? "O my friend! if thou wilt be happy, say, There is no God but God! Do no evil, and thus wilt thou fear neither man nor death; for surely thine hour will come! "The meek in spirit (El Fakir) ''IMAUM ALI ZADI." THE GENESIS OF THE PURE SCIENCES.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  In a word, 'Son of Man, stand upon thy feet and I will speak unto thee!' is the only revelation of truth to which the solving epochs have helped the disciple. But that has been enough to satisfy the greater part of his rational need. In se and per se the universal essence has hardly been more defined by any of these formulæ than by the agnostic x; but the mere assurance that my powers, such as they are, are not irrelevant to it, but pertinent, that it speaks to them and will in some way recognize their reply, that I can be a match for it if I will, and not a footless waif, suffices to make it rational to my feeling in the sense given above. Nothing could be more absurd than to hope for the definitive triumph of any philosophy which should refuse to legitimate, and to legitimate in an emphatic manner, the more powerful of our emotional and practical tendencies. Fatalism, whose solving word in all crises of behavior is 'All striving is vain,' will never reign supreme, for the impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race. Moral creeds which speak to that impulse will be widely successful In spite of Inconsistency, vagueness, and shadowy determination of expectancy. Man needs a rule for his will, and will invent one if one be not given him." After the emotional and active needs come the intellectual and æsthetic ones. The two great æsthetic principles, of richness and of ease, dominate our intellectual as well as our sensuous life. And, ceteris paribus, no system which should not be rich, simple, and harmonious would have a chance of being chosen for belief, if rich, simple, and harmonious systems were also there. Into the latter we should unhesitatingly settle, with that welcoming attitude of the will in which belief consists. To quote from a remarkable book:

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  When two minds of a high order, interested in kindred subjects, come together, their conversation is chiefly remarkable for the summariness of its allusions and the rapidity of its transitions. Before one of them is half through a sentence the other knows his meaning and replies. Such genial play with such massive materials, such an easy hashing of light over far perspectives, such careless indifference to the dust and apparatus that ordinarily surround the subject and seem to pertain to its essence, make these conversations seem true feasts forgoes to a listener who is educated enough to follow them at all. His mental lungs breathe more deeply, in an atmosphere more broad and vast than is their wont. On the other hand, the excessive explicitness and short-windedness of an ordinary man are as wonderful as they are tedious to the man of genius. But we need not go as far as the ways of genius. Ordinary social intercourse will do. There the charm of conversation is in direct proportion to the possibility of abridgment and elision, and in inverse ratio to the need of explicit statement. With old friends a word stands for a whole story or set of opinions. With new-comers everything must be gone over in detail. Some persons have a real mania for completeness, they must express every step. They are the most intolerable of companions, and although their mental energy may in its way be great, they always strike us as weak and second-rate. In short, the essence of plebeianism, that which separates vulgarity from aristocracy, is perhaps less a defect than an excess, the constant need to animadvert upon matters which for the aristocratic temperament do not exist. To ignore, to disdain to consider, to overlook, are the essence of the 'gentleman.' Often most provokingly so; for the things ignored may be of the deepest moral consequence. But in the very midst of our indignation with the gentleman, we have a consciousness that his preposterous inertia and negativeness in the actual emergency is, somehow or other, allied with his general superiority to ourselves. It is not only that the gentleman ignores considerations relative to conduct, sordid suspicions, fears, calculations, etc., which the vulgarian is fated to entertain; it is that he is silent where the vulgarian talks ; that he gives nothing but results where the vulgarian is profuse of reasons; that he does not explain or apologize; that he uses one sentence instead of twenty; and that, in a word, there is an amount of interstitial thinking, so to call it, which it is quite impossible to get him to perform, but which is nearly all that the vulgarian mind performs at all. All this suppression of the secondary leaves the field clear,—for higher heights, should they choose to come. But even if they never came, what thoughts there were would still manifest the aristocratic type and wear the well-bred form. So great is our sense of harmony and ease in passing from the company of a philistine to that of an aristocratic temperament, that we are almost tempted to deem the falsest views and tastes as held by a man of the world, truer than the truest as held by a common person. In the latter the best ideas are choked, obstructed, and contaminated by the redundancy of their paltry associates. The negative conditions, at least, of an atmosphere and a free outlook are present in the former. I may appear to have strayed from psychological analysis into aesthetic criticism. But the principle of selection is so important that no illustrations seem redundant which may help to show how great is its scope. The upshot of what I say simply is that selection implies rejection as well as choice; and that the function of ignoring, of inattention, is as vital a factor in mental progress as the function of attention itself.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  "We find that a feeble [emotional] wave . . . is suspended inwardly by being arrested outwardly; the currents of the brain and the agitation of the centres die away if the external vent is resisted at every point. It is by such restraint that we are in the habit of suppressing pity, anger, fear, pride—on many trifling occasions. If so, it is a fact that the suppression of the actual movements has a tendency to suppress the nervous currents that incite them, so that the external quiescence is followed by the internal. The effect would not happen in any case if there were not some dependence of the cerebral wave upon the free outward vent or manifestation. . . . By the same interposition we may summon up a dormant feeling. By acting out the external manifestations, we gradually infect the nerves leading to them, and finally waken up the diffusive current by a sort of action ab extra. . . . Thus it is that we are sometimes able to assume a cheerful tone of mind by forcing a hilarious expression.[428] We have a mass of other testimony of similar effect. Burke, in his treatise on the Sublime and Beautiful, writes as follows of the physiognomist Campanella: "This man, it seems, had not only made very accurate observations on human faces, but was very expert in mimicking such as were in any way remarkable. When he had a mind to penetrate into the inclinations of those lie had to deal with, he composed his face, his gesture, and his whole body, as nearly as he could, into the exact similitude of the person he intended to examine; and then carefully observed what turn of mind he seemed to acquire by the change. So that, says my author, he was able to enter into the dispositions and thoughts of people as effectually as if he had been changed into the very men. I have often observed [Burke now goes on in his own person] that, on mimicking the looks and gestures of angry, or placid, or frightened, or daring men, I have involuntarily found my mind turned to that passion whose appearance I strove to imitate; nay, I am convinced it is hard to avoid it, though one strove to separate the passion from its corresponding gestures."[429] Against this it is to be said that many actors who perfectly mimic the outward appearances of emotion in face, gait, and voice declare that they feel no emotion at all. Others, however, according to Mr. Wm. Archer, who has made a very instructive statistical inquiry among them, say that the emotion of the part masters them whenever they play it well.[430] Thus:

• From Escape (2007)

  As my mother’s depression worsened, she spent more of the day in bed. She neglected the house until the day before my father came home and then went into a cleaning frenzy. My father wanted his house spotless. One night he came home and we were all in our pajamas, clean and ready for bed. The house was immaculate. But my father walked over to the refrigerator and ran his finger across the top. It was dusty. He lit into my mother and said she had to do a better job of cleaning. My mother began screaming at my father to go to hell. She’d accuse him of not caring how hard she worked to keep up his home and care for his children. If he didn’t like the way she cleaned, then maybe he should take over the job and raise his children by himself. Our home became a battleground, at least when our father came home. He and Mom would be going after each other within five or ten minutes after he walked through the door. The house was tense, the atmosphere ugly. But the spankings stopped when our father was home, which was a relief. For the most part, Mom avoided hitting us then, although she made it known that our behavior was expected to be perfect. But there were days when Mom was happy and didn’t want to die. She loved to play games with us when she was in a good mood. One of our favorites was the Three Little Pigs. Linda, Annette, and I were the pigs and Mom was the big bad wolf. We’d build our playhouses of sticks and mud and she’d come and blow them all down until we made the brick house, which was stronger than she was. We also spent happy hours listening to Mama read fairy tales. She rarely read us religious scripture and, to our delight, much preferred the fantasy world of fairy tales. Mother was devout, but she had a frisky side. One time when my father was away she and a friend went to town and came home with a Christmas tree. Imagine! This was completely forbidden in the FLDS. We decorated it with lights and homemade ornaments. I knew it was wrong to participate in such a worldly tradition, but I was having too much fun to care. Mother beamed. She loved our Christmas tree. We popped popcorn and made garlands for the tree. Before we went to bed that night we hung up our stockings and Mama told us there would be a prize in each of them the next morning. Nothing like this had happened in our lives before. The thought of presents made us wild with anticipation.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Not only did many Yellow cabs bypass black people on the street—or say, “Sorry, I don’t go to Brooklyn”—but black women close to giving birth couldn’t count on a taxi to take them to the hospital, and had to find a car service in advance. Then an African American man named Calvin Williams returned to Brooklyn after serving in the Korean War and invented Black Pearl. It became so popular that voters elected him to the New York State Assembly, where he served two terms. Within Black Pearl, every driver has a story. After getting the same one on a couple of trips, I asked why he had the only venetian blinds I’d ever seen in a car. “Around here,” he says, gesturing to the streets of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, “money is easier to come by than privacy. You can borrow or steal money, but you can’t find a private place. When I was coming up with seven brothers and sisters, I met my girlfriend under the stairs, dodging rats and winos, or I froze my ass off on street corners with my buddies. Even when I went to the Brooklyn Fox to see Little Stevie Wonder—he was a little kid then—security guards would shine flashlights up and down the aisles. All I wanted was to be cool in summer, warm in winter, and listen to music—to have just a little private space for happiness. “So when I retired from my city job and started driving for Black Pearl, I thought, This is it! I’m a rescuer! I’m a Black Knight in Silver Armor! I always make sure nobody has guns, drugs, or alcohol in my car. Then I turn up the music, turn down the blinds, and drive around for as long as my customers want.” Among his regulars were girls from a local Catholic school who rode around with the boyfriends they weren’t supposed to have, a Black Muslim father of five whose wife wouldn’t let him listen to sinful music, two male firefighters who rode home together after work in the most famously homophobic agency in the city, a single mother who needed time away from her job and kids, and an elderly unmarried couple who held hands where their children and grandchildren couldn’t see them. “Only food and water are more important than music and privacy,” he says seriously. “I’m a rescuer.” III.Taxi drivers are entrepreneurs of the road. Like my father, they drive and dream. But flight attendants experience work as a group. When I first began flying a lot in the early 1970s, planes meant only mindlessness, escape from phones, maybe a movie, and most of all, sleep. Even if I took work on board, I nodded off as soon as we were aloft. Like a flying version of Pavlov’s dog, just being carried through space made me feel I needed to make no further effort.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Sweat collected against his forehead, and he wiped at it. The skin at the lower part of his spine was hot and dry. His eyes were stinging. Near the back door, Simon had put three red clay pots on a low bench. The bench had been a pew at Saint Anne Lutheran Church before the church had burned to the ground. Simon used to go out to the blackened ruins to sit in what was left of its pews and gaze out into the valley of pine and cedar and oak trees, the wind on his face and the scent of soot rising all around him. When he was out there, he told Hartjes as they twisted the pews from the foundations into which they had been bolted, searching for one that wouldn’t crumble to ash, when he was out there, it seemed that the whole world went away, all his problems, all his needs—hunger, pain, money, viral load, all of it. Hartjes could understand that. He could understand how a person could get to needing that, stillness in the world. Simon and Hartjes had rescued the pews and scraped them down to their bones, and then they’d polished, coated, and lacquered them until they were smooth with a rich stain. All that work to use them for indoor plants: large, leafy green things with heads like that of a Saint Bernard or a Newfoundland, lolling in the winter light. • • • Simon and Hartjes ate their stew on the porch in the cold. Simon turned his portable space heater on its back under the slats of the bench, and the two of them sat with their legs tucked under them, though for Hartjes it was a struggle because he was thick through the haunch and some fifteen or twenty pounds heavier than Simon. Night had fallen by then, and the world was a smooth black sheet. Across the road and across the fields, they could make out the yellow-orange light in a house as narrow as Simon’s. The yard was patchy with snow and ice. The goats had bedded down in their pen in the back, though sometimes their calls lifted up and swept overhead like the softening static at the start of a radio station.

• From Escape (2007)

  On the way back to the condo we picked up some coconuts that had fallen from the trees. When we got inside, we sliced them open and put the fresh coconut on plates. Merril thought it was delicious—so delicious, in fact, that he decided to send dozens to his friends as gifts. Instead of spending time relaxing or sight-seeing on Kauai, Merril had us pick coconuts and ship them via UPS to his friends. Tammy, Cathleen, and I spent the rest of the afternoon at UPS in our own mini-shipping department. Once we were in a work environment with Merril giving us orders, the tension among us subsided. Work was something we understood. This was the least contentious moment of the entire trip. After sending the coconuts, we had dinner at a steak restaurant that sat high up over the ocean on a big rock. The roaring surf echoed around us. The waves on Kauai seemed more massive than they had on the other islands. Every time a wave crashed on the rocks I could hear the spray splashing. I loved the steadying rhythm of the waves. It was powerful but not at all frightening. I felt small, safe, and protected, which was a rare feeling for me and a distraction from the tawdry soap opera that was being played out all around me. Tammy was infuriated that Merril was planning to sleep with Cathleen that night. She screeched again about the unfairness of it all, but Merril tuned her out. I refused to share a room with her and slept on the sofa in the condo. After three hellish days together, having a sofa all to myself felt like a prize. Cathleen was in a happy mood the next morning, which helped the overall atmosphere. My morning sickness abated and I felt better than I had since we’d arrived. We spent the day sight-seeing on Kauai, traveling to the highest point, where we had a magnificent view of the entire island. A lighthouse there seemed to be a magnet for thousands of birds that would sweep in and off the cliff on waves. When we weren’t high above the Pacific we ambled along beachside roads that were shaded by palm trees. Tammy knew it was her turn to sleep with Merril that night, so she was in a reasonable mood for most of the day and not on the attack. We capped off our day of sight-seeing with dinner at one of the island’s most famous restaurants. When I ordered shrimp, Merril threw a fit.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  As I lay on the pallet by her bed, I felt the most delicious exhaustion. It seemed even the air stirring around me gave me pleasure. I felt it against my skin, as if my nakedness were being stroked. And I fell asleep content that I had served her properly. "But my next great test of strength came one afternoon when she, very cross with me for my ineptitude at brushing her hair, sent me to be the plaything of the Princesses. "I could scarcely believe my ears. She herself would not even deign to witness it. She sent for Lord Gregory, and told him I was to be taken to the Special Punishment Hall and there given to the assembled Princesses. For one hour they could do with me what they liked. And then I was to be bound in the garden and have my thighs whipped with a leather thong, and left there until morning. "This was my first great separation from the Queen. And I could not imagine myself, naked, helpless, and fit only for punishment, given over to the Princesses. I had dropped the Queen's hairbrush twice. I had spilled some wine earlier. All of this had seemed beyond my control and my finest efforts. "When Lord Gregory gave me several hard spanks I was full of shame and fear. And as we neared the Special Punishments Hall, I felt I could not move by my own power. "He had placed a leather collar around my neck. He pulled me along, spanking me only lightly as he said the Princesses must have the full enjoyment of me. "Before we entered the room, he put a sign about my neck by means of a small ribbon. He showed it to me first, and I shuddered to see it announced me as clumsy, willful and bad, and in need of correction. "He then exchanged my leather collar for another which had numerous small metal rings attached to it, each ring just large enough for a finger to be hooked in it. That way the Princesses could pull me this way or that, he said, and woe to me if I showed the slightest resistance. "Cuffs with the same rings were put on my ankles and my wrists. I felt myself scarcely able to move as I was pulled towards the door. "I did not know how to assess my emotions. As the door opened, I saw them all, some ten Princesses, a naked harem lounging about under the watchful eye of a groom, all girls being rewarded for good behavior by this hour of leisure. I learned later that if anyone is to be severely punished he or she is given to them, but on that day they had not expected anyone.

• From Querelle (1953)

  The door guaranteed that. The spikes were ferocious guardians, even against the very air. The lady of La Feria passed her life in a leisurely time, in a medieval castle, and she saw it often in her mind's eye. She was happy. Only the most subtle elements of the life outside found their way to her, to anoint her with an exquisite ointment. She was noble, haughty, and superb. Kept away from the sun and the stars, from games and dreams, but nourished by her very own sun, her own stars, her own games and dreams, shod in mules with high Louis Quinze heels, she moved slowly among her girls without so much as touching them, she climbed the stairs, walked along corridors hung with gilt leather, through astounding halls and salons we shall attempt to describe, sparkling with lights and mirrors, upholstered, decorated with artificial flowers in cut-glass vases and with erotic etchings on the walls. Moulded by time, she was beautiful. Robert had now been her lover for six months. "You pay cash?" "I told you so already." Querelle was petrified by Mario's stare. That stare and his general demeanor expressed more than indifference : they were icy. In order to appear to ignore Mario, Querelle deliberately looked only at the brothelkeeper, looked him straight in the eye. His own immobility was making him feel awkward too. He regained a little assurance when he had shifted his weight from one foot to the other; a modicum of suppleness returned to his 28 I JEAN GENET body, just as he was thinking: "Me, I'm only a sailor. My pay's all I've got. So I've got to hustle. Nothing wrong with that. It's good shit I'm talking about. He's got nothing on me. And even if that one is a cop, I don't give a shit." But he felt that he wasn't able to make a dent in the proprietor's imperturbability: he showed hardly any interest in the merchandise offered, and none at all in the person offering it. The lack of movement and the almost total silence among these three characters was beginning to weigh on each one of them. Querelle went on, in his:. mind : "I haven't told him that I'm Bob's brother. All the same,' he wouldn't dare put the finger on me." At the same time he was appreciating the proprietor's tremendous build and the good looks of the cop. Until now, he had never experienced any real rivalry in the male world, and if he was not all that impressed by what he was confronted with in these two men-or unaware of his feelings in tef11!S of such phraseology-he was at least suffering, for the first time, from the indifference of men toward him. So he said : "And there's no heat on, is there?"

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Marta worked in a cubicle at the plant. The walls were thin and covered in a kind of coarse linen fabric. She had tacked up a picture of her parents and a couple of pictures of herself from summer camp when she was a girl, when she’d had thick glasses and a shaggy bobbed haircut. One of the pictures showed Marta as a smiling seven-year-old standing at the edge of a dock, the water a deep green, the sky over the bursting hills a smooth, tranquil blue. It gave her something pretty to look at when her eyes grew tired and the columns of figures and sums swam together. Her desk was tidy except for the in-box, where people from other departments dropped their own reports, and Marta had to organize them and figure out what she was supposed to do with them. She’d been working at the plant for about five years, and the work had adhered to her like the accumulation of calcium in a pipe, until she was no longer sure if she’d always been suited for the job or had simply become suited through prolonged exposure. In the plant, there was always the sound of dripping water and the dull, distant roar of surf. The hallways had flickering green lights, and when she walked from tunnel to tunnel, climbing up the ladders to inspect the tanks and take down their measurements, it was like moving through an emerald dream. Not many people worked in the plant, not on Marta’s shift—maybe thirty in all. There were of course the men who worked underground, who did the real work and sometimes were burned by acid or lye, who came up the elevators screaming because they’d gotten their hand caught in a hydraulic press. The men were the thick, blunted sort whose lives had deposited them in the plant the way a sluggish stream accumulates debris. They wore gray coveralls and smelled like cigarettes and chlorine and something else, something sulfurous.

• From Escape (2007)

  Rosie’s daughter was born on her birthday, so she named her Rose. We called her Little Rosie. When she was a few months old, Rosie took a job nearby in Cedar City, working in one of her father’s nursing homes. She would take one of us along to babysit, and more often than not it was me. I liked going to work with Rosie. My mother and I had never really gotten along well and it was always a relief to be out of her domain. Rosie was able to earn more money than almost any woman in the community because she had a nursing degree. I saw what an opportunity that was for her, especially in contrast to the rest of the FLDS women, who usually could hope for nothing better than a job in the community sewing plant. I was shaken by what I saw at the sewing center when our class visited. There were rows and rows and rows of women hunched over machines with endless piles of fabric in front of them. They were making uniforms that were sold to large companies. They looked and worked like slaves on big industrial sewing machines that sewed fast. None of them made much money, and I knew that many of them had more than ten children at home. They made the minimum wage, which was about three dollars an hour, and on top of that were paid for each piece. Any woman who failed to produce enough got fired. The work was deadening, the pressure tremendous, and what they earned was not even enough to buy groceries for their big families, let alone anything else. I made a vow to myself that I was never going to end up behind one of those sewing machines. No matter what it took, I was going to get an education like Rosie’s. I became determined to go to college. The time I spent with Rosie protected me from my mother’s instability. Rosie treated me well and appreciated how much I helped her with her baby. I loved my mother but always had the conflicting feelings of fearing her anger and abuse. Rosie was different. Her stability enabled me to grow. Rosie was deeply religious and believed in plural marriage. She felt that sharing my father with my mother was her only way to God.

• From Escape (2007)

  Merril’s wife Ruth was with them. It seemed odd that Merril would take Ruth, too. She and Barbara were sisters, but they had a tremendous rivalry. I was suspicious but didn’t ask questions. It was a relief to see their van pull out of the driveway and know that I had the weekend to myself—or, I should say, to myself and about fourteen children. Merril had thirty-three, but the rest were older or away for the weekend. I was in charge of everything, but that was still relaxing for me because there was no tension—at least not in the form of confrontations with adults. I knew Merril’s daughters would take advantage of his absence to ditch all their chores and hang out with boys on the volleyball court. They knew I wouldn’t report them. Faunita, the other wife who was left behind, was a total recluse. She had ten children, but five were grown and gone. She slept all day and stayed up all night watching television or some of the hundreds of movies she’d recorded on video. She loved Shirley Temple and John Wayne movies. Merril had long since lost interest in her. He never treated her like a wife and they never had sex anymore. She talked about that openly and to everybody. I spent much of the day doing laundry, which was slow going because we had an old-fashioned industrial-size washing machine. It didn’t rinse the clothes. I had to take each load out, rinse them, and spin them in a spinner. Then I hung them on the clothesline to dry. This was very labor-intensive. We had an automatic washer and dryer, but with the volume of clothes that had to be cleaned it was too time-consuming to do dozens of loads of laundry. Once the children’s laundry was on the line, I vacuumed the house, mopped the floors, and dusted. The toddlers tagged along behind me. I loved to cook and was looking forward to making a good dinner and baking cookies for the kids. During the week, when Merril’s daughters cooked, we’d eat only what could be thrown together in a few minutes—big bowls of pasta, or rice and raisins with cinnamon sugar and milk. We cooked with little meat. It was mostly used for flavoring sauces or gravies. Nutrition was abysmal. After dinner, I told the children we’d pop popcorn. I looked forward to getting to bed early. The phone rang just before I started dinner. Merril was tense and abrupt. I was startled because he never talked to me this way. He told me that as soon as he arrived in the city, the new prophet, Rulon Jeffs, sent him to pick up one of the former prophet’s wives, Cathleen, and marry her. Rulon Jeffs had succeeded the prophet Leroy Johnson, whom we called “Uncle Roy.” He’d died three weeks before, on November 25, 1986. He was beloved within the FLDS community, which he had led since 1954.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  In the winter, they made latkes and borscht. They had grown vegetables in a little plot behind the house and pickled them. They opened jars of okra and peas and beans. They made their own kraut. Their house smelled like vinegar that winter, but it was the healthiest Marta had felt in a long time, maybe since she’d taken that picture at camp. Her body changed, but not in the way she expected it to. She didn’t get skinny or tight all over. She didn’t feel like a strung drum. But little by little, the packets of fat under her arms shrank. It was easier for her to run. She didn’t look all that different, she didn’t think, but when she caught sight of herself in the mirror after the shower, she did notice that there was warmth in her cheeks and the whites of her eyes were clear. The world had a vivid intensity to it, like up north, and she felt like she was moving through pure color. After Sigrid passed her comprehensive exams, they started to sleep in on Saturday and Sunday mornings. They became lazy and easy with one another. They made love at weird times of the day, sometimes when the sun was up, which felt especially daring to Marta. It was a strange thing to her, giving of her body so easily, sharing it with another person. It had been like adjusting to Sigrid’s vegetarianism—the way Sigrid would put a hand on her back or on her shoulder, not because she wanted anything but just because she was there. It had been the reason she had not wanted to share a house with Sigrid: All that touching. All that seeing. All that being seen. But it had become the best part of her life, she thought. When they had been together one year, they celebrated by going to London. Ostensibly it was a trip for Sigrid’s research, but Marta found a way to turn it into a trip for the two of them. She had promised to leave Sigrid her own time and her own space to be with her thoughts, to commune with history’s dead women. Marta just wanted to be with her there, to walk the streets of London, holding Sigrid’s hand, carrying her bag if she needed it, offering her whatever support she could. It brought her happiness. The day after they returned, Sigrid took from her bag a small deck of playing cards. Each card was decorated with a different woman from a different historical period. Sigrid handed Marta a queen of clubs. On it, a pretty, blond woman with close-set eyes and a wry, gentle smile looked back at her. “Anne of Cleves,” Sigrid said. “We meet at last,” Marta said, sliding the card back into the deck and shuffling. As she shuffled, Marta watched the faces whip by, a parade of anonymous smiling women, all looking back at her as if across the fanning waves of time. APARTMENT

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  “No,” Hartjes said. He worked construction down on the river, where they were putting up a new footbridge. His own job involved the careful freighting of materials onto the platform where the crane rested on the water. There were times when he thought he’d get sick from the motion of the barge, the constant shifting underfoot. There were times when his hands hurt from lifting and pushing and turning, tightening the straps until they wouldn’t give, tightening them until it seemed impossible that anyone would ever be able to set them loose again. Days when his back ached and his stomach hurt and his hair was peppered with grit, when his eyes burned, and his nose burned from the stench of oil and of the river, which was dying a slow, choked death via a series of minor diversions. But then, on bright winter days, he’d look up and see the geese tracking across the sky, moving up there free as air, and he’d think that there was something beautiful left in the world. And he could go on like that, as long as there was something beautiful to look at. He sweated through his coveralls, through his flannel, into the white mud that caked his gloves and his sleeves. And he thought about those geese, thought about the ice breaking up and the slow green-black water that moved beneath it. “Flowing and flown,” he said under his breath. “You went to Cornell,” Simon said. “You went to Cornell to work construction on a river.” “I went to Cornell to get out of Alabama,” he said with no irony, with no regret. “All that trouble, for nothing,” Simon said. “I like it,” Hartjes said. “It’s only nothing if you expect something better. I never wanted anything.” “Except to get out.” “And get out I did,” Hartjes said. He nudged the knob of the heater, and more dry heat radiated under them. “Do you know those people?” The light of the house across the fields had deepened into a marigold color. Simon squinted. “Big fields make for good neighbors,” Simon said, biting at his thumbnail. “There were houses like this in my town,” Hartjes said. “Little specks out on the dirt roads.” “Rural America. The heartland.” “Dixie,” Hartjes said with a low growl. “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,” Simon sang. “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott,” Hartjes said, and Simon’s chest rattled. “I, a Catholic, go to the trouble of learning your Protestant hymns and this is what I get.” “Protestant hymns. Okay, Martin Luther.” “Was that racial?” Hartjes asked, extending the joke perhaps a note too far, but Simon doubled over and howled between his knees. “Faithful are the wounds of a friend, but deceitful are the kisses of an enemy.”

• 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 Querelle (1953)

  180 I JEAN GENET Beauty can be an obstacle more fearsome than barbed wire: it can be pointed and barbed, it can kill at a distance, like a burst of gunfire. The opulence of Madame Lysiane's flesh was the exact form of her innate generosity. Her skin was white and soft. As soon as she had stretched out (Madame Lysiane hated the expression "go to bed," and respecting her sense of pro priety we won't use it when discussing her, but hope to say a word or two about the "delicacy" of forbidden words), stretched out, she looked around the room. With a slow, circu· 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 pear l 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, every body's darlings ... Ev e ry 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

• From Querelle (1953)

  67 I QUERELLE city by a different gate from the one he had emerged from with the other sailor. Something seemed to be missing from his side. "It's dull, with no one to talk to." He smiled, but very faintly. He was leaving, back there in the fog, on the grass, a certain object, a small heap of calm and night emanating from an invisible and gentle dawn, an object, sacred or damned, waiting at the foot of the outer walls for permission to enter the city, after expiation, after the proba tionary period imposed for purification and humility. The corpse would have that boring face he knew, all its lines smoothed away. With long, supple strides, that same free and easy, slightly rolling gait that made people say "There's a_guy steps like an hombre," Querelle, his soul at peace, took the road leading to La Feria. That episode we wanted to present in slow motion. Our aim was not to horrify the reader, but to give the act of murder something of the quality of an animated cartoon-which in any case is exactly the art form we would most like to be able to use, to show the deformations of our protagonist's musculature and soul. In any case, and in order not to annoy the reader too much-and trusting him to complete, with his very own mal aise, the contradictory and twisted windings of our own vision of the murder-there is a great deal we have left out. It would be easy to have the murderer experience a vision of his brother. Or to have him killed by his brother. Or to make him kill or condemn his brother. There are a great number of themes on which one might embr ? ider some revolting tapestry like that. Nor do we want to go on about the secret and obscene desires inhabiting the one going to his death. Vic or Querelle, take your pick. We abandon the reader to this confusion of his innards. But let us consider this : after committing his first murder Querelle experienced a feeling of being dead, that is to say, of existing somewhere in the depths-more exactly, at the

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Sophie made a condescending sound in the back of her throat, moaning in exaggerated sympathy. Charles stuck his bottom lip out. “Sure you didn’t,” Sophie said, no longer mocking him. Charles stopped pouting, too, and there was a taut silence between them. “I’d leave it alone if I were you,” he said. “Get real.” “Sophie,” Charles barked. His eyes flashed, and his shoulders opened slightly. Out in the yard, the people had begun to leap and clap and shout. The host stood up, leaned out over the banister, and hollered. The snow was falling fully then. And everyone was howling. Charles put his head back and belted out a forceful, vibrating call. Lionel watched the muscles in his neck bulge. His skin reddened. He was the last to stop. Lionel felt soaked through with his sound. He could still hear it when they all went back inside, out of the cold. • • • Lionel said good-bye to everyone in the front hall. The host embraced him for a long time, slid his hands up Lionel’s shirt, and said, “I want you to stay.” “Next time,” Lionel whispered back. He gave Sophie a short squeeze. They exchanged numbers and promised to text or call for lunch in the next few days. Charles gripped his hand very hard and pulled him in close. “See you around, Lionel,” he said. “Good-bye, Charlie,” Lionel whispered into Charles’s ear, surprising them both. Pleasantly buzzed, Lionel decided to walk home. The last bus was long gone, anyway, and the distance wasn’t terrible. He’d had only a couple of puffs on the joint and the one glass of wine. He floated on a warm cloud. Lionel lived on Hancock, so he cut a path through Orton Park. The playground looked a little sad and eerie. The swings moved in the wind. The gazebo had white-blue lights going, but snow had piled up to the benches. The neighborhoods and their mismatched houses. Queen Anne and modernist and Dutch colonial, all mixed together, side by side. During his first year in graduate school he had taken a walk with a friend through one of the East Side neighborhoods, and the friend, from Denmark, kept saying, You have turrets on one end and Frank Lloyd Wright on the other. It makes no sense. No flow. At night, the houses made a kind of sense. As if they were embedded in a shared context.