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 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.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  All the long day of toil had left no trace in them but lightness of heart. Before the early dawn all was hushed. Nothing was to be heard but the night sounds of the frogs that never ceased in the marsh, and the horses snorting in the mist that rose over the meadow before the morning. Rousing himself, Levin got up from the haycock, and looking at the stars, he saw that the night was over. “Well, what am I going to do? How am I to set about it?” he said to himself, trying to express to himself all the thoughts and feelings he had passed through in that brief night. All the thoughts and feelings he had passed through fell into three separate trains of thought. One was the renunciation of his old life, of his utterly useless education. This renunciation gave him satisfaction, and was easy and simple. Another series of thoughts and mental images related to the life he longed to live now. The simplicity, the purity, the sanity of this life he felt clearly, and he was convinced he would find in it the content, the peace, and the dignity, of the lack of which he was so miserably conscious. But a third series of ideas turned upon the question how to effect this transition from the old life to the new. And there nothing took clear shape for him. “Have a wife? Have work and the necessity of work? Leave Pokrovskoe? Buy land? Become a member of a peasant community? Marry a peasant girl? How am I to set about it?” he asked himself again, and could not find an answer. “I haven’t slept all night, though, and I can’t think it out clearly,” he said to himself. “I’ll work it out later. One thing’s certain, this night has decided my fate. All my old dreams of home life were absurd, not the real thing,” he told himself. “It’s all ever so much simpler and better....” “How beautiful!” he thought, looking at the strange, as it were, mother-of-pearl shell of white fleecy cloudlets resting right over his head in the middle of the sky. “How exquisite it all is in this exquisite night! And when was there time for that cloud-shell to form? Just now I looked at the sky, and there was nothing in it—only two white streaks. Yes, and so imperceptibly too my views of life changed!” He went out of the meadow and walked along the highroad towards the village. A slight wind arose, and the sky looked gray and sullen. The gloomy moment had come that usually precedes the dawn, the full triumph of light over darkness.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Levin reached the club just at the right time. Members and visitors were driving up as he arrived. Levin had not been at the club for a very long while—not since he lived in Moscow, when he was leaving the university and going into society. He remembered the club, the external details of its arrangement, but he had completely forgotten the impression it had made on him in old days. But as soon as, driving into the wide semicircular court and getting out of the sledge, he mounted the steps, and the hall-porter, adorned with a crossway scarf, noiselessly opened the door to him with a bow; as soon as he saw in the porter’s room the cloaks and galoshes of members who thought it less trouble to take them off downstairs; as soon as he heard the mysterious ringing bell that preceded him as he ascended the easy, carpeted staircase, and saw the statue on the landing, and the third porter at the top doors, a familiar figure grown older, in the club livery, opening the door without haste or delay, and scanning the visitors as they passed in—Levin felt the old impression of the club come back in a rush, an impression of repose, comfort, and propriety. “Your hat, please,” the porter said to Levin, who forgot the club rule to leave his hat in the porter’s room. “Long time since you’ve been. The prince put your name down yesterday. Prince Stepan Arkadyevitch is not here yet.” The porter did not only know Levin, but also all his ties and relationships, and so immediately mentioned his intimate friends. Passing through the outer hall, divided up by screens, and the room partitioned on the right, where a man sits at the fruit buffet, Levin overtook an old man walking slowly in, and entered the dining-room full of noise and people. He walked along the tables, almost all full, and looked at the visitors. He saw people of all sorts, old and young; some he knew a little, some intimate friends. There was not a single cross or worried-looking face. All seemed to have left their cares and anxieties in the porter’s room with their hats, and were all deliberately getting ready to enjoy the material blessings of life. Sviazhsky was here and Shtcherbatsky, Nevyedovsky and the old prince, and Vronsky and Sergey Ivanovitch. “Ah! why are you late?” the prince said smiling, and giving him his hand over his own shoulder. “How’s Kitty?” he added, smoothing out the napkin he had tucked in at his waistcoat buttons. “All right; they are dining at home, all the three of them.” “Ah, ‘Aline-Nadine,’ to be sure! There’s no room with us. Go to that table, and make haste and take a seat,” said the prince, and turning away he carefully took a plate of eel soup.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  What it then wrought when he issued forth of Ravenna, and sprang the Rubicon, was of such flight that neither tongue nor pen might follow it. Towards Spain it wheeled the host, then towards Durazzo, and so smote Pharsalia that to hot Nile was felt the woe. Antandros and Simois, whence it first came, it saw once more, and saw the spot where Hector lieth couched; and then (alas for Ptolemy!) ruffled itself again; thereafter swooped in lighting upon Juba, then wheeled towards your west, where it heard the Pompeian trumpet. For what it wrought with the succeeding marshal Brutus and Cassius howl in hell; and Modena and Perugia it made doleful. Yet doth wail for it the wretched Cleopatra, who, as she fled before it, caught from the viper sudden and black death. With him it coursed unto the Red Sea shore, with him it set the world in so deep peace that Janus saw his temple barred upon him. But what the ensign that doth make me speak had done before, what it was yet to do throughout the mortal realm subject unto it, becometh small and dusky to behold, if it be looked upon in the third Cæsar’s hand with clear eye and pure heart; for the living justice that inspireth me, granted it, in his hand of whom I speak, the glory of wreaking vengeance for his wrath.8 Now find a marvel in the double thing I tell thee! Thereafter, under Titus, to wreak vengeance on the vengeance on the ancient sin it rushed.9 And when the Lombard tooth bit into Holy Church, under its wings did Charlemagne victorious succour her. Now mayst thou judge of such as I accused but now, and of their sins, which are the cause of all your ills. The one opposeth to the public standard the yellow lilies, and the other doth annex it to a faction,10 so that ’tis hard to see which most offendeth. Ply, ply the Ghibellines their arts under some other standard; for this he ever followeth ill who cleaveth justice from it; and let not that new Charles down beat it with his Guelfs, but let him fear talons that have ripped its fell from mightier lion.11 Many a time ere now have children wailed for father’s fault, and let him not suppose God will change arms for those his lilies.12 This little star adorneth her with good spirits who were active that honour and that fame might come to them; and when hereon desire, thus swerving, leaneth, needs must the rays of the true love mount upward with less life. But in the commeasuring of our rewards to our desert is part of our joy, because we see them neither less nor more. Whereby the living justice so sweeteneth our affection that it may ne’er be warped to any malice. Divers voices upon earth make sweet harmony, and so the divers seats in our life render sweet harmony amongst these wheels.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Levin still continued in the same delirious condition in which it seemed to him that he and his happiness constituted the chief and sole aim of all existence, and that he need not now think or care about anything, that everything was being done and would be done for him by others. He had not even plans and aims for the future, he left its arrangement to others, knowing that everything would be delightful. His brother Sergey Ivanovitch, Stepan Arkadyevitch, and the princess guided him in doing what he had to do. All he did was to agree entirely with everything suggested to him. His brother raised money for him, the princess advised him to leave Moscow after the wedding. Stepan Arkadyevitch advised him to go abroad. He agreed to everything. “Do what you choose, if it amuses you. I’m happy, and my happiness can be no greater and no less for anything you do,” he thought. When he told Kitty of Stepan Arkadyevitch’s advice that they should go abroad, he was much surprised that she did not agree to this, and had some definite requirements of her own in regard to their future. She knew Levin had work he loved in the country. She did not, as he saw, understand this work, she did not even care to understand it. But that did not prevent her from regarding it as a matter of great importance. And then she knew their home would be in the country, and she wanted to go, not abroad where she was not going to live, but to the place where their home would be. This definitely expressed purpose astonished Levin. But since he did not care either way, he immediately asked Stepan Arkadyevitch, as though it were his duty, to go down to the country and to arrange everything there to the best of his ability with the taste of which he had so much. “But I say,” Stepan Arkadyevitch said to him one day after he had come back from the country, where he had got everything ready for the young people’s arrival, “have you a certificate of having been at confession?” “No. But what of it?” “You can’t be married without it.” “_Aïe, aïe, aïe!_” cried Levin. “Why, I believe it’s nine years since I’ve taken the sacrament! I never thought of it.” “You’re a pretty fellow!” said Stepan Arkadyevitch laughing, “and you call me a Nihilist! But this won’t do, you know. You must take the sacrament.” “When? There are four days left now.”

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “It’s first-rate working with his excellency,” said the architect with a smile (he was respectful and composed, though with a sense of his own dignity). “It’s a very different matter to have to do with the district authorities. Where one would have to write out sheaves of papers, here I call upon the count, and in three words we settle the business.” “The American way of doing business,” said Sviazhsky, with a smile. “Yes, there they build in a rational fashion....” The conversation passed to the misuse of political power in the United States, but Anna quickly brought it round to another topic, so as to draw the steward into talk. “Have you ever seen a reaping machine?” she said, addressing Darya Alexandrovna. “We had just ridden over to look at one when we met. It’s the first time I ever saw one.” “How do they work?” asked Dolly. “Exactly like little scissors. A plank and a lot of little scissors. Like this.” Anna took a knife and fork in her beautiful white hands covered with rings, and began showing how the machine worked. It was clear that she saw nothing would be understood from her explanation; but aware that her talk was pleasant and her hands beautiful she went on explaining. “More like little penknives,” Veslovsky said playfully, never taking his eyes off her. Anna gave a just perceptible smile, but made no answer. “Isn’t it true, Karl Fedoritch, that it’s just like little scissors?” she said to the steward. “_Oh, ja,_” answered the German. _“Es ist ein ganz einfaches Ding,”_ and he began to explain the construction of the machine. “It’s a pity it doesn’t bind too. I saw one at the Vienna exhibition, which binds with a wire,” said Sviazhsky. “They would be more profitable in use.” _“Es kommt drauf an.... Der Preis vom Draht muss ausgerechnet werden.”_ And the German, roused from his taciturnity, turned to Vronsky. _“Das lässt sich ausrechnen, Erlaucht.”_ The German was just feeling in the pocket where were his pencil and the notebook he always wrote in, but recollecting that he was at a dinner, and observing Vronsky’s chilly glance, he checked himself. _“Zu compliziert, macht zu viel Klopot,”_ he concluded. _“Wünscht man Dochots, so hat man auch Klopots,”_ said Vassenka Veslovsky, mimicking the German. _“J’adore l’allemand,”_ he addressed Anna again with the same smile. _“Cessez,”_ she said with playful severity. “We expected to find you in the fields, Vassily Semyonitch,” she said to the doctor, a sickly-looking man; “have you been there?” “I went there, but I had taken flight,” the doctor answered with gloomy jocoseness. “Then you’ve taken a good constitutional?” “Splendid!” “Well, and how was the old woman? I hope it’s not typhus?” “Typhus it is not, but it’s taking a bad turn.” “What a pity!” said Anna, and having thus paid the dues of civility to her domestic circle, she turned to her own friends.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Vronsky and Anna spent the whole summer and part of the winter in the country, living in just the same condition, and still taking no steps to obtain a divorce. It was an understood thing between them that they should not go away anywhere; but both felt, the longer they lived alone, especially in the autumn, without guests in the house, that they could not stand this existence, and that they would have to alter it. Their life was apparently such that nothing better could be desired. They had the fullest abundance of everything; they had a child, and both had occupation. Anna devoted just as much care to her appearance when they had no visitors, and she did a great deal of reading, both of novels and of what serious literature was in fashion. She ordered all the books that were praised in the foreign papers and reviews she received, and read them with that concentrated attention which is only given to what is read in seclusion. Moreover, every subject that was of interest to Vronsky, she studied in books and special journals, so that he often went straight to her with questions relating to agriculture or architecture, sometimes even with questions relating to horse-breeding or sport. He was amazed at her knowledge, her memory, and at first was disposed to doubt it, to ask for confirmation of her facts; and she would find what he asked for in some book, and show it to him.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Vassenka was extremely delighted with the left horse, a horse of the Don Steppes. He kept praising him enthusiastically. “How fine it must be galloping over the steppes on a steppe horse! Eh? isn’t it?” he said. He had imagined riding on a steppe horse as something wild and romantic, and it turned out nothing of the sort. But his simplicity, particularly in conjunction with his good looks, his amiable smile, and the grace of his movements, was very attractive. Either because his nature was sympathetic to Levin, or because Levin was trying to atone for his sins of the previous evening by seeing nothing but what was good in him, anyway he liked his society. After they had driven over two miles from home, Veslovsky all at once felt for a cigar and his pocketbook, and did not know whether he had lost them or left them on the table. In the pocketbook there were thirty-seven pounds, and so the matter could not be left in uncertainty. “Do you know what, Levin, I’ll gallop home on that left trace-horse. That will be splendid. Eh?” he said, preparing to get out. “No, why should you?” answered Levin, calculating that Vassenka could hardly weigh less than seventeen stone. “I’ll send the coachman.” The coachman rode back on the trace-horse, and Levin himself drove the remaining pair. Chapter 9 “Well, now what’s our plan of campaign? Tell us all about it,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “Our plan is this. Now we’re driving to Gvozdyov. In Gvozdyov there’s a grouse marsh on this side, and beyond Gvozdyov come some magnificent snipe marshes where there are grouse too. It’s hot now, and we’ll get there—it’s fifteen miles or so—towards evening and have some evening shooting; we’ll spend the night there and go on tomorrow to the bigger moors.” “And is there nothing on the way?” “Yes; but we’ll reserve ourselves; besides it’s hot. There are two nice little places, but I doubt there being anything to shoot.” Levin would himself have liked to go into these little places, but they were near home; he could shoot them over any time, and they were only little places—there would hardly be room for three to shoot. And so, with some insincerity, he said that he doubted there being anything to shoot. When they reached a little marsh Levin would have driven by, but Stepan Arkadyevitch, with the experienced eye of a sportsman, at once detected reeds visible from the road. “Shan’t we try that?” he said, pointing to the little marsh. “Levin, do, please! how delightful!” Vassenka Veslovsky began begging, and Levin could but consent. Before they had time to stop, the dogs had flown one before the other into the marsh. “Krak! Laska!...” The dogs came back. “There won’t be room for three. I’ll stay here,” said Levin, hoping they would find nothing but peewits, who had been startled by the dogs, and turning over in their flight, were plaintively wailing over the marsh.

• From Querelle (1953)

  129 I QUERELLE Bretons are naive and the girls vain and easily taken in by a basket full of odds and ends of machine-made lace. The masonry of the old rampart walls is solid. The wall running along the city side is thick and intact save for a few stones that have been dislodged by trees growing in the interstices. On this sloping bank thick with trees, not far from the hospital or the old penitentiary, the buglers of the 28th Regiment of Colonial Infantry hold their practice every day. On the day following the murder, Querelle before going to La Feria took a walk along the old fortifications, taking care not to pass too close to the scene of his crime in case the police had posted a guard. He was looking for a suitable place to hide his jewels. In various spots around the world he had such secret caches, carefully noted down on papers which he kept in his kit bag. China, Syria, Morocco, Belgium. The notebook containi ng these directions were not unlike a "Register of Massacres" kept by the police. Shanghai, Maison de la France. Garden. Baobab tree by the gate. Beirut, Damascus. Lady at the Piano. Wall to left. Casa, Alphand Bank. Antwerp, Cathedral. Bell tower. Querelle retained very clear memories of these storehouses of his treasures. He knew the details and the surroundings with scrupulous precision, using as mnemonic all the circumstances that had led to the discovery and choice of each spot. He was able to recall every crack in the stone, each root, the insects, the smell, the weather, the triangles of shadow or light; and every time he evoked them, these minuscule scenes appeared to him in precise detail, in the light of an exact memory, all of a piece and festively illuminated. Thus, in one Bash and all together, the details of each hiding place would leap to mind. Querelle took care to remember his caches, but forced himself to forget their contents, in order to later savor the joys of surprise when he would make a world tour expressly to collect them. This i�mprecise idea of buried wealth was like a nimbus shining out

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “I’ll do it,” said Dolly, and getting up, she carefully passed the spoon over the frothing sugar, and from time to time shook off the clinging jam from the spoon by knocking it on a plate that was covered with yellow-red scum and blood-colored syrup. “How they’ll enjoy this at tea-time!” she thought of her children, remembering how she herself as a child had wondered how it was the grown-up people did not eat what was best of all—the scum of the jam. “Stiva says it’s much better to give money.” Dolly took up meanwhile the weighty subject under discussion, what presents should be made to servants. “But....” “Money’s out of the question!” the princess and Kitty exclaimed with one voice. “They appreciate a present....” “Well, last year, for instance, I bought our Matrona Semyenovna, not a poplin, but something of that sort,” said the princess. “I remember she was wearing it on your nameday.” “A charming pattern—so simple and refined,—I should have liked it myself, if she hadn’t had it. Something like Varenka’s. So pretty and inexpensive.” “Well, now I think it’s done,” said Dolly, dropping the syrup from the spoon. “When it sets as it drops, it’s ready. Cook it a little longer, Agafea Mihalovna.” “The flies!” said Agafea Mihalovna angrily. “It’ll be just the same,” she added. “Ah! how sweet it is! don’t frighten it!” Kitty said suddenly, looking at a sparrow that had settled on the step and was pecking at the center of a raspberry. “Yes, but you keep a little further from the stove,” said her mother. “_À propos de Varenka_,” said Kitty, speaking in French, as they had been doing all the while, so that Agafea Mihalovna should not understand them, “you know, mamma, I somehow expect things to be settled today. You know what I mean. How splendid it would be!” “But what a famous matchmaker she is!” said Dolly. “How carefully and cleverly she throws them together!...” “No; tell me, mamma, what do you think?” “Why, what is one to think? He” (_he_ meant Sergey Ivanovitch) “might at any time have been a match for anyone in Russia; now, of course, he’s not quite a young man, still I know ever so many girls would be glad to marry him even now.... She’s a very nice girl, but he might....” “Oh, no, mamma, do understand why, for him and for her too, nothing better could be imagined. In the first place, she’s charming!” said Kitty, crooking one of her fingers. “He thinks her very attractive, that’s certain,” assented Dolly. “Then he occupies such a position in society that he has no need to look for either fortune or position in his wife. All he needs is a good, sweet wife—a restful one.” “Well, with her he would certainly be restful,” Dolly assented.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  In spite of its _cafés chantants_ and its omnibuses, Moscow was yet a stagnant bog. Stepan Arkadyevitch always felt it. After living for some time in Moscow, especially in close relations with his family, he was conscious of a depression of spirits. After being a long time in Moscow without a change, he reached a point when he positively began to be worrying himself over his wife’s ill-humor and reproaches, over his children’s health and education, and the petty details of his official work; even the fact of being in debt worried him. But he had only to go and stay a little while in Petersburg, in the circle there in which he moved, where people lived—really lived—instead of vegetating as in Moscow, and all such ideas vanished and melted away at once, like wax before the fire. His wife?... Only that day he had been talking to Prince Tchetchensky. Prince Tchetchensky had a wife and family, grown-up pages in the corps, ... and he had another illegitimate family of children also. Though the first family was very nice too, Prince Tchetchensky felt happier in his second family; and he used to take his eldest son with him to his second family, and told Stepan Arkadyevitch that he thought it good for his son, enlarging his ideas. What would have been said to that in Moscow? His children? In Petersburg children did not prevent their parents from enjoying life. The children were brought up in schools, and there was no trace of the wild idea that prevailed in Moscow, in Lvov’s household, for instance, that all the luxuries of life were for the children, while the parents have nothing but work and anxiety. Here people understood that a man is in duty bound to live for himself, as every man of culture should live. His official duties? Official work here was not the stiff, hopeless drudgery that it was in Moscow. Here there was some interest in official life. A chance meeting, a service rendered, a happy phrase, a knack of facetious mimicry, and a man’s career might be made in a trice. So it had been with Bryantsev, whom Stepan Arkadyevitch had met the previous day, and who was one of the highest functionaries in government now. There was some interest in official work like that. The Petersburg attitude on pecuniary matters had an especially soothing effect on Stepan Arkadyevitch. Bartnyansky, who must spend at least fifty thousand to judge by the style he lived in, had made an interesting comment the day before on that subject. As they were talking before dinner, Stepan Arkadyevitch said to Bartnyansky: “You’re friendly, I fancy, with Mordvinsky; you might do me a favor: say a word to him, please, for me. There’s an appointment I should like to get—secretary of the agency....”