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 Art of Seduction (2001)

  woman to make Ignazia jealous). protesters of the 1960s who wanted to change all The Ideal Lover is rare in the modern world, for the role takes effort. the ills of society, the self- You will have to focus intensely on the other person, fathom what she is absorbed "me" people missing, what he is disappointed by. People will often reveal this in subtle sought to improve their bodies and to "get in ways: through gesture, tone of voice, a look in the eye. By seeming to be touch" with their own what they lack, you will fit their ideal. feelings. They cared To create this effect requires patience and attention to detail. Most passionately about their appearance, health, life-people are so wrapped up in their own desires, so impatient, they are inca- style, and bank accounts. pable of the Ideal Lover role. Let that be a source of infinite opportunity. Andy catered to their self-Be an oasis in the desert of the self-absorbed; few can resist the temptation centeredness and inflated of following a person who seems so attuned to their desires, to bringing to pride by offering his services as a portraitist. By life their fantasies. And as with Casanova, your reputation as one who the end of the decade, he gives such pleasure will precede you and make your seductions that much would be internationally recognized as one of the leading portraitists of his era. . . . • Warhol offered The cultivation of the pleasures of the senses was ever my his clients an irresistible principal aim in life. Knowing that I was personally calcu-product: a stylish and lated to please the fair sex, I always strove to make myself flattering portrait by a famous artist who was agreeable to it. himself a certified celebrity. —CASANOVA Conferring an alluring star presence upon even the most celebrated of faces, he transformed his subjects The Beauty Ideal into glamorous apparitions, presenting their faces as he thought they wanted to be In 1730, when Jeanne Poisson was a mere nine years old, a fortune-teller seen and remembered. By predicted that one day she would be the mistress of Louis XV. The pre- filtering his sitters' good diction was quite ridiculous, since Jeanne came from the middle class, and features through his silkscreens and it was a tradition stretching back for centuries that the king's mistress be exaggerating their vivacity, chosen from among the nobility. To make matters worse, Jeanne's father he enabled them to gain was a notorious rake, and her mother had been a courtesan. entree to a more mythic and rarefied level of Fortunately for Jeanne, one of her mother's lovers was a man of great existence. The possession wealth who took a liking to the pretty girl and paid for her education. of great wealth and power Jeanne learned to sing, to play the clavichord, to ride with uncommon skill, might do for everyday life,

• 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 Querelle (1953)

  favorite gesture was to keep turning his golden signet ring round his middle finger; the signet was so large that its edges caused a slight irritation of the adjoining fingers. The tic was particularly evident when Mario was sitting behind his desk and grilling someone caught pilfering at the docks or in the warehouses. He shared an office with a colleague, but they both had desks of their own. Mario was quite an elegant man ( there was no question about it, he had excellent taste) . He liked to appear well-dressed. We might further note the good, plain cut of his clothes, the austere manner in which he wore them, the predominantly impassive expression_ on his face, finally, the sobriety and assurance of his gestures. The very fact that he had a desk in an office lent Mario, in the eyes of the delinquents he interrogated, the air of someone of indisputable intellectual superiority. Som��times he got up, leaving the desk without, it seemed, a second thought, the way one may part from something one knows to be in good hands. That was mostly when he went to consult one of his numerous files. This added further to his prestige : it showed him as the possessor of the secrets of several thousand people. When he went outside, his_ face instantly turned . into a mask. Under no circumstances must anyone suspect, in the cafes or elsewhere, that they were plying a policeman with confidences. But behind that mask-as there always has to be a face behind such a thing, to support it Mario composed his features into a policeman's face. For a number of hours, every day, he had to be the one who uncovers the weaknesses of mortal men, their sins, the slightest clues whereby they then could be led, \Vith maximum expediency, and even if they had seemed beyond ail suspicion, to a most terrible atonement. A sublime profession, and he would have been a fool to degrade it to the level of eavesdropping or peeping through keyholes.- Mario felt no curiosity whatsoever about these people, always wanted to remain at the correct distance from them : but as soon as he thought he had discovered that slight indication of guilt, he proceeded in a 245 I QUERELLE manner similar to that of a child blowing soap bubbles, picking out of the froth, with the end of its straw, the one little conglomeration of suds that can be worked into a lovely iridescent bubble. Proceeding from one discovery to the next, �1ario experienced an exquisite feeling of elation : he was breathing into it, and the crime started swelling, then inflating some more, finally to detach itself from him and rise up into the sky.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  He was so far from conceiving of love for woman apart from marriage that he positively pictured to himself first the family, and only secondarily the woman who would give him a family. His ideas of marriage were, consequently, quite unlike those of the great majority of his acquaintances, for whom getting married was one of the numerous facts of social life. For Levin it was the chief affair of life, on which its whole happiness turned. And now he had to give up that. When he had gone into the little drawing-room, where he always had tea, and had settled himself in his armchair with a book, and Agafea Mihalovna had brought him tea, and with her usual, “Well, I’ll stay a while, sir,” had taken a chair in the window, he felt that, however strange it might be, he had not parted from his daydreams, and that he could not live without them. Whether with her, or with another, still it would be. He was reading a book, and thinking of what he was reading, and stopping to listen to Agafea Mihalovna, who gossiped away without flagging, and yet with all that, all sorts of pictures of family life and work in the future rose disconnectedly before his imagination. He felt that in the depth of his soul something had been put in its place, settled down, and laid to rest. He heard Agafea Mihalovna talking of how Prohor had forgotten his duty to God, and with the money Levin had given him to buy a horse, had been drinking without stopping, and had beaten his wife till he’d half killed her. He listened, and read his book, and recalled the whole train of ideas suggested by his reading. It was Tyndall’s _Treatise on Heat_. He recalled his own criticisms of Tyndall of his complacent satisfaction in the cleverness of his experiments, and for his lack of philosophic insight. And suddenly there floated into his mind the joyful thought: “In two years’ time I shall have two Dutch cows; Pava herself will perhaps still be alive, a dozen young daughters of Berkoot and the three others—how lovely!”

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Kouzma, give me my sheepskin. And you tell them to take a lantern. I’ll come and look at her,” he said to the bailiff. The cowhouse for the more valuable cows was just behind the house. Walking across the yard, passing a snowdrift by the lilac tree, he went into the cowhouse. There was the warm, steamy smell of dung when the frozen door was opened, and the cows, astonished at the unfamiliar light of the lantern, stirred on the fresh straw. He caught a glimpse of the broad, smooth, black and piebald back of Hollandka. Berkoot, the bull, was lying down with his ring in his lip, and seemed about to get up, but thought better of it, and only gave two snorts as they passed by him. Pava, a perfect beauty, huge as a hippopotamus, with her back turned to them, prevented their seeing the calf, as she sniffed her all over. Levin went into the pen, looked Pava over, and lifted the red and spotted calf onto her long, tottering legs. Pava, uneasy, began lowing, but when Levin put the calf close to her she was soothed, and, sighing heavily, began licking her with her rough tongue. The calf, fumbling, poked her nose under her mother’s udder, and stiffened her tail out straight. “Here, bring the light, Fyodor, this way,” said Levin, examining the calf. “Like the mother! though the color takes after the father; but that’s nothing. Very good. Long and broad in the haunch. Vassily Fedorovitch, isn’t she splendid?” he said to the bailiff, quite forgiving him for the buckwheat under the influence of his delight in the calf. “How could she fail to be? Oh, Semyon the contractor came the day after you left. You must settle with him, Konstantin Dmitrievitch,” said the bailiff. “I did inform you about the machine.” This question was enough to take Levin back to all the details of his work on the estate, which was on a large scale, and complicated. He went straight from the cowhouse to the counting house, and after a little conversation with the bailiff and Semyon the contractor, he went back to the house and straight upstairs to the drawing-room. Chapter 27 The house was big and old-fashioned, and Levin, though he lived alone, had the whole house heated and used. He knew that this was stupid, he knew that it was positively not right, and contrary to his present new plans, but this house was a whole world to Levin. It was the world in which his father and mother had lived and died. They had lived just the life that to Levin seemed the ideal of perfection, and that he had dreamed of beginning with his wife, his family. Levin scarcely remembered his mother. His conception of her was for him a sacred memory, and his future wife was bound to be in his imagination a repetition of that exquisite, holy ideal of a woman that his mother had been.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  He thought of nothing, wished for nothing, but not to be left behind the peasants, and to do his work as well as possible. He heard nothing but the swish of scythes, and saw before him Tit’s upright figure mowing away, the crescent-shaped curve of the cut grass, the grass and flower heads slowly and rhythmically falling before the blade of his scythe, and ahead of him the end of the row, where would come the rest. Suddenly, in the midst of his toil, without understanding what it was or whence it came, he felt a pleasant sensation of chill on his hot, moist shoulders. He glanced at the sky in the interval for whetting the scythes. A heavy, lowering storm cloud had blown up, and big raindrops were falling. Some of the peasants went to their coats and put them on; others—just like Levin himself—merely shrugged their shoulders, enjoying the pleasant coolness of it. Another row, and yet another row, followed—long rows and short rows, with good grass and with poor grass. Levin lost all sense of time, and could not have told whether it was late or early now. A change began to come over his work, which gave him immense satisfaction. In the midst of his toil there were moments during which he forgot what he was doing, and it came all easy to him, and at those same moments his row was almost as smooth and well cut as Tit’s. But so soon as he recollected what he was doing, and began trying to do better, he was at once conscious of all the difficulty of his task, and the row was badly mown. On finishing yet another row he would have gone back to the top of the meadow again to begin the next, but Tit stopped, and going up to the old man said something in a low voice to him. They both looked at the sun. “What are they talking about, and why doesn’t he go back?” thought Levin, not guessing that the peasants had been mowing no less than four hours without stopping, and it was time for their lunch. “Lunch, sir,” said the old man. “Is it really time? That’s right; lunch, then.” Levin gave his scythe to Tit, and together with the peasants, who were crossing the long stretch of mown grass, slightly sprinkled with rain, to get their bread from the heap of coats, he went towards his house. Only then he suddenly awoke to the fact that he had been wrong about the weather and the rain was drenching his hay. “The hay will be spoiled,” he said. “Not a bit of it, sir; mow in the rain, and you’ll rake in fine weather!” said the old man.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Though it seems like common sense to most of us, our own biology-based kinship system is another case of Flintstonization. We simply assume our own conception of family reflects something eternal and universal in human nature. But as we’ve seen, there isn’t even agreement among all people that one sex act is sufficient to result in pregnancy. The concept of one-mother-per-child is running into trouble in Western societies too. “Motherhood is splintering,” writes William Saletan, the “human nature expert” at Slate.com. “You can have a genetic mother, a gestational mother, an adoptive mother, and God knows what else. When one of your moms is Grandma, it’s even more confusing.” Speaking of surrogate mothers who gestate another woman’s fetus, Saletan argues that it makes sense for a woman’s mother to offer to carry the baby: “When the surrogate is Grandma, the mess is less. Mother and daughter share a genetic bond to each other and to the child. They’re much more likely to work things out and give the child a stable family environment.”6 Perhaps. Either way, with widespread adoption, stepfamilies resulting from remarriage, and techniques such as surrogate gestation, sperm donation, and cryogenic embryo preservation, Homo sapiens is on the fast track away from “traditional” family structures, perhaps headed toward more flexible arrangements reminiscent of the distant past. Belief in partible paternity spreads fatherly feelings throughout a group, but this is just one of many mechanisms for enhancing group solidity. Anthropologists report numerous societies in which naming ceremonies and clan affiliations create obligations between individuals more binding than blood relations. Referring to the Matis people, with whom he lived, anthropologist Philippe Erikson notes, “When it comes to defining kinship ties, relationships deriving from naming practices have absolute priority over any other considerations, such as genealogical connections. When conflicts arise between the two modes of reckoning, sharing a name has precedence….”7 Some anthropologists question whether kinship is an important concept in band-level societies at all—however defined. They argue that since everyone in such a small-scale society is likely to be related to each other in some way, affinity tends to be measured in more fluid terms, such as friendship and sharing partners. As Darwin understood, even the most direct and immediate kinship terminology is subject to cultural definition. “Fatherly behavior is expected of all the males of a local clan toward all the young of the clan,” says anthropologist Janet Chernela. “Multiple aspects of caretaking, including affection and food-getting, are provided by all clansmen.”8 Anthropologist Vanessa Lea notes that, based upon her experience among the Mebengokre, “The allocation of responsibility is socially constructed and not an objective fact….”9 Among the Tukanoan, “Clan brothers provide for one another’s children as a collective. Through the pooling of the daily catch, each male regularly labors for all of the children of a village—his own offspring as well as those of his brothers.”10

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Though it was hard work to look after all the children and restrain their wild pranks, though it was difficult too to keep in one’s head and not mix up all the stockings, little breeches, and shoes for the different legs, and to undo and to do up again all the tapes and buttons, Darya Alexandrovna, who had always liked bathing herself, and believed it to be very good for the children, enjoyed nothing so much as bathing with all the children. To go over all those fat little legs, pulling on their stockings, to take in her arms and dip those little naked bodies, and to hear their screams of delight and alarm, to see the breathless faces with wide-open, scared, and happy eyes of all her splashing cherubs, was a great pleasure to her. When half the children had been dressed, some peasant women in holiday dress, out picking herbs, came up to the bathing-shed and stopped shyly. Marya Philimonovna called one of them and handed her a sheet and a shirt that had dropped into the water for her to dry them, and Darya Alexandrovna began to talk to the women. At first they laughed behind their hands and did not understand her questions, but soon they grew bolder and began to talk, winning Darya Alexandrovna’s heart at once by the genuine admiration of the children that they showed. “My, what a beauty! as white as sugar,” said one, admiring Tanitchka, and shaking her head; “but thin....” “Yes, she has been ill.” “And so they’ve been bathing you too,” said another to the baby. “No; he’s only three months old,” answered Darya Alexandrovna with pride. “You don’t say so!” “And have you any children?” “I’ve had four; I’ve two living—a boy and a girl. I weaned her last carnival.” “How old is she?” “Why, two years old.” “Why did you nurse her so long?” “It’s our custom; for three fasts....” And the conversation became most interesting to Darya Alexandrovna. What sort of time did she have? What was the matter with the boy? Where was her husband? Did it often happen? Darya Alexandrovna felt disinclined to leave the peasant women, so interesting to her was their conversation, so completely identical were all their interests. What pleased her most of all was that she saw clearly what all the women admired more than anything was her having so many children, and such fine ones. The peasant women even made Darya Alexandrovna laugh, and offended the English governess, because she was the cause of the laughter she did not understand. One of the younger women kept staring at the Englishwoman, who was dressing after all the rest, and when she put on her third petticoat she could not refrain from the remark, “My, she keeps putting on and putting on, and she’ll never have done!” she said, and they all went off into roars. Chapter 9

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Almost at the same time that his wife left Alexey Alexandrovitch there had come to him that bitterest moment in the life of an official—the moment when his upward career comes to a full stop. This full stop had arrived and everyone perceived it, but Alexey Alexandrovitch himself was not yet aware that his career was over. Whether it was due to his feud with Stremov, or his misfortune with his wife, or simply that Alexey Alexandrovitch had reached his destined limits, it had become evident to everyone in the course of that year that his career was at an end. He still filled a position of consequence, he sat on many commissions and committees, but he was a man whose day was over, and from whom nothing was expected. Whatever he said, whatever he proposed, was heard as though it were something long familiar, and the very thing that was not needed. But Alexey Alexandrovitch was not aware of this, and, on the contrary, being cut off from direct participation in governmental activity, he saw more clearly than ever the errors and defects in the action of others, and thought it his duty to point out means for their correction. Shortly after his separation from his wife, he began writing his first note on the new judicial procedure, the first of the endless series of notes he was destined to write in the future. Alexey Alexandrovitch did not merely fail to observe his hopeless position in the official world, he was not merely free from anxiety on this head, he was positively more satisfied than ever with his own activity. “He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord: but he that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife,” says the Apostle Paul, and Alexey Alexandrovitch, who was now guided in every action by Scripture, often recalled this text. It seemed to him that ever since he had been left without a wife, he had in these very projects of reform been serving the Lord more zealously than before. The unmistakable impatience of the member of the Council trying to get away from him did not trouble Alexey Alexandrovitch; he gave up his exposition only when the member of the Council, seizing his chance when one of the Imperial family was passing, slipped away from him. Left alone, Alexey Alexandrovitch looked down, collecting his thoughts, then looked casually about him and walked towards the door, where he hoped to meet Countess Lidia Ivanovna.

• From Querelle (1953)

  "Pair of fuckin' faggots, those two." "'Which two?" "What?" Querelle raised his head. His buddy, it seemed, didn't get it. And that was the end of the conversation. Querelle pulled off his other sock and turned in. Not that he wanted to sleep, or think over the scene in the bistro. Once he was stretched out, he had at last the leisure to consider his own affairs, and he had to think quick, in spite of his fatigue. The owner of La Feria would take the two kilos of opium, if Querelle only could get them out of the despatch-boat. The customs officials opened all sailors' bags, even the smallest ones. Coming ashore, all but the officers were subjected to a thorough search. Without cracking a smile, Querelle thought of the Lieutenant. The enormity of this idea struck him even while he was thinking what only he himself could have translated into : "He's been giving me the old eye for some time now. Nervous like a cat on a hot tin roof. I got him hooked, I guess." Querelle was glad to know that Ropert was now living a life of Oriental ease and luxury; to know that he was a brothel Madam's lover as well as a friend to her obliging husband. He closed his eyes. He regained that region in himself where his brother was there with him.- He let himself sink into a state where neither could be distinguished from the other. From this 17 I QUERELLE state he was able to extract, first, some words, and then, by a fairly elementary process, little by little, a thought-which, as it rose from those depths, again differentiated him from Robert and proposed singular acts, an entire system of solitary operations : quite gently these became his own, completely his, and Vic was there, with him, taking part. And Querelle, whose thoughts had overcome his personal autonomy in order to reach Vic, turned away again, re-entered himself, in the blind search for that inexpressible limbo which is like some inconsistent pate of love. He was hardly touching his curled-up prick. He felt no urge. While still at sea, he had announced to the other sailors that once in Brest, he was sure going to shoot his wad; but tonight he wasn't even thinking about whether he should have kissed that girl.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  At dinner he talked a little to his wife about Moscow matters, and, with a sarcastic smile, asked her after Stepan Arkadyevitch; but the conversation was for the most part general, dealing with Petersburg official and public news. After dinner he spent half an hour with his guests, and again, with a smile, pressed his wife’s hand, withdrew, and drove off to the council. Anna did not go out that evening either to the Princess Betsy Tverskaya, who, hearing of her return, had invited her, nor to the theater, where she had a box for that evening. She did not go out principally because the dress she had reckoned upon was not ready. Altogether, Anna, on turning, after the departure of her guests, to the consideration of her attire, was very much annoyed. She was generally a mistress of the art of dressing well without great expense, and before leaving Moscow she had given her dressmaker three dresses to transform. The dresses had to be altered so that they could not be recognized, and they ought to have been ready three days before. It appeared that two dresses had not been done at all, while the other one had not been altered as Anna had intended. The dressmaker came to explain, declaring that it would be better as she had done it, and Anna was so furious that she felt ashamed when she thought of it afterwards. To regain her serenity completely she went into the nursery, and spent the whole evening with her son, put him to bed herself, signed him with the cross, and tucked him up. She was glad she had not gone out anywhere, and had spent the evening so well. She felt so light-hearted and serene, she saw so clearly that all that had seemed to her so important on her railway journey was only one of the common trivial incidents of fashionable life, and that she had no reason to feel ashamed before anyone else or before herself. Anna sat down at the hearth with an English novel and waited for her husband. Exactly at half-past nine she heard his ring, and he came into the room. “Here you are at last!” she observed, holding out her hand to him. He kissed her hand and sat down beside her. “Altogether then, I see your visit was a success,” he said to her. “Oh, yes,” she said, and she began telling him about everything from the beginning: her journey with Countess Vronskaya, her arrival, the accident at the station. Then she described the pity she had felt, first for her brother, and afterwards for Dolly. “I imagine one cannot exonerate such a man from blame, though he is your brother,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch severely. Anna smiled. She knew that he said that simply to show that family considerations could not prevent him from expressing his genuine opinion. She knew that characteristic in her husband, and liked it.

• From Querelle (1953)

  She moved in for another kiss. Things began to stir in Robert. Gently, and providing him with the reassurance that all the treasures of the room were sti11 his to use, the temperature rose in his dong. Never again-that is to say, until he camewould anything be able to remind him that he had once been a lazy and skinny docker, bored with his job, and that he might well become one again. Forever now he was a king, a Caesar, well nourished and clad in a coronation robe, in the vestments of power that is calm and certain, thus differing from the conqueror's breeches. He had a hard-on. Feeling the touch of his hard and vibrant member, Lysiane gave her blonde flesh the order to quiver. "You're so wonderfull" She was waiting for the preliminaries of the real work, from the moment Robert slipped under the covers and started nuzzling around like a truffie-pig in the rich-smelling, dark and 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 perversions, 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 such 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 0 183 I QUERELLE

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  This diffused approach to parenting isn’t limited to villages in Africa or Amazonia. Desmond Morris recalls an afternoon he spent with a female truck driver in Polynesia. She told him that she’d had nine children, but had given two of them to an infertile friend. When Morris asked how the kids felt about that, she said they didn’t mind at all, as “all of us love all of the children.” Morris recalls, “This last point is underlined by the fact that, when we reach the village…she passes the time by wandering over to a group of toddlers, lying down in the grass with them and playing with them exactly as if they were her own. They accept her instantly, without any questioning, and a passer-by would never have guessed that they were anything other than a natural family playing together.”11 “A natural family.” Perhaps this easy acceptance between adults and unrelated children, the diffuse nurturing found in societies where children refer to all men as father and all women as mother, societies small and isolated enough to safely assume the kindness of strangers, where overlapping sexual relationships leave genetic paternity unknowable and of little consequence…perhaps this is the “natural” family structure of our species. Could it be that the atomic isolation of the husband-wife nucleus with an orbiting child or two is in fact a culturally imposed aberration for our species—as ill-suited to our evolved tendencies as corsets, chastity belts, and suits of armor? Dare we ask whether mothers, fathers, and children are all being shoe-horned into a family structure that suits none of us? Might the contemporary pandemics of fracturing families, parental exhaustion, and confused, resentful children be predictable consequences of what is, in truth, a distorted and distorting family structure inappropriate for our species? Nuclear Meltdown If the independent, isolated nuclear family unit is, in fact, the structure into which human beings most naturally configure themselves, why do contemporary societies and religions find it necessary to prop it up with tax breaks and supportive legislation while fiercely defending it from same-sex couples and others proposing to marry in supposedly “nontraditional” ways? One wonders, in fact, why marriage is a legal issue at all—apart from its relevance to immigration and property laws. Why would something so integral to human nature require such vigilant legal protection? Furthermore, if the nuclear triad is so deeply embedded in our nature, why are fewer and fewer of us choosing to live that way? In the United States, the percentage of nuclear family households has dropped from 45 to 23.5 since the 1970s. Married couples (with and without children) accounted for roughly 84 percent of all American households in 1930, but the latest figure is just under 50 percent, while the number of unmarried couples living together has mushroomed from about 500,000 in 1970 to more than ten times that number in 2008.

• From Querelle (1953)

  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 130 I JEAN GENET from each cache, each malevolent fissure gorgea with gold, and as those rays slowly extended away from their intense sources, they finally joined and bathed the entire globe in a lovely blond luminescence in which Querelle's soul felt at ease, in which it felt free. Querelle derived much strength from his feeling that he was rich. In Shanghai, under the roots of the baobab tree by the gate, he had concealed the booty from five burglaries and the murder, committed in Indo-China, of a Russian danseuse; in Damascus, in the ruins of the Lady at the Piano, he had buried the profits of a murder committed in Beirut. By that crime hung the memory of twenty years hard labor, awarded to his accomplice. In Casablanca, Querelle had hidden a fortune stolen from the French Consul in Cairo. To the memory of this was attached the death of an English sailor, his accomplice. In Antwerp, in the cathedral bell tower he had hidden a small fortune, the result of several successful burglaries in Spain, linked to the death of a German docker, his accomplice and victim.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  He took up his book again. “Very good, electricity and heat are the same thing; but is it possible to substitute the one quantity for the other in the equation for the solution of any problem? No. Well, then what of it? The connection between all the forces of nature is felt instinctively.... It’s particulary nice if Pava’s daughter should be a red-spotted cow, and all the herd will take after her, and the other three, too! Splendid! To go out with my wife and visitors to meet the herd.... My wife says, ‘Kostya and I looked after that calf like a child.’ ‘How can it interest you so much?’ says a visitor. ‘Everything that interests him, interests me.’ But who will she be?” And he remembered what had happened at Moscow.... “Well, there’s nothing to be done.... It’s not my fault. But now everything shall go on in a new way. It’s nonsense to pretend that life won’t let one, that the past won’t let one. One must struggle to live better, much better.”... He raised his head, and fell to dreaming. Old Laska, who had not yet fully digested her delight at his return, and had run out into the yard to bark, came back wagging her tail, and crept up to him, bringing in the scent of fresh air, put her head under his hand, and whined plaintively, asking to be stroked. “There, who’d have thought it?” said Agafea Mihalovna. “The dog now ... why, she understands that her master’s come home, and that he’s low-spirited.” “Why low-spirited?” “Do you suppose I don’t see it, sir? It’s high time I should know the gentry. Why, I’ve grown up from a little thing with them. It’s nothing, sir, so long as there’s health and a clear conscience.” Levin looked intently at her, surprised at how well she knew his thought. “Shall I fetch you another cup?” said she, and taking his cup she went out. Laska kept poking her head under his hand. He stroked her, and she promptly curled up at his feet, laying her head on a hindpaw. And in token of all now being well and satisfactory, she opened her mouth a little, smacked her lips, and settling her sticky lips more comfortably about her old teeth, she sank into blissful repose. Levin watched all her movements attentively. “That’s what I’ll do,” he said to himself; “that’s what I’ll do! Nothing’s amiss.... All’s well.” Chapter 28 After the ball, early next morning, Anna Arkadyevna sent her husband a telegram that she was leaving Moscow the same day. “No, I must go, I must go”; she explained to her sister-in-law the change in her plans in a tone that suggested that she had to remember so many things that there was no enumerating them: “no, it had really better be today!” Stepan Arkadyevitch was not dining at home, but he promised to come and see his sister off at seven o’clock.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Ours is a very young species. Few of our ancestors faced the unrelenting scarcity-generated selective pressures envisioned by Hobbes, Malthus, and Darwin. The ancestral human journey did not, by and large, take place in a world already saturated with our kind, fighting over scraps. Rather, the route taken by the bulk of our ancestors led through a long series of ecosystems with nothing quite like us already there. Like the Burmese pythons recently set loose in the Everglades, cane toads spreading unchecked across Australia, or the timber wolves recently reintroduced to Yellowstone, our ancestors were generally entering an open ecological niche. When Hobbes wrote that “Man to Man is an arrant Wolfe,” he was unaware of just how cooperative and communicative wolves can be if there’s enough food for everyone. Individuals in species spreading into rich new ecosystems aren’t locked in a struggle to the death against one another. Until the niche is saturated, such intraspecies conflict over food is counterproductive and needless.15 We’ve already shown that even in a largely empty world, the social lives of foragers were anything but solitary. But Hobbes also claimed prehistoric life was poor, and Malthus believed poverty to be eternal and inescapable. Yet most foragers don’t believe themselves to be impoverished, and there’s every indication that life wasn’t generally much of a struggle for our fire-controlling, highly intelligent ancestors bound together in cooperative bands. To be sure, occasional catastrophes such as droughts, climatic shifts, and volcanic eruptions were devastating. But most of our ancestors lived in a largely unpopulated world, chock-full of food. For hundreds of thousands of generations, the omnivore’s dilemma facing our ancestors lay in choosing among many culinary options. Plants eat soil; deer eat plants; cougars eat deer. But people can and do eat almost anything—including cougars, deer, plants, and yes, even soil.16 The Despair of Millionaires Poverty…is the invention of civilization. MARSHALL SAHLINS A recent New York Times article under the headline “In Silicon Valley, Millionaires Who Don’t Feel Rich” begins, “By almost any definition—except his own and perhaps those of his neighbors here in Silicon Valley—Hal Steger has it made.” The article notes that although Mr. Steger and his wife have a net worth of roughly $3.5 million, he still typically works twelve-hour days plus another ten hours on weekends. “A few million,” explains Steger, “doesn’t go as far as it used to.” Gary Kremen (estimated net worth: $10 million), founder of Match.com, an online dating service, explains, “Everyone around here looks at the people above them.” He continues to work sixty to eighty hours per week because, he says, “You’re nobody here at $10 million.” Another executive gets right to the point, saying, “Here, the top 1 percent chases the top one-tenth of 1 percent, and the top one-tenth of 1 percent chases the top one-one-hundredth of 1 percent.”17

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  When the case had been read through, Stepan Arkadyevitch got up and stretched, and by way of tribute to the liberalism of the times took out a cigarette in the boardroom and went into his private room. Two of the members of the board, the old veteran in the service, Nikitin, and the _Kammerjunker_ Grinevitch, went in with him. “We shall have time to finish after lunch,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “To be sure we shall!” said Nikitin. “A pretty sharp fellow this Fomin must be,” said Grinevitch of one of the persons taking part in the case they were examining. Stepan Arkadyevitch frowned at Grinevitch’s words, giving him thereby to understand that it was improper to pass judgment prematurely, and made him no reply. “Who was that came in?” he asked the doorkeeper. “Someone, your excellency, crept in without permission directly my back was turned. He was asking for you. I told him: when the members come out, then....” “Where is he?” “Maybe he’s gone into the passage, but here he comes anyway. That is he,” said the doorkeeper, pointing to a strongly built, broad-shouldered man with a curly beard, who, without taking off his sheepskin cap, was running lightly and rapidly up the worn steps of the stone staircase. One of the members going down—a lean official with a portfolio—stood out of his way and looked disapprovingly at the legs of the stranger, then glanced inquiringly at Oblonsky. Stepan Arkadyevitch was standing at the top of the stairs. His good-naturedly beaming face above the embroidered collar of his uniform beamed more than ever when he recognized the man coming up. “Why, it’s actually you, Levin, at last!” he said with a friendly mocking smile, scanning Levin as he approached. “How is it you have deigned to look me up in this den?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, and not content with shaking hands, he kissed his friend. “Have you been here long?” “I have just come, and very much wanted to see you,” said Levin, looking shyly and at the same time angrily and uneasily around. “Well, let’s go into my room,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, who knew his friend’s sensitive and irritable shyness, and, taking his arm, he drew him along, as though guiding him through dangers.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  The coffee was never really made, but spluttered over everyone, and boiled away, doing just what was required of it—that is, providing much cause for much noise and laughter, and spoiling a costly rug and the baroness’s gown. “Well now, good-bye, or you’ll never get washed, and I shall have on my conscience the worst sin a gentleman can commit. So you would advise a knife to his throat?” “To be sure, and manage that your hand may not be far from his lips. He’ll kiss your hand, and all will end satisfactorily,” answered Vronsky. “So at the Français!” and, with a rustle of her skirts, she vanished. Kamerovsky got up too, and Vronsky, not waiting for him to go, shook hands and went off to his dressing-room. While he was washing, Petritsky described to him in brief outlines his position, as far as it had changed since Vronsky had left Petersburg. No money at all. His father said he wouldn’t give him any and pay his debts. His tailor was trying to get him locked up, and another fellow, too, was threatening to get him locked up. The colonel of the regiment had announced that if these scandals did not cease he would have to leave. As for the baroness, he was sick to death of her, especially since she’d taken to offering continually to lend him money. But he had found a girl—he’d show her to Vronsky—a marvel, exquisite, in the strict Oriental style, “genre of the slave Rebecca, don’t you know.” He’d had a row, too, with Berkoshov, and was going to send seconds to him, but of course it would come to nothing. Altogether everything was supremely amusing and jolly. And, not letting his comrade enter into further details of his position, Petritsky proceeded to tell him all the interesting news. As he listened to Petritsky’s familiar stories in the familiar setting of the rooms he had spent the last three years in, Vronsky felt a delightful sense of coming back to the careless Petersburg life that he was used to. “Impossible!” he cried, letting down the pedal of the washing basin in which he had been sousing his healthy red neck. “Impossible!” he cried, at the news that Laura had flung over Fertinghof and had made up to Mileev. “And is he as stupid and pleased as ever? Well, and how’s Buzulukov?” “Oh, there is a tale about Buzulukov—simply lovely!” cried Petritsky. “You know his weakness for balls, and he never misses a single court ball. He went to a big ball in a new helmet. Have you seen the new helmets? Very nice, lighter. Well, so he’s standing.... No, I say, do listen.” “I am listening,” answered Vronsky, rubbing himself with a rough towel.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Stepan Arkadyevitch had not chosen his political opinions or his views; these political opinions and views had come to him of themselves, just as he did not choose the shapes of his hat and coat, but simply took those that were being worn. And for him, living in a certain society—owing to the need, ordinarily developed at years of discretion, for some degree of mental activity—to have views was just as indispensable as to have a hat. If there was a reason for his preferring liberal to conservative views, which were held also by many of his circle, it arose not from his considering liberalism more rational, but from its being in closer accordance with his manner of life. The liberal party said that in Russia everything is wrong, and certainly Stepan Arkadyevitch had many debts and was decidedly short of money. The liberal party said that marriage is an institution quite out of date, and that it needs reconstruction; and family life certainly afforded Stepan Arkadyevitch little gratification, and forced him into lying and hypocrisy, which was so repulsive to his nature. The liberal party said, or rather allowed it to be understood, that religion is only a curb to keep in check the barbarous classes of the people; and Stepan Arkadyevitch could not get through even a short service without his legs aching from standing up, and could never make out what was the object of all the terrible and high-flown language about another world when life might be so very amusing in this world. And with all this, Stepan Arkadyevitch, who liked a joke, was fond of puzzling a plain man by saying that if he prided himself on his origin, he ought not to stop at Rurik and disown the first founder of his family—the monkey. And so Liberalism had become a habit of Stepan Arkadyevitch’s, and he liked his newspaper, as he did his cigar after dinner, for the slight fog it diffused in his brain. He read the leading article, in which it was maintained that it was quite senseless in our day to raise an outcry that radicalism was threatening to swallow up all conservative elements, and that the government ought to take measures to crush the revolutionary hydra; that, on the contrary, “in our opinion the danger lies not in that fantastic revolutionary hydra, but in the obstinacy of traditionalism clogging progress,” etc., etc. He read another article, too, a financial one, which alluded to Bentham and Mill, and dropped some innuendoes reflecting on the ministry. With his characteristic quickwittedness he caught the drift of each innuendo, divined whence it came, at whom and on what ground it was aimed, and that afforded him, as it always did, a certain satisfaction. But today that satisfaction was embittered by Matrona Philimonovna’s advice and the unsatisfactory state of the household. He read, too, that Count Beist was rumored to have left for Wiesbaden, and that one need have no more gray hair, and of the sale of a light carriage, and of a young person seeking a situation; but these items of information did not give him, as usual, a quiet, ironical gratification. Having finished the paper, a second cup of coffee and a roll and butter, he got up, shaking the crumbs of the roll off his waistcoat; and, squaring his broad chest, he smiled joyously: not because there was anything particularly agreeable in his mind—the joyous smile was evoked by a good digestion.

• 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."