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 My Life on the Road (2015)

  Nor would I have known how hard it is for the average Indian just to get to work, or that “Eve teasing,” the sexual harassment and touching that women may suffer in public, was what my college friends traveled in groups to avoid. Certainly I would never have come to share the calm of people in crowds that would have signaled an emergency anywhere else.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “At our last conversation, I notified you of my intention to communicate to you my decision in regard to the subject of that conversation. Having carefully considered everything, I am writing now with the object of fulfilling that promise. My decision is as follows. Whatever your conduct may have been, I do not consider myself justified in breaking the ties in which we are bound by a Higher Power. The family cannot be broken up by a whim, a caprice, or even by the sin of one of the partners in the marriage, and our life must go on as it has done in the past. This is essential for me, for you, and for our son. I am fully persuaded that you have repented and do repent of what has called forth the present letter, and that you will cooperate with me in eradicating the cause of our estrangement, and forgetting the past. In the contrary event, you can conjecture what awaits you and your son. All this I hope to discuss more in detail in a personal interview. As the season is drawing to a close, I would beg you to return to Petersburg as quickly as possible, not later than Tuesday. All necessary preparations shall be made for your arrival here. I beg you to note that I attach particular significance to compliance with this request. A. Karenin “_P.S._—I enclose the money which may be needed for your expenses.” He read the letter through and felt pleased with it, and especially that he had remembered to enclose money: there was not a harsh word, not a reproach in it, nor was there undue indulgence. Most of all, it was a golden bridge for return. Folding the letter and smoothing it with a massive ivory knife, and putting it in an envelope with the money, he rang the bell with the gratification it always afforded him to use the well arranged appointments of his writing-table. “Give this to the courier to be delivered to Anna Arkadyevna tomorrow at the summer villa,” he said, getting up. “Certainly, your excellency; tea to be served in the study?”

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  To the carriage, instead of the restive Raven, they had harnessed, thanks to the representations of Marya Philimonovna, the bailiff’s horse, Brownie, and Darya Alexandrovna, delayed by anxiety over her own attire, came out and got in, dressed in a white muslin gown. Darya Alexandrovna had done her hair, and dressed with care and excitement. In the old days she had dressed for her own sake to look pretty and be admired. Later on, as she got older, dress became more and more distasteful to her. She saw that she was losing her good looks. But now she began to feel pleasure and interest in dress again. Now she did not dress for her own sake, not for the sake of her own beauty, but simply that as the mother of those exquisite creatures she might not spoil the general effect. And looking at herself for the last time in the looking-glass she was satisfied with herself. She looked nice. Not nice as she would have wished to look nice in old days at a ball, but nice for the object which she now had in view. In the church there was no one but the peasants, the servants and their women-folk. But Darya Alexandrovna saw, or fancied she saw, the sensation produced by her children and her. The children were not only beautiful to look at in their smart little dresses, but they were charming in the way they behaved. Aliosha, it is true, did not stand quite correctly; he kept turning round, trying to look at his little jacket from behind; but all the same he was wonderfully sweet. Tanya behaved like a grown-up person, and looked after the little ones. And the smallest, Lily, was bewitching in her naïve astonishment at everything, and it was difficult not to smile when, after taking the sacrament, she said in English, “Please, some more.” On the way home the children felt that something solemn had happened, and were very sedate. Everything went happily at home too; but at lunch Grisha began whistling, and, what was worse, was disobedient to the English governess, and was forbidden to have any tart. Darya Alexandrovna would not have let things go so far on such a day had she been present; but she had to support the English governess’s authority, and she upheld her decision that Grisha should have no tart. This rather spoiled the general good humor. Grisha cried, declaring that Nikolinka had whistled too, and he was not punished, and that he wasn’t crying for the tart—he didn’t care—but at being unjustly treated. This was really too tragic, and Darya Alexandrovna made up her mind to persuade the English governess to forgive Grisha, and she went to speak to her. But on the way, as she passed the drawing-room, she beheld a scene, filling her heart with such pleasure that the tears came into her eyes, and she forgave the delinquent herself.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Konstantin Levin, whose presence was needed in the plough land and meadows, had come to take his brother in the trap. It was that time of the year, the turning-point of summer, when the crops of the present year are a certainty, when one begins to think of the sowing for next year, and the mowing is at hand; when the rye is all in ear, though its ears are still light, not yet full, and it waves in gray-green billows in the wind; when the green oats, with tufts of yellow grass scattered here and there among it, droop irregularly over the late-sown fields; when the early buckwheat is already out and hiding the ground; when the fallow lands, trodden hard as stone by the cattle, are half ploughed over, with paths left untouched by the plough; when from the dry dung-heaps carted onto the fields there comes at sunset a smell of manure mixed with meadow-sweet, and on the low-lying lands the riverside meadows are a thick sea of grass waiting for the mowing, with blackened heaps of the stalks of sorrel among it. It was the time when there comes a brief pause in the toil of the fields before the beginning of the labors of harvest—every year recurring, every year straining every nerve of the peasants. The crop was a splendid one, and bright, hot summer days had set in with short, dewy nights. The brothers had to drive through the woods to reach the meadows. Sergey Ivanovitch was all the while admiring the beauty of the woods, which were a tangled mass of leaves, pointing out to his brother now an old lime tree on the point of flowering, dark on the shady side, and brightly spotted with yellow stipules, now the young shoots of this year’s saplings brilliant with emerald. Konstantin Levin did not like talking and hearing about the beauty of nature. Words for him took away the beauty of what he saw. He assented to what his brother said, but he could not help beginning to think of other things. When they came out of the woods, all his attention was engrossed by the view of the fallow land on the upland, in parts yellow with grass, in parts trampled and checkered with furrows, in parts dotted with ridges of dung, and in parts even ploughed. A string of carts was moving across it. Levin counted the carts, and was pleased that all that were wanted had been brought, and at the sight of the meadows his thoughts passed to the mowing. He always felt something special moving him to the quick at the hay-making. On reaching the meadow Levin stopped the horse.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  At first, Dr. Byron did not seem to believe me when I said his last prescription was no match for my insomnia. He suggested I try again, and for a moment diverted my attention by showing me photographs of his family. He had a fascinating child of Dolly’s age; but I saw through his tricks and insisted he prescribe the mightiest pill extant. He suggested I play golf, but finally agreed to give me something that, he said, “would really work”; and going to a cabinet, he produced a vial of violet-blue capsules banded with dark purple at one end, which, he said, had just been placed on the market and were intended not for neurotics whom a draft of water could calm if properly administered, but only for great sleepless artists who had to die for a few hours in order to live for centuries. I love to fool doctors, and though inwardly rejoicing, pocketed the pills with a skeptical shrug. Incidentally, I had had to be careful with him. Once, in another connection, a stupid lapse on my part made me mention my last sanatorium, and I thought I saw the tips of his ears twitch. Being not at all keen for Charlotte or anybody else to know that period of my past, I had hastily explained that I had once done some research among the insane for a novel. But no matter; the old rogue certainly had a sweet girleen. I left in great spirits. Steering my wife’s car with one finger, I contentedly rolled homeward. Ramsdale had, after all, lots of charm. The cicadas whirred; the avenue had been freshly watered. Smoothly, almost silkily, I turned down into our steep little street. Everything was somehow so right that day. So blue and green. I knew the sun shone because my ignition key was reflected in the windshield; and I knew it was exactly half past three because the nurse who came to massage Miss Opposite every afternoon was tripping down the narrow sidewalk in her white stockings and shoes. As usual, Junk’s hysterical setter attacked me as I rolled downhill, and as usual, the local paper was lying on the porch where it had just been hurled by Kenny. The day before I had ended the regime of aloofness I had imposed upon myself, and now uttered a cheerful homecoming call as I opened the door of the living room. With her cream-white nape and bronze bun to me, wearing the yellow blouse and maroon slacks she had on when I first met her, Charlotte sat at the corner bureau writing a letter. My hand still on the doorknob, I repeated my hearty cry. Her writing hand stopped. She sat still for a moment; then she slowly turned in her chair and rested her elbow on its curved back.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  The efforts of Agafea Mihalovna and the cook, that the dinner should be particularly good, only ended in the two famished friends attacking the preliminary course, eating a great deal of bread and butter, salt goose and salted mushrooms, and in Levin’s finally ordering the soup to be served without the accompaniment of little pies, with which the cook had particularly meant to impress their visitor. But though Stepan Arkadyevitch was accustomed to very different dinners, he thought everything excellent: the herb brandy, and the bread, and the butter, and above all the salt goose and the mushrooms, and the nettle soup, and the chicken in white sauce, and the white Crimean wine—everything was superb and delicious. “Splendid, splendid!” he said, lighting a fat cigar after the roast. “I feel as if, coming to you, I had landed on a peaceful shore after the noise and jolting of a steamer. And so you maintain that the laborer himself is an element to be studied and to regulate the choice of methods in agriculture. Of course, I’m an ignorant outsider; but I should fancy theory and its application will have its influence on the laborer too.” “Yes, but wait a bit. I’m not talking of political economy, I’m talking of the science of agriculture. It ought to be like the natural sciences, and to observe given phenomena and the laborer in his economic, ethnographical....” At that instant Agafea Mihalovna came in with jam. “Oh, Agafea Mihalovna,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, kissing the tips of his plump fingers, “what salt goose, what herb brandy!... What do you think, isn’t it time to start, Kostya?” he added. Levin looked out of the window at the sun sinking behind the bare tree-tops of the forest. “Yes, it’s time,” he said. “Kouzma, get ready the trap,” and he ran downstairs. Stepan Arkadyevitch, going down, carefully took the canvas cover off his varnished gun case with his own hands, and opening it, began to get ready his expensive new-fashioned gun. Kouzma, who already scented a big tip, never left Stepan Arkadyevitch’s side, and put on him both his stockings and boots, a task which Stepan Arkadyevitch readily left him. “Kostya, give orders that if the merchant Ryabinin comes ... I told him to come today, he’s to be brought in and to wait for me....” “Why, do you mean to say you’re selling the forest to Ryabinin?” “Yes. Do you know him?” “To be sure I do. I have had to do business with him, ‘positively and conclusively.’” Stepan Arkadyevitch laughed. “Positively and conclusively” were the merchant’s favorite words. “Yes, it’s wonderfully funny the way he talks. She knows where her master’s going!” he added, patting Laska, who hung about Levin, whining and licking his hands, his boots, and his gun. The trap was already at the steps when they went out. “I told them to bring the trap round; or would you rather walk?”

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Now in the solitude of the country, she began to be more and more frequently aware of those joys. Often, looking at them, she would make every possible effort to persuade herself that she was mistaken, that she as a mother was partial to her children. All the same, she could not help saying to herself that she had charming children, all six of them in different ways, but a set of children such as is not often to be met with, and she was happy in them, and proud of them. Chapter 8 Towards the end of May, when everything had been more or less satisfactorily arranged, she received her husband’s answer to her complaints of the disorganized state of things in the country. He wrote begging her forgiveness for not having thought of everything before, and promised to come down at the first chance. This chance did not present itself, and till the beginning of June Darya Alexandrovna stayed alone in the country. On the Sunday in St. Peter’s week Darya Alexandrovna drove to mass for all her children to take the sacrament. Darya Alexandrovna in her intimate, philosophical talks with her sister, her mother, and her friends very often astonished them by the freedom of her views in regard to religion. She had a strange religion of transmigration of souls all her own, in which she had firm faith, troubling herself little about the dogmas of the Church. But in her family she was strict in carrying out all that was required by the Church—and not merely in order to set an example, but with all her heart in it. The fact that the children had not been at the sacrament for nearly a year worried her extremely, and with the full approval and sympathy of Marya Philimonovna she decided that this should take place now in the summer. For several days before, Darya Alexandrovna was busily deliberating on how to dress all the children. Frocks were made or altered and washed, seams and flounces were let out, buttons were sewn on, and ribbons got ready. One dress, Tanya’s, which the English governess had undertaken, cost Darya Alexandrovna much loss of temper. The English governess in altering it had made the seams in the wrong place, had taken up the sleeves too much, and altogether spoilt the dress. It was so narrow on Tanya’s shoulders that it was quite painful to look at her. But Marya Philimonovna had the happy thought of putting in gussets, and adding a little shoulder-cape. The dress was set right, but there was nearly a quarrel with the English governess. On the morning, however, all was happily arranged, and towards ten o’clock—the time at which they had asked the priest to wait for them for the mass—the children in their new dresses, with beaming faces, stood on the step before the carriage waiting for their mother.

• 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)

  “Rain? Why, there was scarcely a drop. I’ll come directly. So you had a nice day too? That’s first-rate.” And Levin went off to change his clothes. Five minutes later the brothers met in the dining-room. Although it seemed to Levin that he was not hungry, and he sat down to dinner simply so as not to hurt Kouzma’s feelings, yet when he began to eat the dinner struck him as extraordinarily good. Sergey Ivanovitch watched him with a smile. “Oh, by the way, there’s a letter for you,” said he. “Kouzma, bring it down, please. And mind you shut the doors.” The letter was from Oblonsky. Levin read it aloud. Oblonsky wrote to him from Petersburg: “I have had a letter from Dolly; she’s at Ergushovo, and everything seems going wrong there. Do ride over and see her, please; help her with advice; you know all about it. She will be so glad to see you. She’s quite alone, poor thing. My mother-in-law and all of them are still abroad.” “That’s capital! I will certainly ride over to her,” said Levin. “Or we’ll go together. She’s such a splendid woman, isn’t she?” “They’re not far from here, then?” “Twenty-five miles. Or perhaps it is thirty. But a capital road. Capital, we’ll drive over.” “I shall be delighted,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, still smiling. The sight of his younger brother’s appearance had immediately put him in a good humor. “Well, you have an appetite!” he said, looking at his dark-red, sunburnt face and neck bent over the plate. “Splendid! You can’t imagine what an effectual remedy it is for every sort of foolishness. I want to enrich medicine with a new word: _Arbeitskur_.” “Well, but you don’t need it, I should fancy.” “No, but for all sorts of nervous invalids.” “Yes, it ought to be tried. I had meant to come to the mowing to look at you, but it was so unbearably hot that I got no further than the forest. I sat there a little, and went on by the forest to the village, met your old nurse, and sounded her as to the peasants’ view of you. As far as I can make out, they don’t approve of this. She said: ‘It’s not a gentleman’s work.’ Altogether, I fancy that in the people’s ideas there are very clear and definite notions of certain, as they call it, ‘gentlemanly’ lines of action. And they don’t sanction the gentry’s moving outside bounds clearly laid down in their ideas.” “Maybe so; but anyway it’s a pleasure such as I have never known in my life. And there’s no harm in it, you know. Is there?” answered Levin. “I can’t help it if they don’t like it. Though I do believe it’s all right. Eh?” “Altogether,” pursued Sergey Ivanovitch, “you’re satisfied with your day?” “Quite satisfied. We cut the whole meadow. And such a splendid old man I made friends with there! You can’t fancy how delightful he was!”

• From Querelle (1953)

  73 I QUERELLE column issuing out of his mouth, holding him up, and against which he rested. It was, above all, to this voice that Querelle had submitted. "What's that?" "Zephir. The Battalion, if you prefer." Th eir hands moved to unfasten their belts, and sailors' belts are, for practical reasons, buckled behind their backs-to avoid, for example, an unsightly pot-belly effect when wearing a tight fitting rig. Thus, certain adventurous characters for no other motive than their own memories of Navy days, or their submis sion to the glamor of the naval uniform, retain or adopt that particular eccentricity. Querelle felt a whole lot friendlier. Since the brothelkeeper belonged to the same family as himself, with roots stretching far down into the same shadowy and perfumed la nds, this very scene was something like one of those trite little escapades in the tents of the African Battalion-which no one mentions later when meeting again on civvy street. Enough had been said. Now Querelle had to execute himself. That's what he would do. "Get over there, to the bed." Like the wind subsides at sea, all anger had subsided. Nor bert's voice was flat. Querelle pulled his leather belt out of the loops and held it in his hand. His pants had slipped down over his calves, leaving his knees bare, and, on the red carpet, they looked like a sluggish pool in which he was standing. "Come on. Tum round. It won't take long." Querelle faced about. He bent over, supporting himself on clenched fists-one closed round the belt buckle-on the edge of the divan. Norbert felt disheveled and unobserved. With a light and calm touch he liberated his prick from his underpants and held it for a moment, heavy and extended in his hand. He saw his reflection in the mirror in front of him and knew it was repeated twenty times in this room. He was strong. He was The Master. Total silence reigned. Advancing calmly, Norbert rested hi s hand on his prick as if it were some strong and flexible tree

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

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

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

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

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

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

• From Querelle (1953)

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

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

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

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

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

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

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

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

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

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

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

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Why am I writing an on-the-road book when I don’t have a driver’s license, much less own a car? I’m so used to traveling as I do that I didn’t anticipate this question. I was once as obsessed as anybody else with driving as a symbol of independence. I signed up for a driver’s ed course in my senior year of high school, though I had no car or access to one. I wasn’t looking so much to be a driver as to symbolize the difference between my mother’s life and mine. She was a passive passenger, so a driver’s license would begin my escape. In the words of so many daughters who don’t yet know that a female fate is not a personal fault, I told myself: I’m not going to be anything like my mother. When I was in college and read Virginia Woolf’s revolutionary demand for “a room of one’s own,” I silently added, and a car. But by the time I came home from India, communal travel had come to seem natural to me. I had learned that being isolated in a car was not always or even usually the most rewarding way to travel: I would miss talking to fellow travelers and looking out the window. How could I enjoy getting there when I couldn’t pay attention? I stopped making excuses for being the rare American who didn’t want to own a car. I even stopped citing environmental excuses, or explaining that Jack Kerouac didn’t drive either. As he said, he didn’t “know how to drive, just typewrite.” I did sometimes quote public opinion polls that rated New Yorkers as the happiest of Americans. Why? Because in the nondriving capital of the nation, we actually see each other in the street instead of being isolated in speeding tin cans. But the truth is, I didn’t decide on not driving. It decided on me. Now when I’m asked with condescension why I don’t drive—and I am still asked—I just say: Because adventure starts the moment I leave my door.