Despair

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 2 of 267 · 20 per page

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Researchers have found that men with lower levels of testosterone are more than four times as likely to suffer from clinical depression, fatal heart attacks, and cancer when compared to other men their age with higher testosterone levels. They are also more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, and have a far greater risk of dying from any cause (ranging from 88 to 250 percent higher, depending on the study). 33 If it’s true that most men are constituted, by millions of years of evolution, to need occasional novel partners to maintain an active and vital sexuality throughout their lives, then what are we saying to men when we demand lifetime sexual monogamy? Must they choose between familial love and long-term sexual fulfillment? Most men don’t fully appreciate the conflict between the demands of society and those of their own biology until they’ve been married for years—plenty of time for life to have grown very complicated, with children, joint property, mutual friends, and the sort of love and friendship only shared history can bring. When they arrive at the crisis point, where domesticity and declining testosterone levels have drained the color from life, what to do? The options most men see before them seem to be: 1. Lie and try not to get caught. While this option may be the most commonly chosen, it may also be the worst. How many men think they have an “unspoken agreement” with their wife that, as long as she doesn’t find out about it, it’s okay for him to have a casual relationship on the side? This is like saying you have an unspoken agreement with the police that it’s okay to drive drunk—as long as they don’t catch you. Even if there is some understanding along these lines, any lawyer will tell you that unspoken agreements are the worst possible foundation for any long-term partnership. Gentlemen, you are going to get caught sooner or later (probably sooner). You have as much chance of getting away with this as a dog has of following a cat up a tree. Ain’t gonna happen. One reason: most women’s sense of smell is significantly better than most men’s, so there’s probably going to be evidence you can’t even sense, but that she’ll pick up on. Need we even mention the much-vaunted powers of female intuition? This requires you to lie to your partner in life. To deceive the mother of your children, the person you were hoping to grow old with. Is this really who you are? Is this the man she chose to share her life with? 2. Give up on having sex with anyone other than your wife for the rest of your life. Maybe resort to porn and Prozac.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  According to journalist Terry Gould, “key parties,” like those later dramatized in the 1997 film The Ice Storm, originated on these military bases in the 1940s, where elite pilots and their wives intermingled sexually with one another before the men flew off toward Japanese antiaircraft fire. Gould, author of The Lifestyle, a cultural history of the swinging movement in the United States, interviewed two researchers who’d written about this Air Force ritual. Joan and Dwight Dixon explained to Gould that these warriors and their wives “shared each other as a kind of tribal bonding ritual, with a tacit understanding that the two thirds of husbands who survived would look after the widows.” * The practice continued after the war ended and by the late 1940s, “military installations from Maine to Texas and California to Washington had thriving swing clubs,” writes Gould. By the end of the Korean War, in 1953, the clubs “had spread from the air bases to the surrounding suburbs among straight, white-collar professionals.” 14 Are we to believe that these fighter pilots and their wives were “naïve”? It’s true that many high-profile American forays into alternative sexuality in the 1970s ended in chaos and hurt feelings, but what does that prove? Americans also tried, and failed, to reduce their reliance on foreign oil in the 1970s. By this logic, it would be “naïve” to ever try again. Besides, in intimate matters, discretion and success tend to go together, so no one really has any idea how many couples succeeded in finding their own unconventional understandings by experimenting with low-key alternatives to standard, off-the-shelf monogamy. 15 What isn’t debatable is that conventional marriage is a full-blown disaster for millions of men, women, and children right now. Conventional till-death-(or infidelity, or boredom)-do-us-part marriage is a failure. Emotionally, economically, psychologically, and sexually, it just doesn’t work over the long term for too many couples. Yet while few mainstream therapists would contemplate trying to convince a gay man or lesbian to “grow up, get real, and just stop being gay,” these days, when it comes to unconventional approaches to heterosexual marriage, Perel points out, “Sexual boundaries are one of the few areas where therapists seem to mirror the dominant culture. Monogamy,” she writes, “is the norm, and sexual fidelity is considered to be mature, committed, and realistic.” Forget about negotiating alternatives: “Nonmonogamy, even consensual nonmonogamy, is suspect.” The notion that it might be possible to love one person while being sexual with another “makes us shudder,” and conjures “images of chaos: promiscuity, orgies, debauchery.”

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  We are apes. Metaphorically and factually, Homo sapiens is one of the five surviving species of great apes, along with chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans (gibbons are considered a “lesser ape”). We shared a common ancestor with two of these apes—bonobos and chimps—just five million years ago. 1 That’s “the day before yesterday” in evolutionary terms. The fine print distinguishing humans from the other great apes is regarded as “wholly artificial” by most primatologists these days. 2 If we’re “above” nature, it’s only in the sense that a shaky-legged surfer is “above” the ocean. Even if we never slip (and we all do), our inner nature can pull us under at any moment. Those of us raised in the West have been assured that we humans are special, unique among living things, above and beyond the world around us, exempt from the humilities and humiliations that pervade and define animal life. The natural world lies below and beneath us, a cause for shame, disgust, or alarm; something smelly and messy to be hidden behind closed doors, drawn curtains, and minty freshness. Or we overcompensate and imagine nature floating angelically in soft focus up above, innocent, noble, balanced, and wise. Like bonobos and chimps, we are the randy descendents of hypersexual ancestors. At first blush, this may seem an overstatement, but it’s a truth that should have become common knowledge long ago. Conventional notions of monogamous, till-death-do-us-part marriage strain under the dead weight of a false narrative that insists we’re something else. What is the essence of human sexuality and how did it get to be that way? In the following pages, we’ll explain how seismic cultural shifts that began about ten thousand years ago rendered the true story of human sexuality so subversive and threatening that for centuries it has been silenced by religious authorities, pathologized by physicians, studiously ignored by scientists, and covered up by moralizing therapists. Deep conflicts rage at the heart of modern sexuality. Our cultivated ignorance is devastating. The campaign to obscure the true nature of our species’ sexuality leaves half our marriages collapsing under an unstoppable tide of swirling sexual frustration, libido-killing boredom, impulsive betrayal, dysfunction, confusion, and shame. Serial monogamy stretches before (and behind) many of us like an archipelago of failure: isolated islands of transitory happiness in a cold, dark sea of disappointment. And how many of the couples who manage to stay together for the long haul have done so by resigning themselves to sacrificing their eroticism on the altar of three of life’s irreplaceable joys: family stability, companionship, and emotional, if not sexual, intimacy? Are those who innocently aspire to these joys cursed by nature to preside over the slow strangulation of their partner’s libido? The Spanish word esposas means both “wives” and “handcuffs.” In English, some men ruefully joke about the ball and chain. There’s good reason marriage is often depicted and mourned as the beginning of the end of a man’s sexual life.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  This contradicts the premise that males are hell-bent on spreading their seed far and wide, while simultaneously protecting their investment in their primary mate/family. Hrdy’s “seeds of confusion” theory posits that concealed ovulation and constant receptivity would benefit a female who had multiple male partners—by preventing them from killing her offspring and inducing them to defend or otherwise aid her children. Hrdy’s vision of human sexual evolution puts females directly at odds with males, who would presumably view fertile females as “individually recognizable and potentially defensible resource packets” too valuable to share. Either way, as depicted in the standard narrative, human sexual prehistory was characterized by deceit, disappointment, and despair. According to this view, both males and females are, by nature, liars, whores, and cheats. At our most basic levels, we’re told, heterosexual men and women have evolved to trick one another while selfishly pursuing zero-sum, mutually antagonistic genetic agendas—even though this demands the betrayal of the people we claim to love most sincerely. Original sin indeed. * But who would argue the gourmand takes less pleasure in her food than the glutton? * We examine the nature of sexual j’ealousy in more detail in Chapter 9 . Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality CHAPTER FOUR The Ape in the Mirror Why should our nastiness be the baggage of an apish past and our kindness uniquely human? Why should we not seek continuity with other animals for our ‘noble’ traits as well? S TEPHEN J AY G OULD ‘Tis from the resemblance of the external actions of animals to those we ourselves perform, that we judge their internal likewise to resemble ours; and the same principle of reasoning, carry’d one step farther, will make us conclude that since our internal actions resemble each other, the causes, from which they are deriv’d, must also be resembling. When any hypothesis, therefore, is advanc’d to explain a mental operation, which is common to men and beasts, we must apply the same hypothesis to both. D AVID H UME, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740) Genetically, the chimps and bonobos at the zoo are far closer to you and the other paying customers than they are to the gorillas, orangutans, monkeys, or anything else in a cage.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  3 Alfred Russel Wallace, who came up with the mechanism underlying natural selection independently of Darwin, experienced his own flash of insight while reading the same essay between bouts of fever in a hut on the banks of a malarial Malaysian river. Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw smelled the Malthusian morbidity underlying natural selection, lamenting, “When its whole significance dawns on you, your heart sinks into a heap of sand within you.” Shaw lamented natural selection’s “hideous fatalism,” and complained of its “damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence, of strength and purpose, of honor and aspiration.” 4 But while Darwin and Wallace made excellent use of the Malthus’s dire calculations, there’s a problem with them. They don’t add up. The tribes of hunters, like beasts of prey, whom they resemble in their mode of subsistence, will… be thinly scattered over the surface of the earth. Like beasts of prey, they must either drive away or fly from every rival, and be engaged in perpetual contests with each other…. The neighboring nations live in a perpetual state of hostility with each other. The very act of increasing in one tribe must be an act of aggression against its neighbors, as a larger range of territory will be necessary to support its increased numbers…. The life of the victor depends on the death of the enemy. T HOMAS M ALTHUS, An Essay on the Principle of Population If his estimates of population growth were even close to correct, Malthus (and thus, Darwin) would have been right to assume that human societies had long been “necessarily confined in room,” resulting in “a perpetual state of hostility” with one another. In Descent of Man, Darwin revisits Malthus’s calculations, writing, “Civilised populations have been known under favourable conditions, as in the United States, to double their numbers in twenty-five years … [At this] rate, the present population of the United States (thirty millions), would in 657 years cover the whole terraqueous globe so thickly, that four men would have to stand on each square yard of surface.” 5 If Malthus had been correct about prehistoric human population doubling every twenty-five years, these assumptions would indeed have been reasonable. But he wasn’t, and they weren’t. We now know that until the advent of agriculture, our ancestors’ overall population doubled not every twenty-five years, but every 250,000 years. Malthus (and thus, Darwin after him) was off by a factor of 10,000. 6 Malthus assumed the suffering he saw around him reflected the eternal, inescapable condition of human and animal life. He didn’t understand that the teeming, desperate streets of London circa 1800 were far from a reflection of prehistoric conditions. A century and a half earlier, Thomas Hobbes had made the same mistake, extrapolating from his own personal experience to conjure a mistaken vision of prehistoric human life. Estimated Global Population 7 Thomas Hobbes was born to terror.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  She tried to get up, to drop backwards; but something huge and merciless struck her on the head and rolled her on her back. 'Lord, forgive me all!' she said, feeling it impossible to struggle. A peasant muttering something was working at the iron above her. And the light by which she had read the book filled with troubles, falsehoods, sorrow, and evil, flared up more brightly than ever before, lighted up for her all that had been in darkness, flickered, began to grow dim, and was quenched for ever. Anna Karenina PART VIII I A LMOST two months had passed. The hot summer was half over, but Sergey Ivanovitch was only just preparing to leave Moscow. Sergey Ivanovitch's life had not been uneventful during this time. A year ago he had finished his book the fruit of six years' labour, 'Sketch of a Survey of the Principles and Forms of Government in Europe and Russia.' Several sections of this book and its introduction had appeared in periodical publications, and other parts had been read by Sergey Ivanovitch to persons of his circle, so that the leading ideas of the work could not be completely novel to the public. But still Sergey Ivanovitch had expected that on its appearance his book would be sure to make a serious impression on society, and if it did not cause a revolution in social science it would, at any rate, make a great stir in the scientific world. After the most conscientious revision the book had last year been published, and had been distributed among the booksellers. Though he asked no one about it, reluctantly and with feigned indifference answered his friends' inquiries as to how the book was going, end did not even inquire of the booksellers how the book was selling, Sergey Ivanovitch was all on the alert, with strained attention, watching for the first impression his book would make in the world and in literature. But a week passed, a second, a third, and in society no impression whatever could be detected. His friends who were specialists and savants, occasionally—unmistakably from politeness—alluded to it. The rest of his acquaintances, not interested in a book on a learned subject, did not talk of it at all. And society generally—just now especially absorbed in other things—was absolutely indifferent. In the press, too, for a whole month there was not a word about his book. Sergey Ivanovitch had calculated to a nicety the time necessary for writing a review, but a month passed, and a second, and still there was silence. Only in the Northern Beetle, in a comic article on the singer Drabanti, who had lost his voice, there was a contemptuous allusion to Koznishev's book, suggesting that the book had been long ago seen through by everyone, and was a subject of general ridicule. At last in the third month, a critical article appeared in a serious review.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Darya Alexandrovna sat down on a garden seat in a corner of the avenue. He stood up facing her. 'I see that she is happy,' he repeated, and the doubt whether she were happy sank more deeply into Darya Alexandrovna's mind. 'But can it last? Whether we have acted rightly or wrongly is another question, but the die is cast,' he said, passing from Russian to French, 'and we are bound together for life. We are united by all the ties of love that we hold most sacred. We have a child, we may have other children. But the law and all the conditions of our position are such that thousands of complications arise which she does not see and does not want to see. And that one can well understand. But I can't help seeing them. My daughter is by law not my daughter, but Karenin's. I cannot bear this falsity!' he said, with a vigorous gesture of refusal, and he looked with gloomy inquiry towards Darya Alexandrovna. She made no answer, but simply gazed at him. He went on— 'One day a son may be born, my son, and he will be legally a Karenin; he will not be the heir of my name nor of my property, and however happy we may be in our home life and however many children we have, there will be no real tie between us. They will be Karenins. You can understand the bitterness and horror of this position! I have tried to speak of this to Anna. It irritates her. She does not understand, and to her I cannot speak plainly of all this. Now look at another side. I am happy, happy in her love, but I must have occupation. I have found occupation, and am proud of what I am doing and consider it nobler than the pursuits of my former companions at court and in the army. And most certainly I would not change the work I am doing for theirs. I am working here, settled in my own place, and I am happy and contented, and we need nothing more to make us happy. I love my work here. Ce n'est pas un pis-aller, on the contrary…' Darya Alexandrovna noticed that at this point in his explanation he grew confused, and she did not quite understand this digression, but she felt that having once begun to speak of matters near his heart, of which he could not speak to Anna, he was now making a clean breast of everything, and that the question of his pursuits in the country fell into the same category of matters near his heart, as the question of his relations with Anna. 'Well, I will go on,' he said, collecting himself. 'The great thing is that as I work I want to have a conviction that what I am doing will not die with me, that I shall have heirs to come after me,—and this I have not.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Your sorrow is a great one, but you ought to find consolation.' 'I am crushed, I am annihilated, I am no longer a man!' said Alexey Alexandrovitch, letting go her hand, but still gazing into her brimming eyes. 'My position is so awful because I can find nowhere, I cannot find within me strength to support me.' 'You will find support; seek it—not in me, though I beseech you to believe in my friendship,' she said, with a sigh. 'Our support is love, that love that He has vouchsafed us. His burden is light,' she said, with the look of ecstasy Alexey Alexandrovitch knew so well. 'He will be your support and your succour.' Although there was in these words a flavour of that sentimental emotion at her own lofty feelings, and that new mystical fervour which had lately gained ground in Petersburg, and which seemed to Alexey Alexandrovitch disproportionate, still it was pleasant to him to hear this now. 'I am weak. I am crushed. I foresaw nothing, and now I understand nothing.' 'Dear friend,' repeated Lidia Ivanovna. 'It's not the loss of what I have not now, it's not that!' pursued Alexey Alexandrovitch. 'I do not grieve for that. But I cannot help feeling humiliated before other people for the position I am placed in. It is wrong, but I can't help it, I can't help it.' 'Not you it was performed that noble act of forgiveness, at which I was moved to ecstacy, and every one else too, but He, working within your heart,' said Countess Lidia Ivanovna, raising her eyes rapturously, 'and so you cannot be ashamed of your act.' Alexey Alexandrovitch knitted his brows, and crooking his hands, he cracked his fingers. 'One must know all the facts,' he said in his thin voice. 'A man's strength has its limits, countess, and I have reached my limits. The whole day I have had to be making arrangements, arrangements about household matters arising (he emphasised the word arising) from my new, solitary position. The servants, the governess, the accounts. . . . These pin-pricks have stabbed me to the heart, and I have not the strength to bear it. At dinner . . . yesterday, I was almost getting up from the dinner-table. I could not bear the way my son looked at me. He did not ask me the meaning of it all, but he wanted to ask, and I could not bear the look in his eyes. He was afraid to look at me, but that is not all . . .' Alexey Alexandrovitch would have referred to the bill that had been brought to him, but his voice shook, and he stopped. That bill on blue paper, for a hat and ribbons, he could not recall without a rush of self-pity. 'I understand, dear friend,' said Lidia Ivanovna. 'I understand it all. Succour and comfort you will find not in me, though I have come only to aid you if I can.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Turning her eyes in the direction Pyotr had turned to look, she saw a factory-hand almost dead-drunk, with hanging head, being led away by a policeman. 'Come, he's found a quicker way,' she thought. 'Count Vronsky and I did not find that happiness either, though we expected so much from it.' And now for the first time Anna turned that glaring light in which she was seeing everything on to her relations with him, which she had hitherto avoided thinking about. 'What was it he sought in me? Not love so much as the satisfaction of vanity.' She remembered his words, the expression of his face that recalled an abject setter-dog, in the early days of their connection. And everything now confirmed this. 'Yes, there was the triumph of success in him. Of course there was love too, but the chief element was the pride of success. He boasted of me. Now that's over. There's nothing to be proud of. Not to be proud of, but to be ashamed of. He has taken from me all he could, and now I am no use to him. He is weary of me and is trying not to be dishonourable in his behaviour to me. He let that out yesterday—he wants divorce and marriage so as to burn his ships. He loves me, but how? The zest is gone, as the English say. That fellow wants everyone to admire him and is very much pleased with himself,' she thought, looking at a red-faced clerk, riding on a riding-school horse. 'Yes, there's not the same flavour about me for him now. If I go away from him, at the bottom of his heart he will be glad.' This was not mere supposition, she saw it distinctly in the piercing light, which revealed to her now the meaning of life and human relations. 'My love keeps growing more passionate and egoistic, while his is waning and waning, and that's why we're drifting apart.' She went on musing. 'And there's no help for it. He is everything for me, and I want him more and more to give himself up to me entirely. And he wants more and more to get away from me. We walked to meet each other up to the time of our love, and then we have been irresistibly drifting in different directions. And there's no altering that. He tells me I'm insanely jealous, and I have told myself that I am insanely jealous; but it's not true. I'm not jealous, but I'm unsatisfied.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  'Not much? You come with me to Paris instead of to Mulhausen. You shall see how to be happy.' 'No, I've done with it all. It's time I was dead.' 'Well, that's a good one!' said Shtcherbatsky, laughing, 'why, I'm only just getting ready to begin.' 'Yes, I thought the same not long ago, but now I know I shall soon be dead.' Levin said what he had genuinely been thinking of late. He saw nothing but death or the advance towards death in everything. But his cherished scheme only engrossed him the more. Life had to be got through somehow till death did come. Darkness had fallen upon everything for him; but just because of this darkness he felt that the one guiding clue in the darkness was his work, and he clutched it and clung to it with all his strength. Anna Karenina PART IV I T HE Karenins, husband and wife, continued living in the same house, met every day, but were complete strangers to one another. Alexey Alexandrovitch made it a rule to see his wife every day, so that the servants might have no grounds for suppositions, but avoided dining at home. Vronsky was never at Alexey Alexandrovitch's house, but Anna saw him away from home, and her husband was aware of it. The position was one of misery for all three; and not one of them would have been equal to enduring this position for a single day, if it had not been for the expectation that it would change, that it was merely a temporary, painful ordeal which would pass over. Alexey Alexandrovitch hoped that this passion would pass, as everything does pass, that everyone would forget about it, and his name would remain unsullied. Anna, on whom the position depended, and for whom it was more miserable than for anyone, endured it because she not merely hoped, but firmly believed, that it would all very soon be settled and come right. She had not the least idea what would settle the position, but she firmly believed that something would very soon turn up now. Vronsky, against his own will or wishes, following her lead, hoped too that something, apart from his own action, would be sure to solve all difficulties. In the middle of the winter Vronsky spent a very tiresome week. A foreign prince, who had come on a visit to Petersburg, was put under his charge, and he had to show him the sights worth seeing. Vronsky was of distinguished appearance; he possessed, moreover, the art of behaving with respectful dignity, and was used to having to do with such grand personages—that was how he came to be put in charge of the prince. But he felt his duties very irksome.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  But he was not aware that he sought work for himself that year, that this was one of the means for keeping shut that secret place where lay hid his feelings towards his wife and son and his thoughts about them, which became more terrible the longer they lay there. If anyone had had the right to ask Alexey Alexandrovitch what he thought of his wife's behaviour, the mild and peaceable Alexey Alexandrovitch would have made no answer, but he would have been greatly angered with any man who should question him on that subject. For this reason there positively came into Alexey Alexandrovitch's face a look of haughtiness and severity whenever anyone inquired after his wife's health. Alexey Alexandrovitch did not want to think at all about his wife's behaviour, and he actually succeeded in not thinking about it at all. Alexey Alexandrovitch's permanent summer villa was in Peterhof, and the Countess Lidia Ivanovna used as a rule to spend the summer there, close to Anna, and constantly seeing her. That year Countess Lidia Ivanovna declined to settle in Peterhof, was not once at Anna Arkadyevna's, and in conversation with Alexey Alexandrovitch hinted at the unsuitability of Anna's close intimacy with Betsy and Vronsky. Alexey Alexandrovitch sternly cut her short, roundly declaring his wife to be above suspicion, and from that time began to avoid Countess Lidia Ivanovna. He did not want to see, and did not see, that many people in society cast dubious glances on his wife; he did not want to understand, and did not understand, why his wife had so particularly insisted on staying at Tsarskoe, where Betsy was staying, and not far from the camp of Vronsky's regiment. He did not allow himself to think about it, and he did not think about it; but all the same, though he never admitted it to himself, and had no proofs, nor even suspicious evidence, in the bottom of his heart he knew beyond all doubt that he was a deceived husband, and he was profoundly miserable about it. How often during those eight years of happy life with his wife Alexey Alexandrovitch had looked at other men's faithless wives and other deceived husbands and asked himself: 'How can people descend to that? how is it they don't put an end to such a hideous position?' But now, when the misfortune had come upon himself, he was so far from thinking of putting an end to the position that he would not recognise it at all, would not recognise it just because it was too awful, too unnatural. Since his return from abroad Alexey Alexandrovitch had twice been at their country villa.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  The reality of his suffering crushed all hopes in Levin and Kitty and in the sick man himself, leaving no doubt, no memory even of past hopes. Without referring to what he had believed in half an hour before, as though ashamed even to recall it, he asked for iodine to inhale in a bottle covered with perforated paper. Levin gave him the bottle, and the same look of passionate hope with which he had taken the sacrament was now fastened on his brother, demanding from him the confirmation of the doctor's words that inhaling iodine worked wonders. 'Is Katya not here?' he gasped, looking round while Levin reluctantly assented to the doctor's words. 'No; so I can say it. . . . It was for her sake I went through that farce. She's so sweet; but you and I can't deceive ourselves. This is what I believe in,' he said, and, squeezing the bottle in his bony hand, he began breathing over it. At eight o'clock in the evening Levin and his wife were drinking tea in their room, when Marya Nikolaevna ran in to them breathlessly. She was pale, and her lips were quivering. 'He is dying!' she whispered. 'I'm afraid he will die this minute.' Both of them ran to him. He was sitting raised up with one elbow on the bed, his long back bent, and his head hanging low. 'How do you feel?' Levin asked in a whisper, after a silence. 'I feel I'm setting off,' Nikolay said with difficulty, but with extreme distinctness, screwing the words out of himself. He did not raise his head, but simply turned his eyes upwards, without their reaching his brother's face. 'Katya, go away!' he added. Levin jumped up, and with a peremptory whisper made her go out. 'I'm setting off,' he said again. 'Why do you think so?' said Levin, so as to say something. 'Because I'm setting off,' he repeated, as though he had a liking for the phrase. 'It's the end.' Marya Nikolaevna went up to him. 'You had better lie down; you'd be easier,' she said. 'I shall lie down soon enough,' he pronounced slowly, 'when I'm dead,' he said sarcastically, wrathfully. 'Well, you can lay me down if you like.' Levin laid his brother on his back, sat down beside him, and gazed at his face, holding his breath. The dying man lay with closed eyes, but the muscles twitched from time to time on his forehead, as with one thinking deeply and intensely. Levin involuntarily thought with him of what it was that was happening to him now, but in spite of all his mental efforts to go along with him he saw by the expression of that calm, stern face that for the dying man all was growing clearer and clearer that was still as dark as ever for Levin. 'Yes, yes, so,' the dying man articulated slowly at intervals.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  And going over the events of the last few days, it seemed to her that she saw in everything a confirmation of this terrible idea. The fact that he had not dined at home yesterday, and the fact that he had insisted on their taking separate sets of rooms at Petersburg, and that even now he was not coming to her alone, as though he were trying to avoid meeting her face to face. 'But he ought to tell me so. I must know that it is so. If I knew it, then I know what I should do,' she said to herself, utterly unable to picture to herself the position she would be in if she were convinced of his not caring for her. She thought he had ceased to love her, she felt close upon despair, and consequently she felt exceptionally alert. She rang for her maid and went to her dressing-room. As she dressed, she took more care over her appearance than she had done all those days, as though he might if he had grown cold to her, fall in love with her again because she had dressed and arranged her hair in the way most becoming to her. She heard the bell ring before she was ready. When she went into the drawing-room it was not he, but Yashvin, who met her eyes. Vronsky was looking through the photographs of her son, which she had forgotten on the table, and he made no haste to look round at her. 'We have met already,' she said, putting her little hand into the huge hand of Yashvin, whose bashfulness was so queerly out of keeping with his immense frame and coarse face. 'We met last year at the races. Give them to me,' she said, with a rapid movement snatching from Vronsky the photographs of her son, and glancing significantly at him with flashing eyes. 'Were the races good this year? Instead of them I saw the races in the Corso in Rome. But you don't care for life abroad,' she said with a cordial smile. 'I know you and all your tastes, though I have seen so little of you.' 'I'm awfully sorry for that, for my tastes are mostly bad,' said Yashvin, gnawing at his left moustache. Having talked a little while, and noticing that Vronsky glanced at the clock, Yashvin asked her whether she would be staying much longer in Petersburg, and unbending his huge figure reached after his cap. 'Not long, I think,' she said hesitatingly, glancing at Vronsky. 'So then we shan't meet again?' 'Come and dine with me,' said Anna resolutely, angry it seemed with herself for her embarrassment, but flushing as she always did when she defined her position before a fresh person. The dinner here is not good, but at least you will see him.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  ' 'I hate your calm. You ought not to have brought me to this. If you had loved me . . . ' 'Anna! How does the question of my love come in?' 'Oh, if you loved me, as I love, if you were tortured as I am! . . .' she said, looking at him with an expression of terror. He was sorry for her, and angry notwithstanding. He assured her of his love because he saw that this was the only means of soothing her, and he did not reproach her in words, but in his heart he reproached her. And the asseverations of his love, which seemed to him so vulgar that he was ashamed to utter them, she drank in eagerly, and gradually became calmer. The next day, completely reconciled, they left for the country. Anna Karenina PART VI I D ARYA A LEXANDROVNA spent the summer with her children at Pokrovskoe, at her sister Kitty Levin's. The house on her own estate was quite in ruins, and Levin and his wife had persuaded her to spend the summer with them. Stepan Arkadyevitch greatly approved of the arrangement. He said he was very sorry his official duties prevented him from spending the summer in the country with his family, which would have been the greatest happiness for him; and remaining in Moscow, he came down to the country from time to time for a day or two. Besides the Oblonskys, with all their children and their governess, the old princess too came to stay that summer with the Levins, as she considered it her duty to watch over her inexperienced daughter in her interesting condition. Moreover Varenka, Kitty's friend abroad, kept her promise to come to Kitty when she was married, and stayed with her friend. All of these were friends or relations of Levin's wife. And though he liked them all, he rather regretted his own Levin world and ways, which was smothered by this influx of the 'Shtcherbatsky element', as he called it to himself. Of his own relations there stayed with him only Sergey Ivanovitch, but he too was a man of the Koznishev and not the Levin stamp, so that the Levin spirit was utterly obliterated. In the Levins' house, so long deserted, there were now so many people that almost all the rooms were occupied, and almost every day it happened that the old princess, sitting down to table, counted them all over, and put the thirteenth grandson or granddaughter at a separate table.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  No working, nor nothing. Only a tie.' This answer had struck Darya Alexandrovna as revolting in spite of the good-natured and pleasing face of the young woman; but now she could not help recalling these words. In those cynical words there was indeed a grain of truth. 'Yes, altogether,' thought Darya Alexandrovna, looking back over her whole existence during those fifteen years of her married life, 'pregnancy, sickness, mental incapacity, indifference to everything, and most of all—hideousness. Kitty, young and pretty as she is, even Kitty has lost her looks; and I when I'm with child become hideous, I know it. The birth, the agony, the hideous agonies, that last moment.. . then the nursing, the sleepless nights, the fearful pains…." Darya Alexandrovna shuddered at the mere recollection of the pain from sore breasts which she had suffered with almost every child. 'Then the children's illnesses, that everlasting apprehension; then bringing them up; evil propensities (she thought of little Masha's crime among the raspberries), education, Latin—it's all so incomprehensible and difficult. And on the top of it all, the death of these children.' And there rose again before her imagination the cruel memory, that always tore her mother's heart, of the death of her last little baby, who had died of croup; his funeral, the callous indifference of all at the little pink coffin, and her own torn heart, and her lonely anguish at the sight of the pale little brow with its projecting temples, and the open, wondering little mouth seen in the coffin at the moment when it was being covered with the little pink lid with a cross braided on it. 'And all this, what's it for? What is to come of it all? That I'm wasting my life, never having a moment's peace, either with child, or nursing a child, for ever irritable, peevish, wretched myself and worrying others, repulsive to my husband, while the children are growing up unhappy, badly educated and penniless. Even now, if it weren't for spending the summer at the Levins', I don't know how we should be managing to live. Of course Kostya and Kitty have so much tact that we don't feel it; but it can't go on. They'll have children, they won't be able to keep us; it's a drag on them as it is. How is papa, who has hardly anything left for himself, to help us? So that I can't even bring the children up by myself, and may find it hard with the help of other people, at the cost of humiliation. Why, even if we suppose the greatest good luck, that the children don't die, and I bring them up somehow. At the very best they'll simply be decent people. That's all I can hope for. And to gain simply that—what agonies, what toil! . . . One's whole life ruined!'

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  But . . .' she opened her lips, and shifted her place in the carriage in the excitement, aroused by the thought that suddenly struck her. 'If I could be anything but a mistress, passionately caring for nothing but his caresses; but I can't and I don't care to be anything else. And by that desire I rouse aversion in him, and he rouses fury in me, and it cannot be different. Don't I know that he wouldn't deceive me, that he has no schemes about Princess Sorokin, that he's not in love with Kitty, that he won't desert me! I know all that, but it makes it no better for me. If without loving me, from duty he'll be good and kind to me, without what I want, that's a thousand times worse than unkindness! That's—hell! And that's just how' it is. For a long while now he hasn't loved me. And where love ends, hate begins. I don't know these streets at all. Hills it seems, and still houses, and houses.. . And in the houses always people and people .. . How many of them, no end, and all hating each other! Come, let me try and think what I want, to make me happy. Well? Suppose I am divorced, and Alexey Alexandrovitch lets me have Seryozha, and I marry Vronsky.' Thinking of Alexey Alexandrovitch, she at once pictured him with extraordinary vividness as though he were alive before her, with his mild, lifeless, dull eyes, the blue veins in his white hands, his intonations and the cracking of his fingers, and remembering the feeling which had existed between them, and which was also called love, she shuddered with loathing. 'Well, I'm divorced, and become Vronsky's wife. Well, will Kitty cease looking at me as she looked at me today? No. And will Seryozha leave off asking and wondering about my two husbands? And is there any new feeling I can awaken between Vronsky and me? Is there possible, if not happiness, some sort of ease from misery? No, no!' she answered now without the slightest hesitation. 'Impossible! We are drawn apart by life, and I make his unhappiness, and he mine, and there's no altering him or me. Every attempt has been made, the screw has come unscrewed. Oh, a beggar-woman with a baby. She thinks I'm sorry for her. Aren't we all flung into the world only to hate each other, and so to torture ourselves and each other? Schoolboys coming—laughing—Seryozha?' she thought. 'I thought, too, that I loved him, and used to be touched by my own tenderness. But I have lived without him, I gave him up for another love, and did not regret the exchange till that love was satisfied.' And with loathing she thought of what she meant by that love. And the clearness with which she saw life now, her own and all men's, was a pleasure to her.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  If I'd cared to. And, indeed, I did care to. There's someone who's pleased with himself,' she thought, as she saw a fat, rubicund gentleman coming towards her. He took her for an acquaintance, and lifted his glossy hat above his bald, glossy head, and then perceived his mistake. 'He thought he knew me. Well, he knows me as well as anyone in the world knows me. I don't know myself. I know my appetites, as the French say. They want that dirty ice-cream, that they do know for certain,' she thought, looking at two boys stopping an ice-cream seller, who took a barrel off his head and began wiping his perspiring face with a towel. 'We all want what is sweet and nice. If not sweetmeats, then a dirty ice. And Kitty's the same—if not Vronsky, then Levin. And she envies me, and hates me. And we shall all hate each other. I Kitty, Kitty me. Yes, that's the truth. "Tiutkin, coiffeur." Je me fais coiffer par Tiutkin. . .. I'll tell him that when he comes,' she thought and smiled. But the same instant she remembered that she had no one now to tell anything amusing to. 'And there's nothing amusing, nothing mirthful, really. It's all hateful. They're singing for vespers, and how carefully that merchant crosses himself! as if he were afraid of missing something. Why these churches and this singing and this humbug? Simply to conceal that we all hate each other like these cab-drivers who are abusing each other so angrily. Yashvin says, "He wants to strip me of my shirt, and I him of his." Yes, that's the truth!' She was plunged in these thoughts, which so engrossed her that she left off thinking of her own position, when the carriage drew up at the steps of her house. It was only when she saw the porter running out to meet her that she remembered she had sent the note and the telegram. 'Is there an answer?' she inquired. 'I'll see this minute,' answered the porter, and glancing into his room, he took out and gave her the thin square envelope of a telegram. 'I can't come before ten o'clock.—Vronsky,' she read. 'And hasn't the messenger come back?' 'No,' answered the porter. 'Then, since it's so, I know what I must do,' she said, and feeling a vague fury and craving for revenge rising up within her, she ran upstairs. 'I'll go to him myself. Before going away for ever, I'll tell him all. Never have I hated anyone as I hate that man!' she thought. Seeing his hat on the rack, she shuddered with aversion. She did not consider that his telegram was an answer to her telegram and that he had not yet received her note.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  'But how is he now?' 'It was a blessing from Providence for us—this Servian war. I'm old, and I don't understand the rights and wrongs of it, but it's come as a providential blessing to him. Of course for me, as his mother, it's terrible; and what's worse, they say ce n'est pas tres bien vu à Pétersbourg. But it can't be helped! It was the one thing that could rouse him. Yashvin—a friend of his—he had lost all he had at cards and he was going to Servia. He came to see him and persuaded him to go. Now it's an interest for him. Do please talk to him a little. I want to distract his mind. He's so low-spirited. And as bad luck would have it, he has toothache too. But he'll be delighted to see you. Please do talk to him; he's walking up and down on that side.' Sergey Ivanovitch said he would be very glad to, and crossed over to the other side of the station. V I N the slanting evening shadows cast by the baggage piled up on the platform, Vronsky in his long overcoat and slouch hat, with his hands in his pockets, strode up and down, like a wild beast in a cage, turning sharply after twenty paces. Sergey Ivanovitch fancied, as he approached him, that Vronsky saw him but was pretending not to see. This did not affect Sergey Ivanovitch in the slightest. He was above all personal considerations with Vronsky. At that moment Sergey Ivanovitch looked upon Vronsky as a man taking an important part in a great cause, and Koznishev thought it his duty to encourage him and express his approval. He went up to him. Vronsky stood still, looked intently at him, recognised him, and going a few steps forward to meet him, shook hands with him very warmly. 'Possibly you didn't wish to see me,' said Sergey Ivanovitch, 'but couldn't I be of use to you?' 'There's no one I should less dislike seeing than you,' said Vronsky. 'Excuse me; and there's nothing in life for me to like.' 'I quite understand, and I merely meant to offer you my services,' said Sergey Ivanovitch, scanning Vronsky's face, full of unmistakable suffering. 'Wouldn't it be of use to you to have a letter to Ristitch—to Milan?' 'Oh no! ' Vronsky said, seeming to understand him with difficulty. 'If you don't mind, let's walk on. It's so stuffy among the carriages. A letter? No, thank you; to meet death one needs no letters of introduction. Nor for the Turks . . .' he said, with a smile that was merely of the lips. His eyes still kept their look of angry suffering.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  What are they all so busy for, trying to show their zeal before me? What is that old Matrona, my old friend, toiling for? (I doctored her, when the beam fell on her in the fire)' he thought, looking at a thin old woman who was raking up the grain, moving painfully with her bare, sun-blackened feet over the uneven, rough floor. 'Then she recovered, but today or tomorrow or in ten years she won't; they'll bury her, and nothing will be left either of her or of that smart girl in the red jacket, who with that skilful, soft action shakes the ears out of their husks. They'll bury her and this piebald horse, and very soon too,' he thought, gazing at the heavily moving, panting horse that kept walking up the wheel that turned under him. 'And they will bury her and Fyodor the thresher with his curly beard full of chaff and his shirt torn on his white shoulders—they will bury him. He's untying the sheaves, and giving orders, and shouting to the women, and quickly setting straight the strap on the moving wheel. And what's more, it's not them alone—me they'll bury too, and nothing will be left. What for?' He thought this, and at the same time looked at his watch to reckon how much they threshed in an hour. He wanted to know this so as to judge by it the task to set for the day. 'It'll soon be one, and they're only beginning the third sheaf,' thought Levin. He went up to the man that was feeding the machine, and shouting over the roar of the machine he told him to put it in more slowly. 'You put in too much at a time, Fyodor. Do you see—it gets choked, that's why it isn't getting on. Do it evenly.' Fyodor, black with the dust that clung to his moist face, shouted something in response, but still went on doing it as Levin did not want him to. Levin, going up to the machine, moved Fyodor aside, and began feeding the corn in himself. Working on till the peasants' dinner-hour, which was not long in coming, he went out of the barn with Fyodor and fell into talk with him, stopping beside a neat yellow sheaf of rye laid on the threshing-floor for seed. Fyodor came from a village at some distance from the one in which Levin had once allotted land to his co-operative association. Now it had been let to a former house-porter. Levin talked to Fyodor about this land and asked whether Platon, a well-to-do peasant of good character belonging to the same village, would not take the land for the coming year. 'It's a high rent; it wouldn't pay Platon, Konstantin Dmitrievitch,' answered the peasant, picking the ears off his sweat-drenched shirt. 'But how does Kirillov make it pay?'

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  ' he was beginning, but he checked himself. 'I must ask what it is you want of me?' 'What I can want? All I can want is that you should not desert me, as you think of doing,' she said, understanding all he had not uttered. 'But that I don't want; that's secondary. I want love, and there is none. So then all is over.' She turned towards the door. 'Stop! st—op!' said Vronsky, with no change in the gloomy lines of his brows, though he held her by the hand. 'What is it all about! I said that we must put off going for three days, and on that you told me I was lying, that I was not an honourable man.' 'Yes, and I repeat that the man who reproaches me with having sacrificed everything for me,' she said, recalling the words of a still earlier quarrel, 'that he's worse than a dishonourable man—he's a heartless man.' 'Oh, there are limits to endurance!' he cried, and hastily let go her hand. 'He hates me, that's clear,' she thought, and in silence, without looking round, she walked with faltering steps out of the room. 'He loves another woman, that's even clearer,' she said to herself as she went into her own room. 'I want love, and there is none. So, then, all is over.' She repeated the words she had said, 'and it must be ended.' 'But how?' she asked herself, and she sat down in a low chair before the looking-glass. Thoughts of where she would go now, whether to the aunt who had brought her up, to Dolly, or simply alone abroad, and of what he was doing now alone in his study; whether this was the final quarrel, or whether reconciliation were still possible; and of what all her old friends at Petersburg would say of her now; and of how Alexey Alexandrovitch would look at it, and many other ideas of what would happen now after the rupture, came into her head; but she did not give herself up to them with all her heart. At the bottom of her heart was some obscure idea that alone interested her, but she could not get clear sight of it. Thinking once more of Alexey Alexandrovitch, she recalled the time of her illness after her confinement, and the feeling which never left her at that time. 'Why didn't I die!' and the words and the feeling of that time came back to her. And all at once she knew what was in her soul. Yes, it was that idea which alone solved all. 'Yes, to die! . . . And the shame and disgrace of Alexey Alexandrovitch and of Seryozha, and my awful shame, it will all be saved by death. To die! and he will feel remorse; will be sorry; will love me; he will suffer on my account.'