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.

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• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  For bonobos, female status is more important than male hierarchy, but even female rank is flexible and not binding. Bonobos have no formalized rituals of dominance and submission like the status displays common to chimps, gorillas, and other primates. Although status is not completely absent, primatologist Takayoshi Kano, who has collected the most detailed information on bonobo behavior in the wild, prefers to use the term “influential” rather than “high-ranking” when describing female bonobos. He believes that females are respected out of affection, rather than because of rank. Indeed, Frans de Waal wonders whether it’s appropriate to discuss hierarchy at all among bonobos, noting, “If there is a female rank order, it is largely based on seniority rather than physical intimidation: older females are generally of higher status than younger ones.”18 Those looking for evidence of matriarchy in human societies might ponder the fact that among bonobos, female “dominance” doesn’t result in the sort of male submission one might expect if it were simply an inversion of the male power structures found among chimps and baboons. The female bonobos use their power differently than male primates. Despite their submissive social role, male bonobos appear to be much better off than male chimps or baboons. As we’ll see in later discussions of female-dominated societies, human males also tend to fare pretty well when the women are in charge. While Sapolsky chose to study baboons because of the chronically high stress levels males suffer as a result of their unending struggles for power, de Waal notes that bonobos confront a different sort of existence, saying, “in view of their frequent sexual activity and low aggression, I find it hard to imagine that males of the species have a particularly stressful time.”19 Crucially, humans and bonobos, but not chimps, appear to share a specific anatomical predilection for peaceful coexistence. Both species have what’s called a repetitive microsatellite (at gene AVPR1A) important to the release of oxytocin. Sometimes called “nature’s ecstasy,” oxytocin is important in pro-social feelings like compassion, trust, generosity, love, and yes, eroticism. As anthropologist and author Eric Michael Johnson explains, “It is far more parsimonious that chimpanzees lost this repetitive microsatellite than for both humans and bonobos to independently develop the same mutation.”20 But there is intense resistance to the notion that relatively low levels of stress and a surfeit of sexual freedom could have characterized the human past. Helen Fisher acknowledges these aspects of bonobo life as well as their many correlates in human behavior, and even makes a sly reference to Morgan’s primal horde:

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I intended to make a guestroom of that hole anyway. It’s the coldest and meanest in the whole house.” “What are you talking about?” I asked, the skin of my cheekbones tensing up (this I take the trouble to note only because my daughter’s skin did the same when she felt that way: disbelief, disgust, irritation). “Are you bothered by Romantic Associations?” queried my wife—in allusion to her first surrender. “Hell no,” said I. “I just wonder where will you put your daughter when you get your guest or your maid.” “Ah,” said Mrs. Humbert, dreaming, smiling, drawing out the “Ah” simultaneously with the raise of one eyebrow and a soft exhalation of breath. “Little Lo, I’m afraid, does not enter the picture at all, at all. Little Lo goes straight from camp to a good boarding school with strict discipline and some sound religious training. And then—Beardsley College. I have it all mapped out, you need not worry.” She went on to say that she, Mrs. Humbert, would have to overcome her habitual sloth and write to Miss Phalen’s sister who taught at St. Algebra. The dazzling lake emerged. I said I had forgotten my sunglasses in the car and would catch up with her. I had always thought that wringing one’s hands was a fictional gesture—the obscure outcome, perhaps, of some medieval ritual; but as I took to the woods, for a spell of despair and desperate meditation, this was the gesture (“look, Lord, at these chains!”) that would have come nearest to the mute expression of my mood. Had Charlotte been Valeria, I would have known how to handle the situation; and “handle” is the word I want. In the good old days, by merely twisting fat Valechka’s brittle wrist (the one she had fallen upon from a bicycle) I could make her change her mind instantly; but anything of the sort in regard to Charlotte was unthinkable. Bland American Charlotte frightened me. My lighthearted dream of controlling her through her passion for me was all wrong. I dared not do anything to spoil the image of me she had set up to adore. I had toadied to her when she was the awesome duenna of my darling, and a groveling something still persisted in my attitude toward her. The only ace I held was her ignorance of my monstrous love for her Lo. She had been annoyed by Lo’s liking me; but my feelings she could not divine. To Valeria I might have said: “Look here, you fat fool, c’est moi qui décide what is good for Dolores Humbert.” To Charlotte, I could not even say (with ingratiating calm): “Excuse me, my dear, I disagree. Let us give the child one more chance.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  First-time travelers to Istanbul, Bali, Gambia, Thailand, or Jamaica may be surprised to see thousands of middle-aged women from Europe and the United States who flock to these places in search of no-strings sexual attention. An estimated eighty thousand women fly to Jamaica looking to “Rent a Rasta” every year.20 The number of female Japanese visitors to the Thai island resort Phuket jumped from fewer than four thousand in 1990 to ten times that just four years later, outnumbering male Japanese tourists significantly. Chartered jets carrying nothing but Japanese women land in Bangkok every week, if not daily. In her book Romance on the Road, Jeannette Belliveau catalogs dozens of destinations frequented by such women. That this sort of behavior would seem unbelievable and embarrassing to most of the young American women filling out questionnaires for their psychology professors is both result and cause of a more general scientific and cultural blindness to the true contours of female sexuality. Of course, there are plenty of men looking for sexual variety on the beaches of Thailand as well, but since that just supports the standard narrative, it seems unimportant. Until it becomes very important. That tiger ain’t go crazy; that tiger went tiger! You know when he was really crazy? When he was riding around on a unicycle with a Hitler helmet on! CHRIS ROCK, talking about a circus tiger that attacked a trainer By temperament, which is the real law of God, many men are goats and can’t help committing adultery when they get a chance; whereas there are numbers of men who, by temperament, can keep their purity and let an opportunity go by if the woman lacks in attractiveness. MARK TWAIN, Letters from the Earth A man we know—we’ll call him Phil—could be considered a living icon of male achievement.* In his early forties, handsome, he’s been married to Helen, a gorgeous, accomplished physician, for almost twenty years. They have three brilliant, beautiful daughters. Phil and a friend started a small software business in their late twenties and now, fifteen years later, they’ve both got more money than they’ll ever be able to spend. Until recently, Phil lived in a big, beautiful house on a hill overlooking a wooded valley. But Phil’s life was, as he puts it, “a disaster waiting to happen.” Disaster struck when Helen discovered the affair he’d been having with a work colleague. Unsurprisingly, she felt deeply betrayed and expressed her outrage by locking him out of the house, refusing even to let him see their children until the lawyers had finished their dismal task. Phil’s seemingly perfect life came crashing down around him.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  The first blows felt warm and good to me. I felt my buttocks flinch and tighten and it seemed I had never experienced such full swelling pleasure, unsatisfied as it was, in my penis. "Of course I was soon groaning from the blows, and with my efforts to conceal the sound, the Queen kissed my face and told me that though my lips must remain sealed, I should let her know how I suffered for her. I understood her at once. My buttocks were now smarting and throbbing with pain. I arched my back, my knees opening all the more, my legs stiff and aching from the strain of the squatting, and I moaned without reservation, my moans growing louder with each crack of the paddle. Understand, nothing restrained me. I was unshackled and ungagged. "All rebelliousness was gone from me. When next the Queen ordered me paddled about the room, I was only too willing. She threw down a handful of small gold balls the size of large purple grapes, and she bid me bring each one to her, just as you were commanded to fetch the roses. The stable boy, my groom as she called him, was to achieve no more than five cracks of the paddle before I had placed one in her hand, or she should be very displeased with me. These gold balls had rolled far and wide, and you cannot imagine how I scurried to gather them. I ran from the paddle as though it were burning me. Of course I was tender and sore by this time, and broken out in plenty of hard welts, but it was to please her that I hurried. "I brought the first one with only three blows. I was very proud. But as I put it in her hand I saw she had put on a Black leather glove, the fingers of which were traced with small emeralds. She bid me turn around and part my legs and show her my anus. I obeyed at once, and immediately felt the shock of those leather sheathed fingers opening my anus. "As I told you, I had been raped and washed out repeatedly by my crude captors in the kitchen. Yet this was a new exposure to me, to be opened thus by her, and so simply and thoughtlessly, without the violence of rape. It made me feel softened with love and weak and totally her possession. At once I realized she was forcing the gold ball which I had retrieved into my anus. And now she instructed me that I was to hold it inside me, unless I wanted her fierce displeasure. "I had no to fetch another. The paddle came at me quickly. I hurried, brought back another gold ball, was made to turn around, and it was forced into me.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I may not be back at Beardsley if and when you return. With one thing and another, one being you know who, and the other not being who you think you know, Dad wants me to go to school in Paris for one year while he and Fullbright are around. “As expected, poor Poet stumbled in Scene III when arriving at the bit of French nonsense. Remember? Ne manque pas de dire à ton amant, Chimène, comme le lac est beau car il faut qu’il t’y mène . Lucky beau! Qu’il t’y —What a tongue-twister! Well, be good, Lollikins. Best love from your Poet, and best regards to the Governor. Your Mona. P.S. Because of one thing and another, my correspondence happens to be rigidly controlled. So better wait till I write you from Europe.” (She never did as far as I know. The letter contained an element of mysterious nastiness that I am too tired to-day to analyze. I found it later preserved in one of the Tour Books, and give it here à titre documentaire . I read it twice.) I looked up from the letter and was about to—There was no Lo to behold. While I was engrossed in Mona’s witchery, Lo had shrugged her shoulders and vanished. “Did you happen to see—” I asked of a hunchback sweeping the floor near the entrance. He had, the old lecherer. He guessed she had seen a friend and had hurried out. I hurried out too. I stopped—she had not. I hurried on. I stopped again. It had happened at last. She had gone for ever. In later years I have often wondered why she did not go for ever that day. Was it the retentive quality of her new summer clothes in my locked car? Was it some unripe particle in some general plan? Was it simply because, all things considered, I might as well be used to convey her to Elphinstone—the secret terminus, anyway? I only know I was quite certain she had left me for ever. The noncommittal mauve mountains half encircling the town seemed to me to swarm with panting, scrambling, laughing, panting Lolitas who dissolved in their haze. A big W made of white stones on a steep talus in the far vista of a cross street seemed the very initial of woe. The new and beautiful post office I had just emerged from stood between a dormant movie house and a conspiracy of poplars. The time was 9 A.M. mountain time. The street was Main Street. I paced its blue side peering at the opposite one: charming it into beauty, was one of those fragile young summer mornings with flashes of glass here and there and a general air of faltering and almost fainting at the prospect of an intolerably torrid noon.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  “I don’t know. You seem to think you have a lot of problems. And I just don’t get it. You’re a smart girl,” Reva said. “You can do anything you put your mind to.” She got up and fished in her bag for her lip gloss. I could see her eyeing the sweaty bottle of rosé. “Come out with me tonight, pretty please? My friend Jackie from Pilates is having a birthday party at a gay bar in the Village. I wasn’t going to go, but if you come with me it could be fun. It’s only seven thirty. And it’s Friday night. Let’s drink this and go out. The night is young!” “I’m tired, Reva,” I said, peeling the wrapper off the cap of a bottle of NyQuil. “Oh, come on.” “You go without me.” “You want to stay here and sleep your life away? That’s it?” “If you knew what would make you happy, wouldn’t you do it?” I asked her. “See, you do want to be happy. Then why did you tell me that being happy is dumb?” she asked. “You’ve said that to me more than once.” “Let me be dumb,” I said, glugging the NyQuil. “You go be smart and tell me how great it is. I’ll be here, hibernating.” Reva rolled her eyes. “It’s natural,” I told her. “People used to hibernate all the time.” “People never hibernated. Where are you getting this?” She could look really pathetic when she was outraged. She got up and stood there holding her stupid knockoff Kate Spade bag or whatever it was, her hair pulled back into a ponytail and crowned with a useless, plastic, tortoiseshell headband. She was always getting her hair blown out, her eyebrows waxed into thin arched parentheses, her fingernails painted various shades of pink and purple, as though all of this made her a wonderful person. “It’s not up for discussion, Reva. This is what I’m doing. If you can’t accept it, then you don’t have to.” “I accept it,” she said, her voice dropping. “I just think it’s a shame to miss out on a fun evening.” She wrestled her white feet into her fake Louboutin stilettos. “You know, in Japan, companies have special rooms for businessmen to take naps in. I read about it in GQ. I’ll check on you tomorrow. I love you,” she said, grabbing the bottle of rosé on her way out. • • • I DREAMT A LOT at the beginning, especially when the summer started in full force and the air in my apartment got thick with the sickly chill of AC. Dr. Tuttle said my dreams might indicate how well certain medications were working. She suggested I keep a log of my dreams as a way of tracking the “waning intensity of suffering.” “I don’t like the term ‘dream journal,’” she told me at our in-person appointment in June. “I prefer ‘night vision log.’”

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  Forty-one days ago I took a transgender man I know to a hotel I was reviewing. We talked, over crab and pork belly, about friends we knew who are poly, about the couples I’m a secondary to and how I feel this suits me. Over cocktails in the bar we talked about relationship anarchy. Over wine in the hotel room, as we leaned out of our balcony window, I turned to him and asked him, clumsily, if it would be okay if I kissed him? And he told me he had wanted to kiss me for ages. And we kissed, drunk and stoned, clumsily, and found our way to the bed and it didn’t solve anything. In the morning he seemed distant and impatient to get home, and I wondered if this was because I hadn’t shared as much as he had in that bed. Because he let me touch the parts of him I would have had a problem naming, while I kept my briefs on the whole time. Since sixty-three days ago, there is no way around the problem for me. When someone touches it, the part of me I hate to name, I do not see my former wife, I do not recall the way the woman who came after you touched me, I remember how you grabbed me, how you told me that you wouldn’t normally do this and opened your mouth, and your anger and incomprehension when I screamed. Sixty-four days ago I would have found a way around that. I believe in relationship anarchy because of what you did to me. Because of what Donald Winnicott called cathexis. To cathect is to invest, emotionally, libidinally, in hope of reward. Because of what you did, I cannot do this, because it is how you treated me: as someone who would reward you by responding the same way as the men you were used to. When I tell people this, I never know if I am making sense. All I know is that I cannot treat the people that I love as things I take from, that I can see sex only as a process of surrender. But there are parts of me I hoard, parts of me I will not give away, nor sell at any price, because you tried to steal them. Twenty-eight days ago, at a party at my apartment, I kissed a trans woman I barely knew, and she kissed me better than anyone has in my life, better than the woman who came after you, better than my wife, and this may have been because I was on molly but the way she touched my back was heavenly and she solved nothing. I still fall asleep feeling broken. I still come to with no memory of where the past hour has gone when I read or see something that makes me remember. I still see no way I can live with this. I still wish it was sixty-four days ago.

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  I turned my back on our worn-out house, the stage of my failure, and walked to the far edge of our property marked with a stone wall. On hands and knees I parted the dead leaves, clawed at the soil with the vibrator’s purple tip. The surface was harder than I thought, not yet thawed from the harsh winter, so I stabbed it repeatedly against the earth until the ground broke into chunks, triggering the instrument on. My digging fingers finished the dirty work. When the hole was deep enough, I dropped it in. That implement. For the lonely, unwanted. I mashed dirt, leaves, sticks, whatever I could find until all that was left was the muffled hum of a buried thing. I sat back against the wall, and my breath turned to gulps. The fresh smell of turned soil in my throat. And my hands, my hands. I wrapped them around my shins and pulled in tight and cried and thought about how when you’re hurt, way before you say it, you have to feel it. How wounded animals in the woods look for a quiet place. How they stay without moving for days. What I Told MyselfVanessa MártirI DON’T REMEMBER WHO TOLD ME WHAT HAPPENED TO MY mother, but I think part of me has always known. I knew when she beat me until I was a shivering ball in a corner. I knew when she held a knife to me that time I was five, pleading to her partner Millie, “Dare me and I’ll kill this little bitch.” She stabbed me repeatedly—not hard enough to break skin but hard enough that it hurt. Hard enough to terrify me. Hard enough to make me think that she really wanted to kill me. Hard enough to let me know that something had happened to her and she never got over it. I WAS NINETEEN, A STUDENT AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN love with a drug dealer from Washington Heights. I found out that night that he’d cheated on me for the umpteenth time, and I didn’t want him to touch me, but he still did. I told myself it wasn’t rape because we were in a relationship. It wasn’t rape because I still loved him. It wasn’t rape because I didn’t fight him off. It wasn’t rape because I stayed with him after. It didn’t matter that I kept whispering no, no, no. It didn’t matter that I sobbed the entire time. At least I wasn’t raped like Mom was, I told myself.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  But I was determined to sleep it away. “You’re still obsessed with Trevor, aren’t you,” Reva said, slurping from her can. “I think I have a tumor,” I replied, “in my brain.” “Forget Trevor,” Reva said. “You’ll meet someone better, if you ever leave your apartment.” She sipped and poured and went on about how “it’s all about your attitude,” and that “positive thinking is more powerful than negative thinking, even in equal amounts.” She’d recently read a book called How to Attract the Man of Your Dreams Using Self-hypnosis, and so she went on to explain to me the difference between “wish fulfillment” and “manifesting your own reality.” I tried not to listen. “Your problem is that you’re passive. You wait around for things to change, and they never will. That must be a painful way to live. Very disempowering,” she said, and burped. I had taken some Risperdal. I was feeling woozy. “Have you ever heard the expression ‘eat shit or die’?” I asked. Reva unscrewed the tequila and poured more into her can. “It’s ‘eat shit and die,’” she said. We didn’t talk for a while. My mind drifted back to Trevor, the way he unbuttoned his shirts and pulled at his tie, the gray drapes in his bedroom, the flare of his nostrils in the mirror when he clipped his nose hairs, the smell of his aftershave. I was grateful when Reva broke the silence. “Well, will you come out for drinks on Saturday at least? It’s my birthday.” “I can’t, Reva,” I said. “I’m sorry.” “I’m telling people to meet up at Skinny Kitty at nineish.” “I’m sure you’ll have a better time if I’m not there to bum you out.” “Don’t be that way,” Reva crooned drunkenly. “Soon we’ll be old and ugly. Life is short, you know? Die young and leave a beautiful corpse. Who said that?” “Someone who liked fucking corpses.” • • • REVA WAS ONLY a week older than me. On August 20, 2000, I turned twenty- five in my apartment in a medicated haze, smoking stale menthols on the toilet and reading an old Architectural Digest. At some point I fumbled in my makeup drawer for eyeliner to circle things on the pages that I found appealing—the blank corners of rooms, the sharp glass crystals hanging from a chandelier. I heard my cell phone ring but I didn’t answer it. “Happy birthday,” Reva said in her message. “I love you.” • • • AS SUMMER DWINDLED, my sleep got thin and empty, like a room with white walls and tepid air-conditioning. If I dreamt at all, I dreamt that I was lying in bed. It felt superficial, even boring at times. I’d take a few extra Risperdal and Ambien when I got antsy, thinking about my past.

• From Querelle (1953)

  He drawled out that affirmative, making it seem a matter so self-evident that it was not worth talking about. At the same time he crossed his legs and took out a cigarette. His whole demeanor seemed an attempt to prove, though it wasn't clear to whom, that the importance of the moment did not lie in his affirmative answer, but in the most trivial gesture. ''Smoke?" "Why not." They lit their cigarettes, took a first puff, and Querelle returned his forcefully through the nose, expressing by those tough smoke-spewing nostrils his sense of victory over himself, a well-kept secret that permitted him to deal so familiarly with a cop-after all, something almost like an officer. The police authorities quickly reached the assumption that both the murders had been comm�tted by Gil. Their belief was confirmed when the other masons saw, and identified, the cigarette lighter found lying in the grass near the assassinated sailor. At first, the police considered a revenge motive; then they thought of the possibility of some love drama; and finally arrived at the notion of sexual aberration plain and simple. All the rooms in the Brest Police Headquarters emanated an effiuvium of despair, yet it was of a peculiarly consoling kind. The walls were decorated with some photographs provided by the Department of Criminal Anthropometry, and with a few "Wanted" notices for unapprehended criminals, specifically those who were suspected of having reached some port town. The tables and desks were laden with dossiers containing statements and important memoranda. From the moment he entered the office, Gil felt like sinking in an ocean of gravity. He 146 I JEAN GENET. knew this feeling from the very moment of his arrest by Mario : when the detective grabbed hold of his sleeve, Gil disengaged himself, but as totally prescient of that reaction Mario repeated, more exactly, simply continued his gesture, squeezing the bicep with such authority that the young mason had to give in to it. It was all there, in the brief moment between the two "apprehensions" -the first one repulsed, the second one decisive-: all the glory of the game, the chase, the irony, the cruelty, the sense of justice that go into building that specific gravity of the police, of the soul of a cop, of the total despair of Gil Turko. He pulled himself together, not to succumb to it, seeing that the Inspector who was with Mario had a very young face, positively radiating a melange of choler and pleasure at the kill. Gil said : "What d'you want from me?" Shaking a little, he added : ". . . Sir . . ." The young Inspector provided the answer: "Don't worry, buddy. We'll show you." From the arrogance of that Gil realized with amazement that this young copper was delighted with Mario's decisive action, that of imprisoning the murderer's hands in a pair of handcuffs.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Although Wilson never argued that genetic inheritance alone creates psychological phenomena, merely that evolved tendencies influence cognition and behavior, his moderate insights were quickly obscured by the immoderate disputes they sparked. Many social scientists at the time believed humans to be nearly completely cultural creatures, blank slates to be marked by society.19 But Wilson’s perspective was highly attractive to other academics eager to introduce a more rigorous scientific methodology into fields they considered overly subjective and distorted by liberal political views and wishful thinking. Decades later, the two sides of the debate remain largely entrenched in their extreme positions: human behavior as genetically determined versus human behavior as socially determined. As you might expect, the truth—and the most valuable science being done in the field—lies somewhere in between these two extremes. Today, self-proclaimed EP “realists” argue that it’s ancient human nature that leads us to wage war on our neighbors, deceive our spouses, and abuse our stepchildren. They argue that rape is an unfortunate, but largely successful reproductive strategy and that marriage amounts to a no-win struggle of mutually assured disappointment. Romantic love is reduced to a chemical reaction luring us into reproductive entanglements parental love keeps us from escaping. Theirs is an all-encompassing narrative claiming to explain it all by reducing every human interaction to the reptilian pursuit of self-interest.20 Of course, there are many scientists working in evolutionary psychology, primatology, evolutionary biology, and other fields who don’t sign on to the narrative we’re critiquing in these pages, or whose paradigms overlap at some points but differ at others. We hope they’ll forgive us if it sometimes seems we oversimplify in order to more clearly illustrate the broad outlines of the various paradigms without getting lost in the weeds of subtle differences. (Readers seeking more detailed information are encouraged to consult the endnotes.) Evolutionary psychology’s standard narrative contains several clanging contradictions, but one of the most discordant involves female libido. Females, we’re told again and again, are the choosy, reserved sex. Men spend their energies trying to impress women—flaunting expensive watches, packaging themselves in shiny new sports cars, clawing their way to positions of fame, status, and power—all to convince coy females to part with their closely guarded sexual favors. For women, the narrative holds that sex is about the security—emotional and material—of the relationship, not the physical pleasure. Darwin agreed with this view. The “coy” female who “requires to be courted” is deeply embedded in his theory of sexual selection. If women were as libidinous as men, we’re told, society itself would collapse. Lord Acton was only repeating what everyone knew in 1875 when he declared, “The majority of women, happily for them and for society, are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind.”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  And whatever you feel is right.” The distraught father went on to say he would go and fetch his delicate daughter immediately after the funeral, and would do his best to give her a good time in totally different surroundings, perhaps a trip to New Mexico or California—granted, of course, he lived. So artistically did I impersonate the calm of ultimate despair, the hush before some crazy outburst, that the perfect Farlows removed me to their house. They had a good cellar, as cellars go in this country; and that was helpful, for I feared insomnia and a ghost. Now I must explain my reasons for keeping Dolores away. Naturally, at first, when Charlotte had just been eliminated and I re-entered the house a free father, and gulped down the two whiskey-and-sodas I had prepared, and topped them with a pint or two of my “pin,” and went to the bathroom to get away from neighbors and friends, there was but one thing in my mind and pulse—namely, the awareness that a few hours hence, warm, brown-haired, and mine, mine, mine, Lolita would be in my arms, shedding tears that I would kiss away faster than they could well. But as I stood wide-eyed and flushed before the mirror, John Farlow tenderly tapped to inquire if I was okay—and I immediately realized it would be madness on my part to have her in the house with all those busybodies milling around and scheming to take her away from me. Indeed, unpredictable Lo herself might—who knows?— show some foolish distrust of me, a sudden repugnance, vague fear and the like—and gone would be the magic prize at the very instant of triumph. Speaking of busybodies, I had another visitor—friend Beale, the fellow who eliminated my wife. Stodgy and solemn, looking like a kind of assistant executioner, with his bulldog jowls, small black eyes, thickly rimmed glasses and conspicuous nostrils, he was ushered in by John who then left us, closing the door upon us, with the utmost tact. Suavely saying he had twins in my stepdaughter’s class, my grotesque visitor unrolled a large diagram he had made of the accident. It was, as my stepdaughter would have put it, “a beaut,” with all kinds of impressive arrows and dotted lines in varicolored inks. Mrs. H. H.’s trajectory was illustrated at several points by a series of those little outline figures—doll-like wee career girl or WAC—used in statistics as visual aids. Very clearly and conclusively, this route came into contact with a boldly traced sinuous line representing two consecutive swerves—one which the Beale car made to avoid the Junk dog (dog not shown), and the second, a kind of exaggerated continuation of the first, meant to avert the tragedy.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  • • • I SPENT THAT FIRST WEEK in a soft twilight zone. I didn’t leave the apartment at all, not even for coffee. I kept a jar of macadamia nuts by the bed, ate a few whenever I rose to the surface, sucked a bottle of Poland Spring, gravitated to the toilet maybe once a day. I didn’t answer the phone— nobody but Reva ever called me anyway. She left me messages so long and breathless that they got cut off midsentence. Usually she called while she was on the StairMaster at her gym. One night, she came over unannounced. The doorman told her he thought I’d gone out of town. “I’ve been worried,” Reva said, barging in with a bottle of sparkling rosé. “Are you sick? Have you been eating? Did you take time off of work?” “I quit,” I lied. “I want to devote more time to my own interests.” “What interests? I didn’t know you had interests.” She sounded utterly betrayed. She stumbled a little on her heels. “Are you drunk?” “You really quit your job?” she asked, kicking her shoes off and flopping down on the armchair. “I’d rather eat shit than have to work for that cunt one more day,” I told her. “Didn’t you say she was married to a prince or something?” “Exactly,” I answered. “But that was just a rumor anyway.” “So you’re not sick?” “I’m resting.” I lay down on the sofa to demonstrate. “That makes sense,” Reva said, nodding compliantly, although I could tell she was suspicious. “Take some time off and think about your next move. Oprah says we women rush into decisions because we don’t have faith that something better will ever come along. And that’s how we get stuck in dissatisfying careers and marriages. Amen! ” “I’m not making a career move,” I started to explain, but I went no further. “I’m taking some time off. I’m going to sleep for a year.” “And how are you going to do that?” I pulled a vial of Ativan out from between the sofa cushions, unscrewed the cap, and fished out two pills. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Reva squirming. I chewed the pills up—simply to horrify her—swallowed and gagged, then stuffed the vial back between the cushions and lay down and closed my eyes. “Well, I’m glad you have a life plan. But to be honest,” Reva began, “I’m concerned about your health. You’ve lost at least three pounds since you started taking all those medications.” Reva was expert at guessing the weights of things and people. “What about the long term? Are you going to take pills for the rest of your life?” “I’m not thinking that far ahead. And I might not live that long.” I yawned. “Don’t say that,” Reva said. “Look at me. Please.”

• From Querelle (1953)

  When it happened, it was a horrifying feeling. Deprived of their protection-whose reality then seemed doubtful, beyond his control, or perhaps really reducible to that insignificant form of a few bent wires-he suddenly stood poor and naked among men. But, sure enough, he got hold of himself again. With one clack of the heel on the fierce deck of the V engeur he regained that region of the Elysian Fields were he would find, ranged all about him, the true manifestations of his bygone murders. But always before that his despair at being a "failure" caused him to commit numerous cruelties he thought were caresses. The other crewmen referred to him-among themselves-as a berserker. Having never really experienced either friendship or camaraderie, he made mistakes. He would spring sudden jokes on his mates in order to gain their approval and end up offending them. Being hurt, they lashed out, and as Querelle persisted, he himself tended to fly into a rage. Yet, in a certain sense, true sympathy may be engendered by cruelty and hatred. The others started admiring Querelle's brutal humor while hating him. Now he saw the Lieutenant who was still watching him. He smiled and started walking over to him. Their being far away from France, the freedom granted the men on this day of rest, the crushing heat, and the general air of festivity aboard the ship at anchor in the Roads, all contributed to relax the rigors of discipline between officers and crewmen. Querelle said : "Lieutenant, would you like a tangerine?" The officer smiled, took a step in his direction. They went into a kind of paso doble, perfectly synchronized : while Querelle raised his hand to detach a tangerine from the branch, the Lieutenant took l).is hand out of his pocket and extended it slowly toward the crewman, who then, with a smile, deposited 135 I QUERELLE his gift in the outstretched palm. More than anything, the very harmony of the two gestures tugged at the Lieutenant's heartstrings. He said : .. lnank ''ou, sailor." .. . "Don't mention it, sir." Querelle turned back to his buddies, pulled off a few more tangerines and threw them over to them . The Lieutenant had walked off slowly and stood peeling the fruit with an affectation of carefree absent-mindedness, while telling himself, with great pleasure, that his lo\'e relationship with Querelle would surely remain pure, as their first gesture of union had just been accomplished according to the laws of such touching harmony that it could only have been created by their two souls, or even bette:-, by a unique power-love itself-that had but one focus, but two rays . . . He glanced warily to left and right, and then, having now quite turned his back to the group of sailors, and certain that no one could observe him, he popped the whole tangerine into his mouth and held it there for a moment, one check bulging.

• From Querelle (1953)

  You draw a little blood? Well, a man's got a right. He's got a right. A little more blood, and yet a little more . . . ?" Thus it was possible to make the crime dwindle right down to that ineffable point where what is permissible turns into what is not, firmly embedded in the sequence of events, not detachable from it, but causing the murder to be committed. Gil exerted himself to scale it down, to make it as tenuous as possible. He forced himself to contemplate that point on the dividing line between "OK" and "too late." But he found himself unable to resolve the question : "Why kill Theo?" The murder remained pointless, it remained a mistake, and one of the kind you could not correct. Gil abandoned this initial method, but not his intention to make the crime disappear. Very quickly, after some detours and false starts, thoughts of other events in his life, his mind latched on to a new notion : all he had to do, to 155 I QUERELLE retrieve and erase this useless crime, was to commit a useful one ( the same) . A crime that would make him rich, and thus render the precedent worthy, as any precedent is that results in a definitive achievement. But who should be the victim? He just didn't know anybody rich. Well, he would have to get out of Brest, take the train, get to Rennes or perhaps even Paris where the people were wealthy, walked about in the streets, patiently or impatiently waiting for a robber to strike them down. This acceptance of their destiny, their voluntary wait for murder, lit up Gil's mind in very bright lights. In the great cities, surely, those capitalists positively yearned for the criminal to arrive, to kill them and to make off with their gold. But here, in this godforsaken little town, in this hide-out, he was doomed to drag along the cumbersome and useless weight of his first murder. Several times he felt the urge to tum himself in to the police. However, he had retained his childhood fear of gendarmes and their funereal uniforms. He was afraid they would immediately stick him under the guillotine and chop his head off. He took pity on his mother. He asked her for her forgiveness. He relived his early youth, his apprenticeship with his father, his first jobs on building sites in the South of France. Every detail of his life now seemed to presage a tragic destiny.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “A—a—a!” groaned Vronsky, clutching at his head. “Ah! what have I done!” he cried. “The race lost! And my fault! shameful, unpardonable! And the poor darling, ruined mare! Ah! what have I done!” A crowd of men, a doctor and his assistant, the officers of his regiment, ran up to him. To his misery he felt that he was whole and unhurt. The mare had broken her back, and it was decided to shoot her. Vronsky could not answer questions, could not speak to anyone. He turned, and without picking up his cap that had fallen off, walked away from the race course, not knowing where he was going. He felt utterly wretched. For the first time in his life he knew the bitterest sort of misfortune, misfortune beyond remedy, and caused by his own fault. Yashvin overtook him with his cap, and led him home, and half an hour later Vronsky had regained his self-possession. But the memory of that race remained for long in his heart, the cruelest and bitterest memory of his life. Chapter 26

• From Querelle (1953)

  \Veil, she would hang herself. She was brea thing so hard that her chest, in expanding, seemed to raise her entire body upward, and she looked like someone about to begin her Ascension . Dry-eyed, behind burning eyelids, she stared at the terrifying void of mirrors and lights, wh ile following, in her mind, the circular movement of these themes of despair: "Even when they are apart, they'll call for each other, from one end of the world to the other . . . " "If his brother goes to sea, Robert's face will always be turned to the west. I'll be n1arried to a sunflower . . . " ''The smiles and the insults fly back and forth between them, wind themselves around them, tie them together. No one will ever know wh ich one is the stronger. And their boy just passes through all that, not making any difference . . . " In the precious palace of her white body of flesh like ivory and mother-of-pearl, l\Jadame Lysiane watched the unrol ling of grea t streatners of watered silk, on wh ich those sumptuous phrases had been embroidered, and she deciphered 276 I JEAN GENET them with fear and awe. She witnessed the secret history of the inseparable lovers. Their fights were riddled with smiles, their games adorned with insults. Laughter and insults became interchangeable. They hurt each other, laughing. And to this very door, to Madame Lysiane's threshold they keep on weaving themselves together in their rites. They have their feasts, to which they invite only themselves. Every minute they celebrate their nuptials. The thought of setting fire to the building came back, clearer than before. To concentrate on it, to decide where she would pour the gasoline, Madame Lysiane let her body slump into a state of self-oblivion; but as soon as she had made her decision, she pulled herself together again. With both hands she examined· the edges of her corset, through the material of her dress. She got up. "Have to look good and straighten up." As soon as the thought crossed her mind, she felt deeply ashamed. Then, numbly, Madame Lysiane saw her own words written out in front of her, in her own inimitable grammar. Thinking of her lovers : uThey is singing." Looking at Querelle, Madame Lysiane no longer felt what fencing masters call the hunger of the rapier. She was alone. Document Outline Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraphs Querelle

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  Today, it takes two jobs in an insecure economy to make the mortgage payment, feed and clothe a family, and keep up a fifty-four-year-old tract house. Often in my town, those jobs are held by the second generation of immigrant families—like the Latino, Filipino, and Chinese families in my neighborhood. They bring a different dynamic to the suburban experience, more like the urban immigrants of the first half of the twentieth century. My neighborhood struggles economically, but I’m not sure that its struggles are worse than what they were in the past. Some families still live paycheck to paycheck. Maybe more are only a family crisis away from falling out of the not-quite-middle-class into something less secure. These anxieties affect this suburb. But the loyalty of these diverse residents remains strong enough to bring out 400 volunteer park coaches in the fall and 600 to clean up the weedy yards of the disabled on Volunteer Day and over 2,000 to sprawl on lawn chairs and blankets to listen to concerts in the park every summer. Is southern California still the “future ”? In some ways, it is. As metropolitan regions reach their limits, either geographically (like Los Angeles) or because of growth boundaries set by voters, more places will become like Los Angeles. A moderately dense assemblage of continuous suburban landscape is the future of many metropolitan regions. Los Angeles just got there first. But is that the future that anyone wants? Paradoxically, some places consciously chose the fate of Los Angeles. In the mid-1990s, the growth management agency for Portland, Oregon, set out to replicate some of the features of southern California, and they’re succeeding. Portland, by design, is becoming more like Los Angeles. Can you compare the suburban residents of the 1950s with those of today? Have we become more resentful of our neighbors than we once were ? Mass-produced suburbs were new then. No one knew what would happen when tens of thousands of working-class husbands and wives were thrown together in a suburb and expected to make a fit place to live. It’s hard for us to imagine all the demands made on them. We’re unprepared to see them as uncertain but courageous actors in the making of the places in which they chose to live. Newly made suburban places today are governed by the hard certainties of a homeowners association. The accommodations and politics built into suburban life in the 1950s have been replaced with the rigidity and authority of contract law. Citizens are being made into mere consumers. The loss is obvious. You don’t deal with real violence in Holy Land. You stay away from the crimes that have marred your town and other suburbs . In the tabloid and nightly news versions of our lives—in stories that swing from the heartwarming to the horrific—suburban crime is the final proof that no place is safe, every comfort is an illusion, and all efforts at making a community are merely ironic. These are despairing beliefs.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “There’s only one point to be considered: is either of the parties desirous of forming new ties? If not, it is very simple,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, feeling more and more free from constraint. Alexey Alexandrovitch, scowling with emotion, muttered something to himself, and made no answer. All that seemed so simple to Stepan Arkadyevitch, Alexey Alexandrovitch had thought over thousands of times. And, so far from being simple, it all seemed to him utterly impossible. Divorce, the details of which he knew by this time, seemed to him now out of the question, because the sense of his own dignity and respect for religion forbade his taking upon himself a fictitious charge of adultery, and still more suffering his wife, pardoned and beloved by him, to be caught in the fact and put to public shame. Divorce appeared to him impossible also on other still more weighty grounds.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Are you certainly going tomorrow then?” asked Vronsky. “Yes, I suppose so,” answered Anna, as it were wondering at the boldness of his question; but the irrepressible, quivering brilliance of her eyes and her smile set him on fire as she said it. Anna Arkadyevna did not stay to supper, but went home. Chapter 24 “Yes, there is something in me hateful, repulsive,” thought Levin, as he came away from the Shtcherbatskys’, and walked in the direction of his brother’s lodgings. “And I don’t get on with other people. Pride, they say. No, I have no pride. If I had any pride, I should not have put myself in such a position.” And he pictured to himself Vronsky, happy, good-natured, clever, and self-possessed, certainly never placed in the awful position in which he had been that evening. “Yes, she was bound to choose him. So it had to be, and I cannot complain of anyone or anything. I am myself to blame. What right had I to imagine she would care to join her life to mine? Who am I and what am I? A nobody, not wanted by anyone, nor of use to anybody.” And he recalled his brother Nikolay, and dwelt with pleasure on the thought of him. “Isn’t he right that everything in the world is base and loathsome? And are we fair in our judgment of brother Nikolay? Of course, from the point of view of Prokofy, seeing him in a torn cloak and tipsy, he’s a despicable person. But I know him differently. I know his soul, and know that we are like him. And I, instead of going to seek him out, went out to dinner, and came here.” Levin walked up to a lamppost, read his brother’s address, which was in his pocketbook, and called a sledge. All the long way to his brother’s, Levin vividly recalled all the facts familiar to him of his brother Nikolay’s life. He remembered how his brother, while at the university, and for a year afterwards, had, in spite of the jeers of his companions, lived like a monk, strictly observing all religious rites, services, and fasts, and avoiding every sort of pleasure, especially women. And afterwards, how he had all at once broken out: he had associated with the most horrible people, and rushed into the most senseless debauchery. He remembered later the scandal over a boy, whom he had taken from the country to bring up, and, in a fit of rage, had so violently beaten that proceedings were brought against him for unlawfully wounding. Then he recalled the scandal with a sharper, to whom he had lost money, and given a promissory note, and against whom he had himself lodged a complaint, asserting that he had cheated him. (This was the money Sergey Ivanovitch had paid.) Then he remembered how he had spent a night in the lockup for disorderly conduct in the street. He remembered the shameful proceedings he had tried to get up against his brother Sergey Ivanovitch, accusing him of not having paid him his share of his mother’s fortune, and the last scandal, when he had gone to a western province in an official capacity, and there had got into trouble for assaulting a village elder.... It was all horribly disgusting, yet to Levin it appeared not at all in the same disgusting light as it inevitably would to those who did not know Nikolay, did not know all his story, did not know his heart.