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 Querelle (1953)

  1 54 I JEAN GENET yes, that would have been immensely reassuring, although, come to think o.f it, the certainty would not have been any greater. The victim might have said yes out of sheer malice, in order to cause Gil to commit a useless crime. Perhaps Th e o had been the kind of guy who had wanted to drive . him exactly to that point, who felt a metaphysical hatred for him. Then again Gil told himself that he had clearly recognized the thousand little wrinkles in his victim's face, the thin lines around his mouth. Then again, fear and trembling. He had committed a crime that had no reward whatsoever. Not a sou. It was an empty crime, like a bottomless bucket. It was a mistake. Gil pondered ways of correcting it. . First of all, crouched in his comer, fetal among the damp stones, his head hanging low, he tried to de stroy his act by dividing it up into a series of gestures, each one of them inoffensive in itself: "You open the door! Man's got a right to open a door. You pick up a bottle. Man's got a right to do that. You break it? Well, that can happen. That's all right. You take the bottleneck and point it at the guy? That's not so terrible. You put it up against his neck.- Yo u apply a little pressure. Well, those things happen, you know. 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 poin tless, 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, hi s mind latched on to a new notion: all he had to do, to

• From Querelle (1953)

  %53 I QUERELLE "Take it easy, old hoss. We'll get some more." He was talking about their jobs, and Gil understood it that way, but the emotion those words called forth in him, due to a secret double-entendre that made them refer to children, made Gil fully aware of his own attachment and created a wonderful confus ion in his heart, between the accomplice and the lover. For Gil, it was a revelation. Then, however, error crept in, and we have to record it: it was exactly the same mistake survivors habitually commit when they urge those about to die to have faith and courage. As he thought, most carefully, in fact beg ging Gil not to betray him even if the police should happen to catch him, he went on : "It wouldn't really make any difference, you know. 'Whatever happens, you're not running any risk." And like a babe at the breast of Innocence, Gil asked: ''No risk? What do you mean?'' "Well, you know. You have a death sentence hanging over you already." Gil fel t his stomach turning, becoming quite empty, knotting itself up; then it unfolded again, and the weight of the entire globe entered into it. He leaned against Querelle who took him in his arms. Let us mention, at this point, that Gil never said a word about Querelle to the police. Before Gil was sent on to Ren nes, Mario contrived to be present at every one of his inter rogations, being slightly afraid that he might bring up Querel1e's n ame. l\1ario was convinced that the young mason had committed one of the murders, but that he was innocent of the other one. From the moment of his arrest Gil had forgotten Querelle, and he never mentioned his name for the simple reason that no one ever brought it up. No need to labor the point: the reader will easily understand why neither Gil nor the detectives (with the exception of Mario ) ever could really understand the connection between the murder of the sailor and the soon truly subterranean existence of a man who had murdered a mason. As for Mario, his part in the sequence of

• From Querelle (1953)

  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 inter changeable. 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 mate rial 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.

• 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)

  He passes the houses of people he does not know, though he has lived on his block for forty-six years. His walk into the center of the city is a little more than a mile. 96 The San Gabriel River crosses my city. The river channel is completely lined in concrete against a repetition of the disastrous floods of the 1930s. Set in the floor of the San Gabriel River is a smaller concrete slot, a miniature river that flows constantly with a foot or two of water discharged from the county’s waste water treatment plant. Only when it rains is there more water in the San Gabriel River than this shallow band about a dozen feet wide. At night, in the reflection of hundreds of street lamps, the substitute river glows. 97 A middle-aged man drove north on a Sunday night in January from an apartment in Orange County. He had his choice of freeway off-ramps; he chose one that brought him to my city. He stopped where streets end at the San Gabriel River, and where the city had expanded a neighborhood park. He crossed several hundred feet of the park’s newly planted turf to climb an Edison Company transmission tower. The legs of these towers, starting ten feet off the ground and for a height of another dozen feet, are faced with steel sawtooth strips. Each tooth is a blade, two or three inches long. Each strip of blades is longer than a man’s reach. There are no fences around the transmission towers. There is no need. The man climbed one of the towers. He pulled himself, hand over hand, over the steel strips. When he reached the top, he was pierced and bleeding. The man saw the grid of houses laid out in lights. He saw the interlace of the roads, the interruption of the river, and its band of glowing water. It was a clear night. The man reached up. 98 With state and federal grants, the city built a park under the power lines, since no houses can be built under the wires. The city built jogging paths, playgrounds, picnic shelters, and restrooms. The city planted a meadow of California wildflowers around the base of one of the transmission towers. The park improvements are modest, but modern and adequate. Mothers bring their children and push strollers along the mile of concrete jogging paths. When the park was completed, the city council named it in honor of a retiring city council member. She had been an original incorporator of the city in 1954 and then a park commissioner. More than two thousand people turned out to see the park dedicated in the councilwoman’s honor, and to eat a free pancake breakfast. 99 The park also is an equestrian center. The horses boarded there turned in their stalls at the flash of light and a sound like thunder. Nothing more happened.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  But I have always been struck, in America, by an emotional poverty so bottomless, and a terror of human life, of human touch, so deep, that virtually no American appears able to achieve any viable, or ganic connection between his public stance and his private life. This is what makes them so baffling, so moving, so exasper ating, and so untrustworthy. "Only connect," Henry James has said. Perhaps only an American writer would have been driven to say it, his very existence being so threatened by the failure, in most American lives, of the most elementary and crucial connections. NO NAME IN THE STREET This failure of the private life has always had the most dev astating effect on American public conduct, and on black white relations. If Americans were not so terrified of their private selves, they would never have needed to invent and could never have become so dependent on what they still call "the Negro problem." This problem, which they invented in order to safeguard their purity, has made of them criminals and monsters, and it is destroying them; and this not fr om anything blacks may or may not be doing but because of the role a guilty and constricted white imagination has assigned to the blacks. That the scapegoat pays fi>r the sins of others is well known, but this is only legend, and a revealing one at that. In fact, however the scapegoat may be made to suffer, his suffering cannot purity the sinner; it merely incriminates him the more, and it seals his damnation. The scapegoat, eventually, is released, to death: his murderer continues to live. The suff ering of the scapegoat has resulted in seas of blood, and yet not one sinner has been saved, or changed, by this despairing ritual. Sin has merely been added to sin, and guilt piled upon guilt. In the private chambers of the soul, the guilty party is identified, and the accusing finger, there, is not legend, but consequence, not f.1ntasy, but the truth. People pay for what they do, and, still more, for what they have al lowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply: by the lives they lead. The crucial thing, here, is that the sum of these individual abdications menaces life all over the world. ror, in the generality, as social and moral and political and sexual entities, white Americans arc probably the sickest and certainly the most dangerous people, of any color, to be found in the world today. I may not have realized this before my first journey South. But, once I fimnd myself there, I recog nized that the South was a riddle which could be read only in the light, or the darkness, of the unbelievable disasters which had overtaken the private life. I say, "riddle": not the riddle ofwhat this unhappy people claim, madly enough, as their "fi>lk" ways. I had been a nigger t( >r a long time.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Not until the very end of the passage does the voice again sound like our Hum the Hummer, when the desperation of “Heart, head—everything” suddenly gives way to the resiliently comic command to the printer. In that one instant H.H.’s masking takes place before the reader, who gets a fleeting look into those “ two hypnotic eyes ” (to quote John Ray) and sees the pain in them. Lolita is so deeply moving a novel because of our sharp awareness of the great tension sustained between H.H.’s mute despair and his compensatory jollity. “Crime and Pun” is one of the titles the murderous narrator of Despair considers for his manuscript, and it would serve H.H. just as well, for language is as much a defense to him as chess is to Grandmaster Luzhin. But even when H.H. lets the mask slip, one glimpses only his desperation, not the “real” H.H. or the manipulative author. As Nabokov says in Chapter Five of Gogol , analogously discussing Akaky Akakyevich and the “holes” and “gaps” in the narrative texture of The Overcoat : “We did not expect that, amid the whirling masks, one mask would turn out to be a real face, or at least the place where that face ought to be ” [italics mine—A.A.]. If the printer had obeyed H.H.’s request to fill the page with Lo’s name, we’d have a twentieth-century equivalent of a totally self-reflexive blank or patterned page in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1767). C HAPTER 27 redheaded … lad : Charlie Holmes turns out to be Lolita’s first lover . moth or butterfly : a reminder that H.H. is no entomologist. See John Ray, Jr. . Nabokov stressed “Humbert’s complete incapacity to differentiate between Rhopalocera and Heterocera.” lentigo : a freckly skin pigmentation. aux yeux battus : French; with circles round one’s eyes. plumbaceous umbrae : Latin; leaden shadows. mägdlein : German; little girl. Lepingville … nineteenth century : as to the “identity” of this poet, Nabokov responded, “That poet was evidently Leping who used to go lepping (i.e., lepidoptera hunting) but that’s about all anybody knows about him.” See gay … Lepingville . backfisch : German; an immature, adolescent girl; a teenager. simulacrum : a sham; an unreal semblance. psychotherapist … rapist : H.H. calls our attention to the rapist in the therapist. Nabokov similarly employs semantic constituents in Despair , when he poses a sensible question: “What is this jest in majesty? This ass in passion?” (p. 46). what shadow … after? : in traditional Doppelgänger fiction the reprehensible self is often imagined as a shadow, as in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Shadow.” H.H. constantly toys with the convention.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “O my sweet!” he said inwardly to Frou-Frou, as he listened for what was happening behind. “He’s cleared it!” he thought, catching the thud of Gladiator’s hoofs behind him. There remained only the last ditch, filled with water and five feet wide. Vronsky did not even look at it, but anxious to get in a long way first began sawing away at the reins, lifting the mare’s head and letting it go in time with her paces. He felt that the mare was at her very last reserve of strength; not her neck and shoulders merely were wet, but the sweat was standing in drops on her mane, her head, her sharp ears, and her breath came in short, sharp gasps. But he knew that she had strength left more than enough for the remaining five hundred yards. It was only from feeling himself nearer the ground and from the peculiar smoothness of his motion that Vronsky knew how greatly the mare had quickened her pace. She flew over the ditch as though not noticing it. She flew over it like a bird; but at the same instant Vronsky, to his horror, felt that he had failed to keep up with the mare’s pace, that he had, he did not know how, made a fearful, unpardonable mistake, in recovering his seat in the saddle. All at once his position had shifted and he knew that something awful had happened. He could not yet make out what had happened, when the white legs of a chestnut horse flashed by close to him, and Mahotin passed at a swift gallop. Vronsky was touching the ground with one foot, and his mare was sinking on that foot. He just had time to free his leg when she fell on one side, gasping painfully, and, making vain efforts to rise with her delicate, soaking neck, she fluttered on the ground at his feet like a shot bird. The clumsy movement made by Vronsky had broken her back. But that he only knew much later. At that moment he knew only that Mahotin had flown swiftly by, while he stood staggering alone on the muddy, motionless ground, and Frou-Frou lay gasping before him, bending her head back and gazing at him with her exquisite eyes. Still unable to realize what had happened, Vronsky tugged at his mare’s reins. Again she struggled all over like a fish, and her shoulders setting the saddle heaving, she rose on her front legs but unable to lift her back, she quivered all over and again fell on her side. With a face hideous with passion, his lower jaw trembling, and his cheeks white, Vronsky kicked her with his heel in the stomach and again fell to tugging at the rein. She did not stir, but thrusting her nose into the ground, she simply gazed at her master with her speaking eyes.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Alexey Alexandrovitch decided that he would go to Petersburg and see his wife. If her illness was a trick, he would say nothing and go away again. If she was really in danger, and wished to see him before her death, he would forgive her if he found her alive, and pay her the last duties if he came too late. All the way he thought no more of what he ought to do. With a sense of weariness and uncleanness from the night spent in the train, in the early fog of Petersburg Alexey Alexandrovitch drove through the deserted Nevsky and stared straight before him, not thinking of what was awaiting him. He could not think about it, because in picturing what would happen, he could not drive away the reflection that her death would at once remove all the difficulty of his position. Bakers, closed shops, night-cabmen, porters sweeping the pavements flashed past his eyes, and he watched it all, trying to smother the thought of what was awaiting him, and what he dared not hope for, and yet was hoping for. He drove up to the steps. A sledge and a carriage with the coachman asleep stood at the entrance. As he went into the entry, Alexey Alexandrovitch, as it were, got out his resolution from the remotest corner of his brain, and mastered it thoroughly. Its meaning ran: “If it’s a trick, then calm contempt and departure. If truth, do what is proper.” The porter opened the door before Alexey Alexandrovitch rang. The porter, Kapitonitch, looked queer in an old coat, without a tie, and in slippers. “How is your mistress?” “A successful confinement yesterday.” Alexey Alexandrovitch stopped short and turned white. He felt distinctly now how intensely he had longed for her death. “And how is she?” Korney in his morning apron ran downstairs. “Very ill,” he answered. “There was a consultation yesterday, and the doctor’s here now.” “Take my things,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch, and feeling some relief at the news that there was still hope of her death, he went into the hall. On the hatstand there was a military overcoat. Alexey Alexandrovitch noticed it and asked: “Who is here?” “The doctor, the midwife, and Count Vronsky.” Alexey Alexandrovitch went into the inner rooms. In the drawing-room there was no one; at the sound of his steps there came out of her boudoir the midwife in a cap with lilac ribbons. She went up to Alexey Alexandrovitch, and with the familiarity given by the approach of death took him by the arm and drew him towards the bedroom. “Thank God you’ve come! She keeps on about you and nothing but you,” she said. “Make haste with the ice!” the doctor’s peremptory voice said from the bedroom. Alexey Alexandrovitch went into her boudoir.

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

  We notice later that our mark-making—our drawing—is how our hands interpret the visual world right now and that’s fine. As we get more advanced, we can look for more complicated styles, like Eddie Campbell did, or choose a particular technique, like David Chelsea, or even just bring a huge and practiced gracefulness to the page like Judith Vanistendael. But in general, we should just work honestly through observation and practice to try to tell our story. Drawings of war and torture are drawn with the same clarity, drama, and expressiveness. Finding a Visual Style MY STORY FINDING AN APPROPRIATE MODE OF EXPRESSION I spent most of my career drawing silly pictures. Humorous farces and comic strips—characters with big noses and big feet. It was all I really was capable of drawing, and since it lined up with my interest in social satire, I kept developing and refining this style for almost twenty years. None of that seemed right when suddenly I had to tell a tragic story. It was somehow fun to draw my little daughter in a light and cartoony way, but everything else needed a more serious tone to it. Tragedy not being my forte, I sketched when I could, learned to use a brush better from my friend Justine, and eventually, just went for it. Sometimes scratching with the pen like my life depended upon it, which in some ways, it did. Since I’m not well trained in serious expressive drawing, a lot of this effort came hard, and ultimately the drawings fail to convey what I wanted. Sometimes, I hope though, that the desperation is visible in the drawing, like maybe you can see the struggle to get the picture out, there inside the picture itself. Early sketches featuring different styles. SHORTCOMINGS I grew tired of drawing cars and sometimes gave up, implying their shape with shading film. Other drawings I did over and over again to get right and never did. I grew tired of drawing people, the same people, with specific expressions on their face. At some point, I realized I couldn’t draw these people—my wife and I and the people around us, as if they existed in reality and I was just transposing it. I began to feel that this story happened in a more ethereal or mythic space, and as I became more confident in believing that this was true, some of my more appropriate—and less literal—drawings came out. To sum up, I tried my hardest to do what was right for the story, but had to forgive myself the shortcomings I brought with me. I did the best I could, hoping it would resonate. I expressed what I could, learned a lot, and came out a different person.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  So I filled prescriptions for things like Neuroproxin, Maxiphenphen, Valdignore, and Silencior and threw them into the mix now and then, but mostly I took sleeping aids in large doses, and supplemented them with Seconols or Nembutals when I was irritable, Valiums or Libriums when I suspected that I was sad, and Placidyls or Noctecs or Miltowns when I suspected I was lonely. Within a few weeks, I’d accumulated an impressive library of psychopharmaceuticals. Each label bore the sign of the sleepy eye, the skull and crossbones. “Do not take this if you become pregnant.” “Take with food or milk.” “Store in a dry place.” “May cause drowsiness.” “May cause dizziness.” “Do not take aspirin.” “Do not crush.” “Do not chew.” Any normal person would have worried about what the drugs would do to her health. I wasn’t completely naive about the potential dangers. My father had been eaten alive by cancer. I’d seen my mother in the hospital full of tubes, brain dead. I’d lost a childhood friend to liver failure after she took acetaminophen on top of DayQuil in high school. Life was fragile and fleeting and one had to be cautious, sure, but I would risk death if it meant I could sleep all day and become a whole new person. And I figured I was smart enough to know in advance if the pills were going to kill me. I’d start having premonition nightmares before that happened, before my heart failed or my brain exploded or hemorrhaged or pushed me out my seventh-story window. I trusted that everything was going to work out fine as long as I could sleep all day. • • • I’D MOVED INTO MY apartment on East Eighty-fourth Street in 1996, a year after I graduated from Columbia. By summer 2000, I still hadn’t had a single conversation with any of my neighbors—almost four years of complete silence in the elevator, each awkward ride a performance of hypnotized spaceout. My neighbors were mostly fortysomething married people without children. Everyone was well-groomed, professional. A lot of camel-hair coats and black leather briefcases. Burberry scarves and pearl earrings. There were a few loudmouthed single women my age I saw from time to time gabbing on their cell phones and walking their teacup poodles. They reminded me of Reva, but they had more money and less self-loathing, I would guess. This was Yorkville, the Upper East Side. People were uptight. When I shuffled through the lobby in my pajamas and slippers on my way to the bodega, I felt like I was committing a crime, but I didn’t care. The only other slovenly people around were elderly Jews with rent-controlled apartments. But I was tall and thin and blond and pretty and young. Even at my worst, I knew I still looked good.

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

  IN 2014, PSYCHOLOGISTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF OREGON conducted the first comprehensive, university-wide survey of sexual assault and learned that 19 percent of female students are victims of rape or attempted rape during the time they’re studying at Oregon. Nineteen percent. One in five women. Today. I am still scraping at my story. I can’t go back and get the young woman I was from the Italian restaurant before she climbs onto the boat. I can’t stop the truck or the rapist, but I can let the girl I was know that I see her. I hear her. I know she is telling the truth. If nothing changes—and in thirty years, not nearly enough has changed—next year, there will be one hundred thousand more assaults on our campuses. One is too many. One hundred thousand. In the self-defense class, our teacher taught us that if we couldn’t imagine doing something—cracking an assailant in the head with a stapler, opening up a can of pepper spray on an attacker, digging our keys into the eyes of a would-be rapist—we wouldn’t be able to act in a real crisis. Wielding the stapler, the pepper spray, and the keys, our teacher taught us the power of visualization, and I learned to imagine in advance what I might be called upon to do in an emergency. One hundred thousand? This is an emergency. Together, let’s visualize what we need to change the rape culture. I have my keys in my hand and I am holding them like a claw. Let’s turn this motherfucking system around. & the Truth Is, I Have No StoryClaire SchwartzI too, having lost faith in language, have placed my faith in language. —TERRANCE HAYES 1. This is not about that. This is about everything after. This is about how, all of a sudden, there was only one after. How the infinity of tiny afters—after school and after my most recent birthday and after A. and I ducked behind a couch hiding from nothing and she told me that she was falling in love with me and after my chest opened to a new kind of wanting and after I last had a fever and after the first time I threw a Frisbee without its careening into the ground—were all swept away into the only after that stretches out endlessly over the unfolding nows. This is about that. My language is so imprecise. I am thrashing in what I can’t tell you.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  « Alas, masters, I pray you by your fates and lucky spirits, may you come to the years of old age strong and joyful, as you shall succour me, miserable caitiff, and restore my little one from Hell to my white hairs again. For he, my grandson, the dear companion. of my. path, by following a sparrow that sang upon an hedge, is fallen into a ditch hereby that lay open, at the root of the shrubs, and verily, I think he is in 377 21 22 LUCIUS APULEIUS ipsius avum sibi saepicule clamitantis vivere illum quidem sentiam, sed per corporis, ut videtis, mei defectam valitudinem opitulari nequeam. At vobis aetatis et roboris beneficio facile est suppetiari miserrimo seni puerumque illum novissimum suc- cessionis meae atque unicam stirpem sospitem mihi facere." Sic deprecantis suamque canitiem distrahentis totos quidem miseruit; sed unus prae ceteris et animo fortior et aetate iuvenior et corpore validior, quique solus praeter alios incolumis proelium superius eva- serat, exsurgit alacer et percontatus quonam loci puer ille decidisset, monstrantem digito non longe frutices horridos senem illum impigre comitatur. Ac dum pabulo nostro suaque cura refecti sarcinulis quisque sumptis suis viam capessunt, clamore primum nomi- natim cientes illum iuvenem frequenter inclamant ; mox mora diutina commoti mittunt e suis arcessi- torem unum, qui requisitum comitem tempestivae viae commonefactum reduceret. At ille modicum commoratus refert sese buxanti pallore trepidus, miraque! super conservo suo renuntiat: conspica- tum se quippe supinato illi et iam ex maxima parte consumpto immanem draconem mandentem insistere nec ullum usquam miserrimum senem comparere illum. Qua re cognita et cum pastoris sermone col- lata, qui saevum prorsus hunc illum nec alium lo- corum inquilinum praeminabatur, pestilenti deserta regione velociori se fuga proripiunt nosque pellunt crebris tundentes fustibus. Celerrime denique longo 1 MSS mira. Some connecting particle is needed, and we must write either e£ mira or miraque. 378 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK VIII danger of death. As for me, though I know from his own voice, crying oft upon his grandsire, that he yet liveth, I am not able to help him by reason of my old age, but you, that are so valiant and lusty, may easily help me herein a miserable old man, and deliver me my boy, last of my heirs and single offspring of my race that is yet left alive.”

• From Querelle (1953)

  10 I JEAN GENET by the anxiety this beast of prey showed iri going to its own perdition, he shrugged lightly as he rose to his feet and chuckled. Querelle, too, stood up. He looked around, amused, smiling the more he relished the inner sensation of marching to the torture chamber. He was doing it with despair in his soul, yet with an unexpressed inner certitude that this execution was necessary for him to go on living. Into what would he be trans formed? A fairy. He was terrified at the thought. And what exactly is a fairy? What stuff is it made of? What particular li ght shows it up? What new monster does one become, and how does one then feel about the monstrosity of oneself? One is said to "like that," when one gives oneself up to the police. That copper's good looks were really at the back of everything. It is sometimes said that the smallest event can transform a life, and this one was of such significance. "No kissing, that's for sure," he thought. And: "I'll just stick my ass out, that's all." That last expression had for him much the same resonance as "I'll stick my prick out." · What new body would be his? To his despair, however, was added the comforting certainty that the execution would wash him clean of the murder, which he now thought of as an ill digested morsel of food. At last he would have to pay for that somber feast that death-dealing always is. It is always a dirty business: one has to wash oneself afterwards. And wash so thoroughly that nothing of oneself remains. Be reborn. Die, to be reborn. After that he would not be afraid of anybody. Sure, the police could still track him down and have his head cut off: thus it was necessary to take precautions not to give oneself away , but in front of the fantasy court of justice he had created for himself Quereile would no longer have anything to answer for, since he who committed that murder would be dead. The abandoned corpse, would it get past the city gates? Querelle could hear that long, rigid object, always wrapped in its narrow fog shroud, complaining, murmuring some exquisite tune. It was Vic's dead body, bewailing its fate. It desired the honors of

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  C A N T O X I I I The Second Round, or ring, of the Seventh Circle; the dismal mystic Wood of Self-murderers. The souls of these have taken root in the ground, and become stunted trees, with withered leaves and branches; instead of fruit, producing poison. The obscene Harpies, insatiable foreboders of misery and despair, sit wailing upon them and devouring them. Pietro delle Vigne is one of the suicides; and he tells Dante what had made him destroy himself, and also in what manner the souls are converted into those uncouth trees. Their discourse is interrupted by the noise of two spirits all naked and torn, who come rushing through the dense wood, pursued by eager female hell-hounds. The first of them is Lano; the second, Jacomo da Sant’ Andrea. Both had violently wasted their substance, and thereby brought themselves to an untimely end, and to this punishment. Dante finds a countryman, who, after squandering all his substance, had hanged himself; and hears him speak superstitiously about the calamities of Florence. NESSUS HAD not yet reached the other side, when we moved into a wood, which by no path was marked. Not green the foilage, but of colour dusky; not smooth the branches, but gnarled and warped; apples none were there, but withered sticks with poison. No holts so rough or dense have those wild beasts, that hat the cultivated tracts, between Cecina and Corneto. 1 Here the unseemly Harpies make their nests, who chased the Trojans from the Strophades 2 with dismal note of future woe. Wide wings they have, and necks and faces human, feet with claws, and their large belly feathered; they make rueful cries on the strange trees. The kind Master began to say to me: “Before thou goest farther, know that thou art in the second round; and shalt be, until thou comest to the horrid sand. Therefore look well, and thou shalt sec things which would take away belief from my speech.” Already I heard wailings uttered on every side, and saw no one to make them: wherefore I, all bewildered, stood still. I think he thought that I was thinking so many voices came, amongst those stumps, from people who hid themselves on our account. Therefore the Master said: “If thou breakest off any little shoot from one of these plants, the thoughts, which thou hast, will all become defective.” Then I stretched my hand a little forward, and plucked a branchlet from a great thorn; and the trunk of it cried, “Why dost thou rend me?” 3 And when it had grown dark with blood, it again began to cry: “Why dost thou tear me? hast thou no breath of pity?

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

  Will be sent to further his schooling in town. 19. Leaving for town. Lat by Lat THE END, unless you want to pick up the sequel, Town Boy (2007, First Second). Note that the dredge (pictured below) appears three times in this chronology, establishing itself as one of the main forces in Lat’s early imaginative development. NONNONBA by Shigeru Mizuki NonNonBa (2012, Drawn & Quarterly) by Shigeru Mizuki, on the other hand, is tightly structured and thematically grounded. The book is largely about his awakening to the awareness of spirits or yokai around him everywhere. He is aided by an old woman in the village, NonNonBa of the title. TIGHTLY STRUCTURED PARALLELS In between small anecdotes of NonNonBa instructing and testing young Shigeru, we also have at least 3 developing outside stories. One is the ongoing warfare of the neighborhood kids. Another is the father’s career frustrations, his inability to progress in his city bank job, and his later opening of a movie theater in their small village. And another is the relationships Shigeru has with two young girls in the village, one who dies as a child, and another who is sold off as a geisha. His friendships with these two girls aid his spiritual visions, and he has one major vision with each girl. The threads of the stories are so tightly controlled and structured that his second and final vision happens exactly one page prior to his older brother trying to hang himself from despair over a neighborhood girl. Likewise, the boy army story comes to a head as he gains more and more spiritual wisdom. All of these stories are tightly plotted to make the events seem more and more urgent as the book progresses. Shigeru by Shigeru Read these samples right to left! The reader spills slowly out of Shigeru’s final vision, to be thrown instantly into a terrifying, urgent scene with his brother. (Read this right to left!) WE CAN FIX IT! by Jess Fink A third book, which is not chronological at all but starts with a thematic structure and then changes, is Jess Fink’s We Can Fix It! (2013, Top Shelf Productions). Fink gives us the premise that her older self is going back in time to visit her younger self and warn her against embarrassing and hurtful situations. WILDLY BACK AND FORTH IN TIME Mostly in the beginning, older Fink is trying to encourage younger Fink to enjoy the sexiness of being young. But this wears thin on them both and eventually old Fink wants to protect the younger self in every situation possible. She jumps all around her own childhood, warning her against sending lewd photos to boys, buying ugly pants, indulging in bad comics, etc., until all of this intrusion into her past is seen as empty. The book is compelling because the older, current Fink is the main character. We watch her increasingly frustrated with her own misperceptions with how she can change or interact with the past.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  shoots up to a sapling, and to a savage plant; the Harpies, feeding then upon its leaves, give pain, and to the pain an outlet. Like the others, we shall go for our spoils, but not to the end that any may be clothed with them again: for it is not just that a man have what he takes from himself. 7 Hither shall we drag them, and through the mournful wood our bodies shall be suspended, each on the thorny tree of its tormented shade.” We still were listening to the trunk, thinking it would tell us more, when by a noise we were surprised; like one who feels the boar and chase approaching to his stand, who hears the beasts and the branches crashing. And, lo! on the left hand, two spirits, 8 naked and torn, fleeing so violently that they broke every fan of the wood. The foremost: “Come now, come, O death!” And the other, who thought himself too slow, cried. “Lano, thy legs were not so ready at the jousts of Toppo.” And since his breath perhaps was failing him, of himself and of a bush he made one group. Behind them, the wood was filled with black braches, eager and fleet, as greyhounds that have escaped the leash. Into him, who squatted, they thrust their teeth, and rent him piece by piece; then carried off his miserable limbs. My Guide now took me by the hand, and led me to the bush, which was lamenting through its bleeding fractures, in vain. “O Jacomo da Sant’ Andrea!” it cried, 9 “what hast thou gained by making me thy screen? what blame have I of thy sinful life?” When the Master had stopped beside it, he said: “Who wast thou, who, through so many wounds, blowest forth with blood thy dolorous speech?” And he to us: “Ye spirits, who are come to see the ignominious mangling which has thus disjoined my leaves from me, O gather them to the foot of the dismal shrub! I was of the city that changed its first patron for the Baptist, 10 on which account he with his art will always make it sorrowful; and were it not that at the passage of the Arno there yet remains some semblance of him, those citizens, who afterwards rebuilt it on the ashes left by Attila, would have laboured in vain. I made a gibbet for myself of my own dwelling.” 1. The river Cecina and the Marte, on whose banks stands the town of Corneto, indicate the northern and southern boundaries of the marshy coast district of the Maremma in Tuscany. 2. In the third book of the Æneid, Virgil narrates how, on the islands of the Strophades, the Harpies defile the viands of the Trojans, who attack the hideous birds. One of these, Celæno (infelix vates). prophesies the misfortunes that will befall the Trojans and how they will endure the famine before attaining their goal. 3.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Oh, it’s awful! oh dear, oh dear! awful!” Stepan Arkadyevitch kept repeating to himself, and he could think of nothing to be done. “And how well things were going up till now! how well we got on! She was contented and happy in her children; I never interfered with her in anything; I let her manage the children and the house just as she liked. It’s true it’s bad _her_ having been a governess in our house. That’s bad! There’s something common, vulgar, in flirting with one’s governess. But what a governess!” (He vividly recalled the roguish black eyes of Mlle. Roland and her smile.) “But after all, while she was in the house, I kept myself in hand. And the worst of it all is that she’s already ... it seems as if ill-luck would have it so! Oh, oh! But what, what is to be done?” There was no solution, but that universal solution which life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insoluble. That answer is: one must live in the needs of the day—that is, forget oneself. To forget himself in sleep was impossible now, at least till nighttime; he could not go back now to the music sung by the decanter-women; so he must forget himself in the dream of daily life. “Then we shall see,” Stepan Arkadyevitch said to himself, and getting up he put on a gray dressing-gown lined with blue silk, tied the tassels in a knot, and, drawing a deep breath of air into his broad, bare chest, he walked to the window with his usual confident step, turning out his feet that carried his full frame so easily. He pulled up the blind and rang the bell loudly. It was at once answered by the appearance of an old friend, his valet, Matvey, carrying his clothes, his boots, and a telegram. Matvey was followed by the barber with all the necessaries for shaving. “Are there any papers from the office?” asked Stepan Arkadyevitch, taking the telegram and seating himself at the looking-glass. “On the table,” replied Matvey, glancing with inquiring sympathy at his master; and, after a short pause, he added with a sly smile, “They’ve sent from the carriage-jobbers.” Stepan Arkadyevitch made no reply, he merely glanced at Matvey in the looking-glass. In the glance, in which their eyes met in the looking-glass, it was clear that they understood one another. Stepan Arkadyevitch’s eyes asked: “Why do you tell me that? don’t you know?” Matvey put his hands in his jacket pockets, thrust out one leg, and gazed silently, good-humoredly, with a faint smile, at his master. “I told them to come on Sunday, and till then not to trouble you or themselves for nothing,” he said. He had obviously prepared the sentence beforehand.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  The day after their arrival there was a heavy fall of rain, and in the night the water came through in the corridor and in the nursery, so that the beds had to be carried into the drawing-room. There was no kitchen maid to be found; of the nine cows, it appeared from the words of the cowherd-woman that some were about to calve, others had just calved, others were old, and others again hard-uddered; there was not butter nor milk enough even for the children. There were no eggs. They could get no fowls; old, purplish, stringy cocks were all they had for roasting and boiling. Impossible to get women to scrub the floors—all were potato-hoeing. Driving was out of the question, because one of the horses was restive, and bolted in the shafts. There was no place where they could bathe; the whole of the river-bank was trampled by the cattle and open to the road; even walks were impossible, for the cattle strayed into the garden through a gap in the hedge, and there was one terrible bull, who bellowed, and therefore might be expected to gore somebody. There were no proper cupboards for their clothes; what cupboards there were either would not close at all, or burst open whenever anyone passed by them. There were no pots and pans; there was no copper in the washhouse, nor even an ironing-board in the maids’ room. Finding instead of peace and rest all these, from her point of view, fearful calamities, Darya Alexandrovna was at first in despair. She exerted herself to the utmost, felt the hopelessness of the position, and was every instant suppressing the tears that started into her eyes. The bailiff, a retired quartermaster, whom Stepan Arkadyevitch had taken a fancy to and had appointed bailiff on account of his handsome and respectful appearance as a hall-porter, showed no sympathy for Darya Alexandrovna’s woes. He said respectfully, “nothing can be done, the peasants are such a wretched lot,” and did nothing to help her.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  This self-deception was not of long duration. The sick man fell into a quiet sleep, but he was waked up half an hour later by his cough. And all at once every hope vanished in those about him and in himself. 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 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.”