Fear

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)

  64 I JEAN GENET had trodden down. But he perceived, quickly, the absurdity of his fear, while hoping his. steps would be so light that every blade of grass would be intelligent enough to stand up again of its own accord. But the corpse surely wouldn't be discovered until later on, in the early morning hours. Yes, it would have to wait for the working men on their way to their jobs: they are the ones who come across what criminals leave by the roadside. The foggy weather did not trouble him. He noticed the marshy stench prevailing in the area. The outstretched arms of pesti lence enfolded him. He kept on going. For a moment he was afraid a couple of lovers might have come down here among the trees, but this time of the year that seemed quite unlikely. Leaves and grass were damp, and the gaps between the branches interlaced with cobwebs moistened his face with their droplets as he passed through them. For a few seconds, to the astonished eyes of the assassin, the forest appeared most en chanted and lovely, vaulted and girded by hanging creeper plants gilded by a mysterious sun hanging in a sky both dim and clear and of an immensely distant blue, the womb of every dawn. Finally Querelle found himself by the trunk of a huge tree. He went up to it, cautiously walked around it, then leant against it, turning his back to the place of murder where the corpse lay waiting. He took off his beret and held it in the way we have described. Above him, he knew, a tangle of black , branches and twigs was penetrating and holding the fog. And from within him rose, up to his waking consciousness, all the details of the charges against him. In the hush of an overheated room brimming with eyes an d ears and fiery mouths, Querelle clearly heard the deep and droning and by its very banality most vengeful voice of the Presiding Judge: "You have brutally slaughtered an accomplice of yours. The moti ves for this deed are only too evident . . ." (Here the Judge's voice and the Judge himself blurred. Querelle refused to see those motives, to disentangle, to find them in himself. He relaxed his attention to the proceedings and pressed himself

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “So far—and it may be so always—you are happy and at peace. I see in Anna that she is happy, perfectly happy, she has had time to tell me so much already,” said Darya Alexandrovna, smiling; and involuntarily, as she said this, at the same moment a doubt entered her mind whether Anna really were happy. But Vronsky, it appeared, had no doubts on that score. “Yes, yes,” he said, “I know that she has revived after all her sufferings; she is happy. She is happy in the present. But I?... I am afraid of what is before us ... I beg your pardon, you would like to walk on?” “No, I don’t mind.” “Well, then, let us sit here.” Darya Alexandrovna sat down on a garden seat in a corner of the avenue. He stood up facing her. “I see that she is happy,” he repeated, and the doubt whether she were happy sank more deeply into Darya Alexandrovna’s mind. “But can it last? Whether we have acted rightly or wrongly is another question, but the die is cast,” he said, passing from Russian to French, “and we are bound together for life. We are united by all the ties of love that we hold most sacred. We have a child, we may have other children. But the law and all the conditions of our position are such that thousands of complications arise which she does not see and does not want to see. And that one can well understand. But I can’t help seeing them. My daughter is by law not my daughter, but Karenin’s. I cannot bear this falsity!” he said, with a vigorous gesture of refusal, and he looked with gloomy inquiry towards Darya Alexandrovna. She made no answer, but simply gazed at him. He went on: “One day a son may be born, my son, and he will be legally a Karenin; he will not be the heir of my name nor of my property, and however happy we may be in our home life and however many children we may have, there will be no real tie between us. They will be Karenins. You can understand the bitterness and horror of this position! I have tried to speak of this to Anna. It irritates her. She does not understand, and to her I cannot speak plainly of all this. Now look at another side. I am happy, happy in her love, but I must have occupation. I have found occupation, and am proud of what I am doing and consider it nobler than the pursuits of my former companions at court and in the army. And most certainly I would not change the work I am doing for theirs. I am working here, settled in my own place, and I am happy and contented, and we need nothing more to make us happy. I love my work here. _Ce n’est pas un pis-aller,_ on the contrary....”

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  Clark began buying farmland in Southern California and invested in a sugar mill in Los Alamitos in Orange County. There was money to be made in sugar beets. The government supported domestic production with a protective tariff of 76 percent. In 1904, Clark organized his Southern California holdings as the Montana Land Company with his brother, J. Ross Clark. Later, they made Clark Bonner, J. Ross Clark’s nephew, president of the company. William A. Clark died in 1925 and left an estate worth $200 million. In 1926, Clark Bonner closed the sugar mill and leased the company’s former beet fields to tenant farmers. In 1929, Clark Bonner began subdividing the company’s farmland. The Depression and the Second World War followed. 122 According to Mark Taper, the stockholders arranged to sell the Montana Land Company because postwar corporate taxes were 77 percent. It wasn’t profitable, he said, for the company to subdivide its land in small tracts to real estate developers. According to his son, Bonner was frustrated by so many acres without landmarks. 123 The sale of the Montana Land Company included all the remaining lots in the middle-class subdivision Clark Bonner laid out in 1929. The sale also included the company-run golf course, which Bonner had intended to be an exclusive country club. In the late 1940s, the doctors, college professors, and retired naval officers who lived in the houses east of the golf course still called it “the country club.” It had never been one; it has always been a public golf course. The property owners in Bonner’s subdivision reacted immediately to the sale of the Montana Land Company and the golf course. They were afraid the three developers planned to subdivide the course into more lots for thousand-square-foot tract houses. They knew who would live in them. The three developers needed the cooperation of the county to build 17,500 houses in thirty-three months. The three men quickly leased the golf course to the county. 124 Near the first tee at the golf course is a memorial to Clark Bonner. County Supervisor Herbert Legg suggested the memorial on the day the three developers were forced to lease the golf course to the county. The memorial is a bronze plaque, originally paid for by the members of the Chamber of Commerce. When county workers removed the plaque and lost it many years later, Bonner’s son bought a new plaque and replaced it. The plaque is mounted on the side of a platform built of tan Palo Verde stone. An olive tree grows in the center of the platform. The monument used to include a drinking fountain and a bench for golfers coming off the front nine holes. The county recently took these out and replaced Bonner’s plaque. On the new plaque, the bronze letters that spell out the name of the county supervisor for this district are as big as those that spell Bonner’s name.

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

  CHAPTER 5 STARTING If you’ve made it this far, and have done the assignments, then you’re probably ready to start. A lot of us can overprepare (I’m one of them), stalling ourselves from really starting. Starting and working is scary! We think: What if I’m not good enough? What if my story is dumb? What if no one likes it? These internal critics are our biggest enemies to actually working on our book, so sometimes we need to trick them while we get our courage and some momentum up. One way is to give ourselves simple tasks, focusing only on the present. We’re going to look at three artists who have created amazing large-scale bodies of work by focusing on the day-to-day. HOW TO UNDERSTAND ISRAEL IN 60 DAYS OR LESS by Sarah Glidden Sarah Glidden was an art school graduate with a painting degree, and an interest in photography and drawing, when she realized that she wanted to try comics. NEW DAY, NEW COMIC So she started. One a day for eight or nine months. Silly little things, about finding a seat, being bothered by a fly, or affected by the heat or the cold. In these little strips, she observed, documented, and experimented. And day by day she tried something new and taught herself the comics form. She published these as series of small mini-comics, and then when she felt she had said enough and done enough work in that mode, she created a longer, semifictional story as another experiment. And with that work under her belt, she went on a long journey with the thought of turning this real-life journey into a graphic novel. How to Understand Israel in 60 days or Less (2011, Vertigo) became a series of well-written and well-drawn black-and-white self-published mini-comics until an editor at Vertigo comics saw it and offered her a contract to publish it in full color. Sarah by Sarah A quick, experimental comic in a sketchbook from Sarah Glidden’s early diary comics. Which she did. 200 pages, fully watercolored, and like the fable of Stone Soup, this all happened from starting with a simple daily diary comic. Samples from the early and later version of How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less MAKE ME A WOMAN by Vanessa Davis FRAMES FULL OF LIFE Vanessa Davis started by making little visual diaries of her life. Sometimes one-panel, sometimes two, usually fewer than four. These comics were less about experimenting with form and were more about Vanessa establishing and developing her utterly unique and lively personality on the page. Each day Davis retold a quirky, often self-deprecating moment from life in her Spaniel Rage comics. These had a charm and sense of humor that no other diary comic had. From there, Davis went on to tell only slightly longer stories, usually no more than three pages, but packed with funny moments, light and big-hearted drawing, and tons of personality.

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

  THETH by Josh Bayer Josh Bayer’s Rom and Theth are memoirs that sometimes masquerade as revisions of other comics. LOOSE, VARIED DRAWINGS Bayer has a loose, inconsistent drawing style but his readers connect with its feral qualities. Bayer, too, loves to draw and it shows in him explosively trying new things on every page to get his story out. Characters brood, argue, fight, and strive for better situations while moving through this rich variety of coarse lines and radical marks. Josh Bayer’s lines do a lot of the talking for his characters. Theth doesn’t speak much, but the lines he’s drawn with are full of tension and intercoiled rage and resentment and fear. Theth by Josh Josh Bayer’s main character wears a helmet and sort of radiation suit, casting him into the world of ‘70s and ‘80s super-hero comics that he is so excited by. A PHYSICAL ACT In most cases, the creator of the memoir loves the art of drawing. That act of drawing is a way to relive the story, to put yourself as a creator back in time with new eyes and new tools. Along this line, Alison Bechdel ( Fun Home, 2007, Mariner Books) shoots reference photos of herself in virtually every scene in her stories. Having done the same thing myself at times, I can only imagine that Bechdel experiences the story even more deeply in a physical way because of this restaging, allowing her to inhabit the story in order to make fuller sense of it in context. Body, emotions, and intellect all work together in Bechdel’s powerful work, which we’ll see more of in future chapters. Bechdel in a staged reference shot for a drawing of her own father. WHY COMICS? So if the question is “Why comics?” I hope I’ve given you some ways to think about answering it by connecting it to drawing. The process of drawing is a fabulous one, markedly different from traditional writing, talking, or thinking. Drawing is more animal, maybe more childish. It’s challenging, but it’s mesmerizing, surprising, and rewarding when it goes well. But know, too, that it’s okay to not know the answer to Why Comics? If the impulse is strong enough, follow it and it will reveal the answers later. Why Comics? MY STORY DRAWING THROUGH EMOTION In my own case I have always used comics to explore my emotional landscape. The montage of drawings to the left shows the manner in which I’ve drawn myself or variations of myself for twenty years. The style, even when crude and inexperienced, is always emotive. The characters wildly express themselves with their faces and their gestures, expressing, I suppose, my sort of high-strung nature. It was with drawing and writing that I dealt with and maneuvered within the emotional world for most of life. So then when tragedy hit me, I had nothing to turn to except that same writing and drawing.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  He didn’t ask why. Locked inside, the only way out would be through the windows. I figured that if I jumped out while I was on the Infermiterol, it would be a painless death. A blackout death. I’d either wake up safe in the apartment, or I wouldn’t. It was a risk I’d take forty times, every three days. If, when I woke up in June, life still wasn’t worth the trouble, I would end it. I would jump. This was the deal I made. • • • BEFORE PING XI CAME over on January 31, I took a final walk outside. The sky was milky, the sounds of the city muted by the hard ruffling of wind hitting my ears. I wasn’t nostalgic. But I was terrified. It was lunacy, this idea, that I could sleep myself into a new life. Preposterous. But there I was, approaching the depths of my journey. So far, I thought, I’d been wandering through the forest. But now I was approaching the mouth of the cave. I smelled the smoke of a fire burning deep inside. Something had to be burned and sacrificed. And then the fire would burn out and die. The smoke would clear. My eyes would adjust to the darkness, I thought. I’d find my footing. When I came out of the cave, back out into the light, when I woke up at last, everything—the whole world—would be new again. I crossed East End Avenue and shuffled across the salted walkway through Carl Schurz Park toward the river, a wide channel of cracked obsidian. The collar of my fur coat tickled my chin. I remember that. A couple was taking pictures of each other by the railing. “Can you take one of the two of us?” I pulled my limp, pink hands from my pockets and held the camera numbly. “Stand closer together,” I said, teeth chattering. The girl rubbed the wetness from her top lip with her gloved finger. The man lurched forward in his stiff wool coat. I thought of Trevor. In the viewfinder, the light did not find their faces but illuminated the aura of the wind-whipped hair around their heads. “Cheese,” I said. They repeated it. When they were gone, I threw my cell phone into the river and went back to my building, told the doorman that a short Asian man would be visiting me regularly. “He’s not my boyfriend, but give him that kind of consideration. He has my keys.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  An awful cry was muffled by the hand over her mouth; she was shuddering so violently it seemed she all by lifted him on top of her. And then she lay still, moist, pink, with her eyes closed, breathing deeply as the tears flowed silently. "That was lovely, my darling," he said. "Open your eyes." She did it timidly. But then she lay looking up at him. "This has been so hard for you," he whispered. "You could not even imagine these things happening to you. And you are red with shame, and shaking with fear, and you believe perhaps it's one of the dreams you dreamed in your hundred years. But it's real, Beauty," he said. "And it is only the beginning! You think I've made you my Princess. But I've only started. The day will come my Princess. But I've only started. The day will come when you can see nothing but me as if I were the sun and the moon, when I mean all to you, food, drink, the air you breathe. Then you will truly be mine, and these first lessons...and pleasures..." he smiled, "will seem like nothing." He bent over her. She lay so very still, gazing up at him. "How kiss me," he commanded. "And I mean, really...kiss me." THE JOURNEY AND THE PUNISHMENT AT THE INN THE NEXT morning all the Court was gathered in the Great Hall to see the Prince off, and all of the Court, including the grateful King and Queen, stood with their eyes down, bowing from the waist as the Prince came down the steps with the naked Beauty walking behind him. He had commanded her to clasp her hands on the back of her neck beneath her hair, and to walk just a little to his right so that he might see her in the corner of his eye. And she obeyed, her bare feet making not the slightest sound on the worn stone steps as she followed him. "Dear Prince," said the Queen, when he reached the great front door and saw that his soldiers stood mounted on the drawbridge, "we are in your eternal debt, but she is our only daughter." The Prince turned to look at her. She was yet beautiful, though more than twice Beauty's age, and he wondered if she too had served his great-grandfather. "How can you question me?" the Prince asked patiently. "I have restored your Kingdom, and you know full well if you remember anything of the ways of my land, that Beauty will be much enhanced by her service there." Then the telltale blush came to the Queen as it had to the King before, and she bowed her head in acceptance. "But surely you will allow Beauty some clothing," she whispered, "at least until she reaches the border of your Kingdom." "All those towns between here and my Kingdom have owed their allegiance to us for a century.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  I shall not spank her with it. Rather I shall see her face with it as I spank her." In a blur, Beauty saw Prince Alexi move to the dressing table. And then before her, propped against a silk pillow, was the mirror, tilted so she could see the Queen's smooth white face in it distinctly. The dark eyes terrified her. The Queen's smile terrified her. "But I shall show her nothing," Beauty thought desperately, shutting her eyes, the tears squeezed out down her cheeks. "Surely, there is something superior about the open hand," the Queen was saying, her left hand on Beauty's neck, massaging it. She slipped it down under Beauty's breasts, and pushing them closer to one another, touched both nipples with her long fingers. "Have I not spanked you with my hand as hard as any man, Alexi?" "To be sure, your Highness," he answered softly. He was behind Beauty again. Perhaps he had taken his place against the bedpost. "Now clasp your hands in the small of your back and keep them there," said the Queen. And she closed her hand over Beauty's buttocks just as she had closed her other hand over Beauty's breasts. "And acknowledge my commands to you, Princess." "Yes, your Highness," Beauty struggled to respond, but to her further shame her voice broke into sobs and she shivered trying to restrain them. "And be quieter than that," said the Queen sharply. The Queen commenced to spank her. One great hard slap after another fell on her buttocks, and if a paddle had ever been worse she could not remember it. She tried to be still, to be quiet, to show nothing, nothing, as she repeated that word over and over in her mind, but she could feel herself writhing. It was as Leon had said with the Bridle Path; you always struggle as if you could escape the paddle, squirm away from it. And she heard herself crying out suddenly in gasps as the slaps stung her. The Queen's hand seemed immense and hard and heavier than the paddle. It shaped itself to her as it spanked her, and she realized she was frantic, full of tears, and cries, and all of this for the Queen to see in her cursed mirror. Yet she could not stop it. And the Queen's other hand pinched her breasts, stretched her nipples one at a time, letting them go, and stretching them again, as the spanks went on and on until Beauty was sobbing. Anything would have been better.

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  Today, there is a saline plume under the city of Torrance. It’s fifty-seven billion gallons of undrinkable water. This salt water is moving. It’s still sinking into the basin and traveling toward Los Angeles at the rate of 300 to 400 feet a year. A line of observation wells tracks its progress under the plain. The fresh water flowing west toward the Newport-Inglewood fault is pumped to the surface and delivered to the faucets of 1.2 million households, including those in my city. The salt water is on the other side of the fault. Intrusion of the saline plume past the fault line would be a disaster for forty-three cities. It would make drought on the Los Angeles plain permanent. 271 Mayfair Pool was open all summer when I was growing up. No one in my neighborhood could afford a big backyard swimming pool. There were so many school-age children that a single two-block area might have more than 150. On hot afternoons, you would walk to the pool with your trunks on under your jeans and carry a towel. You would wait in the heat in a long line of other children, change in the crowded locker room, and quickly step onto the pool deck. The shallow end of the pool would be so full of younger children that you could not swim. Many of the children would be pressed along the edge of the pool, holding on to the coping of the concrete deck. The crowd would gradually shift some children into the less-crowded, deep end of the pool. If you could swim, or were brave, you got away from the pool edge and struck out across the deep water. 272 The city of Los Angeles has just enough water for its needs. Most of this water is piped from the Owens Valley. Long Beach has just enough water delivered from state and federal water projects, and from its own wells. My city, and forty-two others, have just enough water drawn from the aquifers beneath their neighborhoods. We have just enough because cities and land owners with water rights finally agreed to hold off the disaster of saltwater intrusion into the basin’s freshwater aquifers. They turned to the county courts in 1959 for adjudication of their pumping rights and a limit on how much water they can take each year. The court appointed a San Gabriel River watermaster to oversee the ebbing of the ground water. The watermaster accounts for the extraction of every gallon of water under a plan the pumpers have voluntarily agreed to follow. Another independent agency, the Southern California Water Replenishment District, is responsible for preventing the Pacific Ocean from reclaiming its former bay. Every gallon taken from the aquifers under the plain is supposed to be replaced, to maintain the precarious balance of salt water and fresh water. The replenishment district oversees a system of check dams and spreading grounds.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  All the rooms of the summer villa were full of porters, gardeners, and footmen going to and fro carrying out things. Cupboards and chests were open; twice they had sent to the shop for cord; pieces of newspaper were tossing about on the floor. Two trunks, some bags and strapped-up rugs, had been carried down into the hall. The carriage and two hired cabs were waiting at the steps. Anna, forgetting her inward agitation in the work of packing, was standing at a table in her boudoir, packing her traveling bag, when Annushka called her attention to the rattle of some carriage driving up. Anna looked out of the window and saw Alexey Alexandrovitch’s courier on the steps, ringing at the front door bell. “Run and find out what it is,” she said, and with a calm sense of being prepared for anything, she sat down in a low chair, folding her hands on her knees. A footman brought in a thick packet directed in Alexey Alexandrovitch’s hand. “The courier has orders to wait for an answer,” he said. “Very well,” she said, and as soon as he had left the room she tore open the letter with trembling fingers. A roll of unfolded notes done up in a wrapper fell out of it. She disengaged the letter and began reading it at the end. “Preparations shall be made for your arrival here ... I attach particular significance to compliance....” she read. She ran on, then back, read it all through, and once more read the letter all through again from the beginning. When she had finished, she felt that she was cold all over, and that a fearful calamity, such as she had not expected, had burst upon her. In the morning she had regretted that she had spoken to her husband, and wished for nothing so much as that those words could be unspoken. And here this letter regarded them as unspoken, and gave her what she had wanted. But now this letter seemed to her more awful than anything she had been able to conceive.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  "Now, into the room," said Lord Gregory, and the slaves who had waited in a long line were ushered into the next chamber where they stood directly facing the arched door to the garden. Beauty could see now that a young Prince was first in line, and she saw that mounted Lord, his horse pawing the dirt before the archway. Leon moved Beauty a little to the side. "Now you can see better," he said. And she saw the Prince clasp his hands behind his neck and step forward. A trumpet sounded, catching Beauty off guard so she gasped. And a cry rose from the crowd behind the archway. The young slave was forced out and at once greeted by the black leather paddle of the Lord on horseback. Immediately the slave commenced to run. The mounted Lord rode right beside him, and the sound of the paddle came loud and distinct as the murmur of the crowd seemed to rise and mingle itself with faint ripples of laughter. Beauty was aghast as she saw the two figures disappear down the path together. "I cannot do it, I cannot," she thought. "I cannot be made to run. I will fall. I will fall to the ground and cover myself. To be tied, to be bound in front of so many was dreadful enough, but this is impossible..." But another rider was already in place, and a young Princess was forced suddenly forward. The paddle found its mark, the Princess let out a little cry and was immediately running desperately fast along the Bridle Path, the rider after her, spanking her fiercely. Before Beauty could take her eyes off them, another slave was on the way, and her eyes blurred as she saw far ahead a dim line of torches outlining the path that seemed to go on and on through the trees, past an endless vista of feasting Lords and Ladies. "Now, Beauty, you see what is required, and don't cry. If you're crying it will be harder. You must put your mind on running fast, keeping your hands on your neck. Here, place them there now. And you must lift your knees high, and try not to squirm to escape the paddle. It will catch you no matter what you do, but I warn you, no matter how many times I tell you that, you will find yourself trying to run away from it. That is the trick, but remain graceful." Another slave was running, and then another. And the young girl who had cried earlier was upended again, dangling, as she was spanked. "Dreadful of her," said the Princess in front of Beauty. "She'll be spanked hard enough in a moment." Suddenly there were only three slaves before Beauty and the archway. "O, but I can't..." she cried to Leon.

• From Querelle (1953)

  so I JEAN GENET of potential danger to himself. Dede had returned without an}' precise information, yet Mario was sure of the risk he was running: he started going out again, came out into the open with the crazy notion that by his speed and agility he would outdistance death, and that even if he were killed, death would simply pass through him. His courage was designed to dazzle and blind whatever it was that was threat�ning him. All the same, secretly, he reserved the right to negotiate with the enemy along lines that will eventually become apparent: Mario was merely waiting for the occasion. In that, too, he demon strated courage. The police made enquiries among all known "queens." There aren't many of those in Brest. Although it is a big naval base, Brest has remained a small provincial town. The avowed pederasts-self-avowed, that is-manage to remain ad mirably inconspicuous. They are peaceful citizens of irreproach able outward appearance, even though they may, the long day through, perhaps suffer from a timid itch for a bit of their fun. Nor could any detective have supposed that the murder dis covered in the neighborhood of the ramparts might have been the violent and-in terms of time and place-inevitable out come of a love affair that had developed on board a solid and loyal Navy vessel. No doubt the police knew about the world wide reputation of La Feria, but the reputation of the boss himself seemed unassailable: they did not know of a single client-docker or other-who had buggered him or whom he had buggered. Yet the notoriety of La Feria was legendary. However, Mario did not consider any of these matters until later, when Nono, in a moment's playful braggadocio, told him about his doings with Querelle. \Vhen Querelle emerged from the coal bunkers and qtme up on deck on the day after that big night, he was black from head to toe. A thick but soft layer of coal dust covered his hair, stiffening it, petrifying every curl, powdering his face and naked torso, the material of his pants, and his bare feet. He crossed the deck to reach his quarters . .. Mustn't worry too much," he was thinking as he walked

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  Now we know that with jets flying at excessive speed, and guided missiles, we may have no time at all. We must be on our toes at all times, as though the enemy would strike with the next breath.” 31 The city has a war memorial given to it by the Marine Corps in 1956, a souvenir of Korea. It is a Douglas F-3D fighter painted above and below in the gray and white of a shark. In the mid-1950s, the Marine Corps donated gutted fighters to cities if they would haul one away to a public place and have the plane repainted at intervals. Douglas Aircraft, the region’s biggest employer, called the F-3D the Skyknight . There is the head of an Indian painted on the side of our Skyknight . The Indian may be a Navajo. He looks like the Indian on a Navajo Freight Lines truck. Both Indians have blue eyes. The Marines gave the city the jet fighter, lacking any operating gear, as a pure husk, as a toy. And it was, for a time. The city had the shell of the jet brought here from the next county and laid it belly down, with no landing gear, flat on the scraped ground in a new park. Children played on it. For two years the F-3D lay as if its pilot had made an oddly successful, wheels-up landing between the jungle gym and the swing set. [image "Image" file=Image00004.jpg] 32 Almost at once, the F-3D began to hurt children, who broke arms and legs jumping from its wings. To protect the children, the city put its jet on a twelve-foot high, white, concrete pylon that swept the F-3D forward, like a mid-1950s hood ornament. Up there is where the future lay safely. The county construction crew fixed the plane in a gentle climb. It does not look ridiculous or particularly military. Besides, sycamore trees obscure it from the boulevard. The pylon was marked with one plaque—a dedication to the Korean War dead of the city. The plaque has the names of city council members on it and no one else’s. 33 Every Memorial Day, we go out to the park and honor our dead. We gather under the wings of the war memorial with some members of the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the Disabled American Veterans. The women’s auxiliaries participate. The mix of men and women is about equal. In recent years the number of those attending has grown. About 150 veterans and the wives and widows of veterans attend. A unit from the high school Navy ROTC presents the colors. The Legion post commander says a few words. The mayor says a few words. A guest speaker chosen by the Legion makes a patriotic speech. They read the names of all the old men of the Legion, VFW, and DAV who have died in the past year. It is a fairly long list.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  The governess, after saying good-morning, began a long and detailed account of Seryozha’s naughtiness, but Anna did not hear her; she was considering whether she would take her with her or not. “No, I won’t take her,” she decided. “I’ll go alone with my child.” “Yes, it’s very wrong,” said Anna, and taking her son by the shoulder she looked at him, not severely, but with a timid glance that bewildered and delighted the boy, and she kissed him. “Leave him to me,” she said to the astonished governess, and not letting go of her son, she sat down at the table, where coffee was set ready for her. “Mamma! I ... I ... didn’t....” he said, trying to make out from her expression what was in store for him in regard to the peaches. “Seryozha,” she said, as soon as the governess had left the room, “that was wrong, but you’ll never do it again, will you?... You love me?” She felt that the tears were coming into her eyes. “Can I help loving him?” she said to herself, looking deeply into his scared and at the same time delighted eyes. “And can he ever join his father in punishing me? Is it possible he will not feel for me?” Tears were already flowing down her face, and to hide them she got up abruptly and almost ran out on to the terrace. After the thunder showers of the last few days, cold, bright weather had set in. The air was cold in the bright sun that filtered through the freshly washed leaves. She shivered, both from the cold and from the inward horror which had clutched her with fresh force in the open air. “Run along, run along to Mariette,” she said to Seryozha, who had followed her out, and she began walking up and down on the straw matting of the terrace. “Can it be that they won’t forgive me, won’t understand how it all couldn’t be helped?” she said to herself.

• From Querelle (1953)

  used to meet sailors in the bars. He mingled with them, while never daring to hope that he could become one of their company, but he respected them for their membership in that gallant organization. But that night, secretly, to himself only, he was one of them. In the morning he left. The fog was extremely dense. He headed for the railroad station. He held his head low, hoping to conceal his face in the tall collar of the peacoat. It was unlikely that any laborer, one of his old buddies, would cross his path, or that he would be recognized even then, in this disguise. Having arrived in the vicinity of the station Gil turned onto tl)e road that goes down to the docks. The train was due at ten after six. Gil was carrying the revolver Querelle had given him. Would he shoot if the officer yelled for help? He went into the small one-patron pissoir that stood next to the guard rails above the sea. If anyone passed by, all he would see was the back of a sailor taking a leak. Gil did not have to fear either officers or policemen. Querelle had arranged everything per- • fectly. All Gil had to do now was to wait for the train : the Lieutenant would certainly come this way. Would Gil recognize him? He recapitulated all the details of the plan of action. Suddenly he stopped to consider whether he should address the officer familiarly or with the customary respect. "Talk tough, to get the message across." But it would be strange for a sailor to address a superior thus. Gil decided to flaunt formality, but felt some regret that he wouldn't, even on the morning he had donned it for the very first time, be able to know all the pleasures and consolations of his uniform, consisting largely of one's being able to forget oneself in the profound security hierarchy and ritual provide. Hands in the pockets of his peacoat, Gil stood and waited. The fog dampened and cooled his face, softened his wish to be brutal. Querelle was probably still sleeping in his hammock. Gil heard the train whistle, clatter across the iron bridge, pull into the station. A few minutes later occasional silhouettes flitted by: women and children. His heart was thumping. The Lieutenant appeared in the fog, all alone. Gil 229 I QUERELLE stepped out of the pissoir, holding the gun pointed at the ground at his side. He caught up with the Lieutenant, stopped him. "No noise. Give me that satchel or I'll shoot."

• From Querelle (1953)

  63 I QUERELLE Criminal Court that he made up for himself after every murder. As soon as he had committed the crime, Querelle had felt the hand of an imaginary policeman on his shoulder, and from the site of the slaughter all the way to this desolate place he had walked with a heavy tread, crushed by his appalling fate. After some hundred meters he abandoned the path to plunge in among the trees and brambles and down a slope to the old moat below the battlements girding the city. He had the frightened look and do\vncast mien of a guilty man under arrest, yet within him the certainty-and this joined him to the policeman, in a shameful yet friendly fashion-that he was a hero. The ground was sloping and covered with thorny shrubs. "Well, here we go," he thought. And, almost at once: "Yassir , th is is it, folks. Back to the worm farm." When he reached the bottom of the moat, Querelle stopped for a moment. A light wind was stirring the dry, brittle, pointed tips of the grasses, making them rustle quietly. The strange lightness of the sound only made his situation seem more bizarre. He walked on through the fog, still heading away from the scene of the crime. The grass and the wind went on making their gentle noise, soft as the sound of air in an athlete's nos trils, or the step of an acrobat ... Querelle, now clad in bright blue silk tights, proceeded slowly, his figure moulded by the azure garment, waist accentuated by a steel-studded leather belt. He felt the silent presence of every muscle working in unison with all the others to create· the effect of a statue carved out of turbulent silence. Two police officers walked on either side of him, invisible, triumphant and friendly, full of tender ne ss and cruelty toward their prey. Querelle continued a few more meters, through the fog and the whispering grasses. He was looking for a quiet place, solitary as a cell, sufficiently secluded and dignified to serve as a place of judgment. "Sure hope they don't pick up my tracks," he thought. He regretted that he had not simply turned around and walked backwards in his own footsteps, thus raising the grass he

• From Querelle (1953)

  146 I JEAN GENET. knew this feeling from the very moment of his arrest by Mario: w h en 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 "apprehen sions" -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. Now it was easy to walk up to, to insult, or to strike the beast of pr ey, free and proud a minute ago, rendered quite inoffensive now. Gil -turned back toward Mario. The childlike aspect of his soul which had come to his help for an instant was completely gone now. Yielding to the need to utter at least one lovely phrase before dying-though sometimes, even silence ,can be su ch an impressive line-that would sum up his life, that would co nsummate .it regally, well, just express it-he said : "C'est la vie." When he entered the Police Chief's office he was over come first by the tremendous heat in the room and felt himself going soft to the point of thinking he would die of exhaustion, incapable of any effort to escape the radiator wh ich was already tr embling with expectation, preparing to uncoil like an ana conda in order to wrap itself round him and strangle him. He was suffering from both fear and shame. He reproached himself

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  She said to herself: “No, just now I can’t think of it, later on, when I am calmer.” But this calm for thought never came; every time the thought rose of what she had done and what would happen to her, and what she ought to do, a horror came over her and she drove those thoughts away. “Later, later,” she said—“when I am calmer.” But in dreams, when she had no control over her thoughts, her position presented itself to her in all its hideous nakedness. One dream haunted her almost every night. She dreamed that both were her husbands at once, that both were lavishing caresses on her. Alexey Alexandrovitch was weeping, kissing her hands, and saying, “How happy we are now!” And Alexey Vronsky was there too, and he too was her husband. And she was marveling that it had once seemed impossible to her, was explaining to them, laughing, that this was ever so much simpler, and that now both of them were happy and contented. But this dream weighed on her like a nightmare, and she awoke from it in terror. Chapter 12 In the early days after his return from Moscow, whenever Levin shuddered and grew red, remembering the disgrace of his rejection, he said to himself: “This was just how I used to shudder and blush, thinking myself utterly lost, when I was plucked in physics and did not get my remove; and how I thought myself utterly ruined after I had mismanaged that affair of my sister’s that was entrusted to me. And yet, now that years have passed, I recall it and wonder that it could distress me so much. It will be the same thing too with this trouble. Time will go by and I shall not mind about this either.”

• From Querelle (1953)

  137 I QUERELLE rhoids. \Vhen Querelle left one of the gardens of Alexandria, it was too late to throw the broken.aff branche s into the street and then nervously cower behind some shrub, waiting for the favorable moment to vault across the garden wall. Where was there one could throw them, at all? Any beggar hunkered down in the dust, any Arab street kid would certainly notice a French sailor engaged in the process of getting rid of a whole load of tangerines still on the branch. It ap peared best to hide them on his person. Querelle wanted to avoid any bizarre gesture that would ca11 attention to him, and thus he moved in plain view from garden to ship, in uninterrupted motion, simply slipping those branches into the neck opening of his sailor's jacket, let ting some leaves and fruit stick out, turning his chest, in honor of his star, into a living repository for them. But back on board he sensed the danger he was still running, would be running for quite a while, although it did not have th e insistent quality of fear following a true crime: one foot sti11 on the gangway, the other suspended in air, he addressed a bewitching smile to the deity of his secret night. In his pants pocket he carried the necklace of gold coins and the two h2nds of Fatmah he had stolen in the villa of that tangerine garden. The gold lent him weight, terrestrial security. When he had distributed the foliage and the fruit to the other crewmen, languorous with heat and boredom, and feeling suddenly pure, he experienced such a powerful sense of his own limpidity, in fact, that he had to watch hin1s elf every second while walking along the deck to his quarters, so as not to pull out the stolen treasures from his pocket in plain view of everybody. The same feeling of light heartedness, confounding his single-minded belief in his star and his certainty of being a lost man, had uplifted him (his heart, light, like a balloon) during his walk on the road along the city ramparts \ � hen-flashing into his mind with piercing clarity-a certain fact had become clear to him: the polic e had dis covered a cigarette lighter in the vicinity of the murdered

• From Querelle (1953)

  111 I QUERELLE Querelle suddenly felt very pleased, not because he found himself in this cave dedicated to evil doings, but because he had in his possession a much deeper secret than the one Gil had just revealed to him. Querelle's question came in a very casual, offhand tone: "But why did you snuff that sailorboy? That didn't really make sense to me." Th e insinua ting sentence began with a "but" so heavy with hypocrisy that Querelle, whose common approach was a brusque one, was instantly reminded of Lieutenant Seblon and his wily ways, his roundabout approaches. Gil felt the blood draining away from his face. His life , his presence within himself, rushed to his eyes and made them burn, escaped th rough them to lose itself, to disperse among the dark shadows of the dungeon. He had to hesitate before answering, not with the kind of hesitation where time is gained by cold-blooded reasoning for and against, but out of a feeling close to complete prostration, aggravated by the impression that it would be useless to deny anything, and this, too, locked his jaws. The charge was so serious that he had to make an effort to comprehend it at all. He remained mute, tried to lose himself in a fixed stare, and became so self-conscious of it that he could feel the muscles round his eyes twitching. Unblinking, he pressed his lips to gether, until they became a thin line. "Well? That sailor. What made you snuff him?" "He didn't do it." As if half asleep Gil listened to Querelle's question and Roger's answer. The sound of their voices didn't bother him at all. He had withdrawn totally into the intensity of his stare, while being aware of its fixity. "Who was it then, if it wa sn't him?" Gil turned his head and looked Querelle in the eye.