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.

Page 127 of 529 · 20 per page

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Meanwhile a militarized wall has gone up along much of the Mexican border, ironically making it harder for seasonal undocumented workers to go home, as many once did, and turning this country into what some call the Golden Prison. Arizona school officials become so xenophobic that they outlaw Mexican American studies programs in high schools, lest they foster “ethnic solidarity.” Some students chain themselves to their desks in protest. Also, a growing number of children born in America are going to school in fear that their families won’t be there when they get home. Since half of all undocumented immigrants are women, and 80 percent of them have children who are citizens, this is a lot of fear. As I write this, anti-immigrant politicians are promising to build even higher walls. On the other hand, I begin to meet high school students and teachers in California and Texas who ask for Mexican American studies programs in their schools for the first time, precisely because of all the publicity generated by students protesting in Arizona. Also, Hispanic American voters are such a fast-growing part of the electorate that some politicians hostile to undocumented immigrants are being defeated. Polls show that most Americans don’t believe our economy could get along without the nearly twelve million undocumented workers here, or that deporting all of them is even possible. Also, our aging population is predicted to need millions more immigrant home care and health care workers. Even consumers who want local and organic meat and produce are beginning to link this principled stand to fair pay and fair treatment for people who harvest and serve our food. In other words, the future is blowing in the wind. I’m sure of only one thing. Within driving distance of where you are reading this right now, there are secret worlds of migrant farmworkers far from home, and immigrants who fear the loss of home. Coast to coast, these are our secrets next door. II.World War II newsreels gave me nightmares as a child, antiwar demonstrations inspired me as an adult, and now I’m at least in training to be a pacifist. Yet on a summer day in 1993 I find myself in downtown Manhattan, marching behind uniformed men and women carrying guns. Why? The answer is Tom Stoddard. I met him almost a decade earlier at a benefit in a Manhattan law firm, home to wingtip shoes, hunting prints, and Reagan supporters. He was heading the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund and had somehow persuaded this conservative firm to support his organization that defends the rights of gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender people, and anybody with HIV/AIDS. This was the 1980s. Religious leaders were still calling HIV/AIDS “God’s punishment for sin,” and obituaries were still concealing it as a cause of death, even when the dying were impossibly young. Homophobia was still so powerful that even The New York Times had yet to use the word homophobia .

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  The “illness” that led frustrated women to the offices of vibrator-wielding doctors a century ago often led someplace far worse in medieval Europe. As historian Reay Tannahill explains, “The Malleus Maleficarum (1486), the first great handbook of the witch inquisitors, had no more difficulty than a modern psycho-analyst in accepting that [a certain] type of woman might readily believe she had had intercourse with the Devil himself, a huge, black, monstrous being with an enormous penis and seminal fluid as cold as ice water.”8 But it wasn’t only sexual dreams that attracted the brutal attentions of erotophobic authorities. If a witch-hunter in the 1600s discovered a woman or girl with an unusually large clitoris, this “devil’s teat” was sufficient to condemn her to death.9 Medieval Europe suffered periodic plagues of incubi and succubi, male and female demons thought to be invading the dreams, beds, and bodies of living people. Thomas Aquinas and others believed that these demons impregnated women on their nocturnal visits by first posing as a succubus (a female spirit who has sex with a sleeping man in order to obtain his sperm), and then depositing the sperm in an unsuspecting woman in the form of an incubus (a male spirit ravishing a sleeping woman). Women thus thought to have been impregnated by malevolent spirits flitting about like nocturnal honeybees were at special risk of being exposed as witches and dealt with accordingly. Any stories these women might have told regarding the true origins of their pregnancy conveniently died with them. Though now considered one of the finest novels ever written, Madame Bovary was denounced as immoral when it was first published in late 1856. Public prosecutors in Paris were upset that Gustave Flaubert portrayed a headstrong peasant girl who flaunted the rules of established propriety by taking lovers. They felt her character met with insufficient punishment. Flaubert’s defense was that the work was “eminently moral” on those terms. After all, Emma Bovary dies by her own hand in misery, poverty, shame, and desperation. Insufficient punishment? The case against the book, in other words, turned on whether Emma Bovary’s punishment was agonizing and horrible enough, not on whether she deserved such suffering at all or had any right to pursue sexual fulfillment in the first place. But even Flaubert and his misogynistic prosecutors could never have dreamed up the punishments said to befall immodest women among the Tzotzil Maya of Central America. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy explains that “the h’ik’al, a super-sexed demon with a several-foot-long penis,” seizes women who have misbehaved, “carrying them off to his cave, where he rapes them.” Little girls are told that any woman unlucky enough to become pregnant by the h’ik’al “swells up and then gives birth night after night, until she dies.”10

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  I think I sensed that I should go right away, yet somehow the accident seemed like a normal part of my father’s life on the road, nothing to be too alarmed about. Also I felt a cold stab of fear that if I went to California, I would become my father’s caretaker, as I had been my mother’s—and never come back to my own life. A few days before I was to leave, the doctor called my sister to say that our father had taken a turn for the worse due to internal bleeding. I got on the first flight to Los Angeles, but when I changed planes in Chicago, I heard myself being paged. It was my sister. The doctor had called again. There had been a massive internal hemorrhage—our father had died. When I arrived at that hospital, I found only a manila envelope with my father’s few belongings, and a doctor who seemed barely able to control his anger that no family member had been present. My father had succumbed to gushing traumatic ulcers, he said, more lethal than his crash wounds. I don’t know whether I was listening with a daughter’s ears or hearing a fact, but I thought he was saying that this fatal bleeding had been caused not by the crash itself, but by trauma, stress, despair. It was something I could never find the courage to tell my sister. It was something I would never forget.

• From Querelle (1953)

  st I QUERELLE 4•But it's such a drag when you're like that. And anyway, how do you know for sure that that Tony's rea11y out to get you " Mario made an irritated gesture. His mouth hardened. uYou don't think I'm getting cold feet, do you?" HI didn't say that." Dede sounded angry . .. 1 didn't say th at." He was standing in front of Mario. His voice was hoarse, a little vulgar, deep, with a slight country accent. It was the kind of voice that knows how to talk to horses. l\1ario turned his head. He looked at Dede for a couple of seconds. AU he would proceed to say during the ensuing scene would be tight-lipped and stem, as if trying to put the fu11 force of his will into his expression, so that the youngster would realize, once and for a11, that he, l\fario Lambert, inspector of the mobile squad, as signed to the Commissariat of Brest, went fn no fear for his future. For a year now he had been working with Dede who provided him with information on the secret life of the docks and told him about the thefts, the pilfering of coffee, minerals, other goods. The men on the waterfront paid little attention to the kid . .. Get going." Planted in front of him, feet apart and looking stockier than before, Dede gazed at the policeman, somewhat sulkily. Then he swiveled round on one foot, keeping his legs extended like a compass, and, in reaching over to the window where his coat was hanging on the hasp, moved his shoulders and chest with surprising speed and strength, displacing the weight of an in visible vault of heaven. For the first time Mario realized that Dede was strong, that he had grown up into a young man. He felt ashamed about having given in to fear in his presence, but then very quickly retreated into the she]] of The Police, which justifies every kind of behavior. The window opened on to a narrow lane. Facing it, on the other side, was the gray wall of a garage. Dede put on his coat. When he turned around again,

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  276 When it rains lightly and steadily, the replenishment district’s system of dams and spreading grounds collects the runoff from the San Gabriel River. On parts of the Los Angeles River, the runoff gathers behind rubber dams, inflated only when it rains. When it rains harder, the dams and gravel basins designed to capture runoff become part of a flood control system intended to move the water as quickly as possible. Along most city streets, storm drains open into feeder channels that empty directly into the rivers. When it rains very hard—an inch of rain an hour—the Los Angeles and San Gabriel rivers quickly fill nearly to the top of the concrete levees the Army Corps of Engineers built to contain flood water. The Corps of Engineers built the levees, beginning in 1938, to prevent the two rivers from cutting new channels through nearly 300 square miles of suburban development. When the two rivers flow at capacity, millions of gallons of flood water move through them in just a few hours. To prevent the flood water from topping the levees, the Corps designed flap gates that close the feeder channels until the crest passes. When the flap gates close, the excess water has to be stored somewhere. The flood control system stores the water on the level streets of the cities on the Los Angeles plain. 277 Until the Corps of Engineers built the county’s flood control system, the Los Angeles and San Gabriel were called “tramp” rivers because they found a new bed almost every winter. In the 1880s, the bed of the San Gabriel River would routinely shift more than a mile west after a heavy rain. The Los Angeles River once entered the Pacific Ocean near the city of Santa Monica and then at San Pedro, eighteen miles away. Once, the Los Angeles River was completely captured by the San Gabriel River. In 1915, levees began to limit the wandering of the two rivers, although they sometimes overflowed their new, artificial banks. A series of disastrous floods in

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Many lesbians had survived everything from family exile to Freudian theory, from remaining closeted in order to keep their jobs to coming out and losing custody of their own children. Besides enduring violence directed at females in general, they faced the added danger of being raped as a punishment, or as a “conversion” to heterosexuality. No lesbian was completely safe, but for those without traditional families, secret communities could mean more safety and a chosen family. On the road, I met couples traveling in RVs and discovered that a national roving group called RV Women provided campgrounds and community. Other gatherings were massive and seasonal—most famously, the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. From 1976 to 2015, thousands of women and girls, lesbians and otherwise, came for part or all of the month of August to camp on acres of man-free Michigan forest and experience music groups, visual arts, and sports in safety and freedom. Other secrets were small but permanent, like lesbian retirement communities in Florida, or the Last Perch, a creation of a California couple whose vision went from aging to hospice. In 2001 I discovered an all-female trailer park near Tucson, Arizona. After being let through a double gate with a safety code that changed daily, I found myself on streets named for admired women in history. Suddenly I could imagine living on the corner of Emma Goldman and Gertrude Stein, or following Dorothy Height to Eleanor Roosevelt. At the center of all the neat rows of trailers was a clubhouse where women could gather for everything from book clubs to gambling. Now secrecy has become less necessary for safety, and, at least in some parts of the country, lesbian couples and their children are treated like other families. On the Web there are LGBTQ resort and retirement places for a larger community of gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people. Yet whether we are born women or become women, many of us still find more safety in each other’s company than in the company of men, and more safety than men find in one another’s company. As long as there is danger, there will be secrets. But most of all, I owe my discovery of the power of secrets to migrant farmworkers. Without them, I would still believe that what I saw of America from my father’s car—or see now from my own wandering path—is all there is to see. I.It is the very end of the 1960s. Scared and in over my head, I am a volunteer flying to California at the request of Cesar Chavez, a man I don’t know. His fledgling union is trying to raise wages for all farmworkers, but the growers have refused even to talk, and Cesar has enlisted public support by calling for a consumer boycott of grapes. In retaliation, agribusiness is using migrants from Mexico to break the strike, and Cesar has organized protest marches from both sides of the border.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  See the beast from which I turned back; help me from her, thou famous sage; for she makes my veins and pulses tremble.” “Thou must take another road,” he answered, when he saw me weeping, “if thou desirest to escape from this wild place: because this beast, for which thou criest, lets not men pass her way; but so entangles that she slays them; and has a nature so perverse and vicious, that she never satiates her craving appetite; and after feeding, she is hungrier than before. The animals to which she weds herself are many; 13 and will yet be more, until the Greyhound 14 comes, that will make her die with pain. He will not feed on land or pelf, but on wisdom, and love, and manfulness; and his nation shall be between Feltro and Feltro. He shall be the salvation of that low 15 Italy, for which Camilla the virgin, Euryalus, and Turnus, and Nisus, died of wounds; 16 he shall chase her through every city, till he have put her into Hell again; from which envy first set her loose Wherefore I think and discern this for thy best, that thou follow me; and I will be thy guide, and lead thee hence through an eternal place, 17

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  Finally it was time to go up. And driving Beauty before him, he gave her a few gentle but brisk spanks to hurry her up the stairs to the bedchamber. BEAUTY BEAUTY STOOD at the foot of the bed, her hands clasped to her neck, her buttocks throbbing with a warm pain that felt so much better now than the spanking she had lately received that it was almost pleasure. She had for the moment stopped crying. She had only just pulled down the covers for the Prince, with her teeth, her hands clasped behind her back, and then with her teeth had taken his boots to the edge of the room. And now she waited for further commands, trying to watch him, though her eyes were cast down, without his realizing it. He had bolted the door, and he was sitting on the side of the bed. And his black hair, loose and curling at his shoulders gleamed in the light of the tallow candle. His face was very beautiful to her, perhaps because in spite of the size of the features, they were all rather delicately molded. She did not know for certain. Even his hands enthralled her. The fingers were so long, so white, so delicate. She was terribly relieved to be alone with him. The moments below in the Inn had been such an agony to her, and even though he had brought the wooden paddle with him and might spank her much harder with it than that dreadful girl, she was so glad to be alone with him that she could not be afraid of it. She was afraid, however, that she hadn't pleased him. She searched her mind for faults. She had obeyed all his commands, and he understood how difficult it was for her. He knew completely what it meant for her to be stripped naked and revealed to everyone, to be helpless and made public and that this surrender of which he spoke could come in acts and gestures long before it could come from her mind. But no matter how hard she tried to excuse herself, she could not help but wondering if she could have tried harder. Did he want her to cry out more when she was spanked? She was uncertain. Just thinking of that girl spanking her in front of everyone made her cry again, and she knew that the Prince would see her tears, and he might wonder why now, when she'd been told to stand still at the foot of the bed, she was crying. This is my life, she told herself, trying to calm herself. He has awakened me and claimed me.

• From Querelle (1953)

  Entering the old penitentiary Quere11e was elated by fear and by the responsibility he was about to assume. Silently walking along beside Roger he felt a budding within himself-soon they would open, those buds, all over his body, and perfume it with their corollae : the budding of a violent adventure. Danger was what he needed in order to bloom. Danger and fear made him high. \Vhat would he find in the depths of the abandoned prison? He held on to himself. The least sense of excitement would have been enough to make him fear the place. With a tightness in his chest he thought of all those massive walls converging to crush him, and so he fought against them, fought them off, strained against them as he strained against his own anger, with the same effort, almost the same motions as those of the sergeant of the guard when he closes, using both his hands and all the weight of his body, the giant gates of the citadel. In some shadowy sense he was walking back to meet a former and blessed existence. Not that he seriously thought he had ever been a galley slave, nor did his imagination get involved in such fantasies, but he experienced a wonderful sense of well-being, a presentiment of rest, at the idea of entering, a free man, sovereign, the dark interior of these thick walls, which had throughout the ages contained so much shackled pain, so much physical and moral suffering, so many bodies contorted by torture, worn out by disease, knowing no other joys but the memory of marvelous crimes that stood like a pillar of smoke in the light, or pierced the dark in which they had been committed, with a blazing shaft of light. 'What could remain of these murders under the stones of this prison, or in its corners, or suspended in the humid air? Even though, for Querelle, these reflections were no clear thoughts, at lea�t the same thing that brings them so easily to pen and paper gave him a heavy, confused feeling of pain and bothered his brain with a smidgen of anguish. What's more, Q�erelle was on his way, for the first time in his life, to meet another criminal, a brother. He had already entertained vague dreams of meeting a murderer of his own stature, with 165 I QUERELLE

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Vronsky had not yet seen Anna. He purposely avoided looking in her direction. But he knew by the direction of people’s eyes where she was. He looked round discreetly, but he was not seeking her; expecting the worst, his eyes sought for Alexey Alexandrovitch. To his relief Alexey Alexandrovitch was not in the theater that evening. “How little of the military man there is left in you!” Serpuhovskoy was saying to him. “A diplomat, an artist, something of that sort, one would say.” “Yes, it was like going back home when I put on a black coat,” answered Vronsky, smiling and slowly taking out his opera-glass. “Well, I’ll own I envy you there. When I come back from abroad and put on this,” he touched his epaulets, “I regret my freedom.” Serpuhovskoy had long given up all hope of Vronsky’s career, but he liked him as before, and was now particularly cordial to him. “What a pity you were not in time for the first act!” Vronsky, listening with one ear, moved his opera-glass from the stalls and scanned the boxes. Near a lady in a turban and a bald old man, who seemed to wave angrily in the moving opera-glass, Vronsky suddenly caught sight of Anna’s head, proud, strikingly beautiful, and smiling in the frame of lace. She was in the fifth box, twenty paces from him. She was sitting in front, and slightly turning, was saying something to Yashvin. The setting of her head on her handsome, broad shoulders, and the restrained excitement and brilliance of her eyes and her whole face reminded him of her just as he had seen her at the ball in Moscow. But he felt utterly different towards her beauty now. In his feeling for her now there was no element of mystery, and so her beauty, though it attracted him even more intensely than before, gave him now a sense of injury. She was not looking in his direction, but Vronsky felt that she had seen him already. When Vronsky turned the opera-glass again in that direction, he noticed that Princess Varvara was particularly red, and kept laughing unnaturally and looking round at the next box. Anna, folding her fan and tapping it on the red velvet, was gazing away and did not see, and obviously did not wish to see, what was taking place in the next box. Yashvin’s face wore the expression which was common when he was losing at cards. Scowling, he sucked the left end of his mustache further and further into his mouth, and cast sidelong glances at the next box.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  They are playing the game as it exists. I’m trying to change it—and I’ve failed. There is little more painful than surrealism when you yourself are the only contrast. • I’ve passed by Laurel, Maryland, on trips to and from Washington, D.C., for years, but I haven’t a clue what goes on there. Then one day in 1982 when I’m enjoying being at my desk at Ms. magazine after a long stretch of road trips, I get a call from Connie Bowman, a brand-new marketing director at the Freestate Raceway in Laurel. Since harness racing is a national and global attraction for the subcultures of racing and betting—and since both subcultures are overwhelmingly male—Bowman wants to attract more women. Her idea is to invite me and Loretta Swit, star of one of the most-watched series in TV history, to race each other in an event to be called M*A*S*H vs. Ms. In return, each of us will get a percentage of the gate to give away. This captures my attention. Ms. magazine has discovered that very few advertisers will support a women’s magazine that doesn’t devote its editorial pages to praising the products it advertises: fashion, beauty, home decoration, and the like. To make up for the lack of ads in Ms. —and to meet requests for subscriptions from battered women’s shelters, prisons, welfare programs, and just readers who can’t afford them—we have to raise contributions. This is why I find myself on a warm summer evening, dressed in white pants and green and gold racing silks, standing in front of a huge, blindingly lit stadium filled with thousands of shouting strangers cheering for their favorite horses plus the novelty bet of Loretta or me. Loretta is wearing white pants plus blue and red silks, and we are both peering out from under white crash helmets emblazoned “M*A*S*H vs. Ms. ” Beyond us is a huge oval racetrack so preternaturally lit up by klieg lights that I’m told astronauts can see it from space. Both of us are about to put our lives in the hands of horses and jockeys we don’t know. This feels more surrealistic than it sounded on the phone. Officials walk us to our respective rigs. Mine is pulled by a beautiful chestnut mare and guided by a skinny, older black driver. He is unusual in this traditionally white world of southern horse racing. Loretta has a younger white driver and a dark-coated gelding. We each seat ourselves next to the driver on a plank no bigger than an ironing board that is attached to a superlight rig. The whole thing is more like a coat hanger than the Ben-Hur chariot I envisioned. As we trot out to the track where other teams are assembled, we already seem to be going very fast. After the starting signal, that speed is much faster. I realize I’m sitting only inches above a track that is whizzing underneath me in a blur.

• From Querelle (1953)

  Now it was easy to walk up to, to insult, or to strike the beast of prey, 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 such an impressive line-that would sum up his life, that would consummate .it regally, well, just express it-he said : "C'est la vie." When he entered the Police Chief's office he was overcome 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 which was already trembling with expectation, preparing to uncoil like an anaconda in order to wrap itself round him and strangle him. He was suffering from both fear and shame. He reproached himself 147 I QUERELLE for not being as magnificent as he should have been. The walls seemed to hold blood-oripping secrets, more terrible than his own. His physical appearance surprised the Police Chief. He would never have dreamt the murderer looked like this. When he had instructed !vtario to put a little more zing into the investigation, he had been unable to resist the temptation to describe the potential suspect in some detail. However, crime is an area where previous experience is virtually useless. He had been sitting there at his desk, toying with a ruler, trying to conjure up the portrait of a homosexual murderer. Mario had listened, without believing a word of it. "There are precedents. Like Vacher. These are types who get carried away by their vices. Sadists, that's what they are. And these two murders are the handiwork of a sadist."· \Vith similar buoyant assurance the Commissioner had then gone on to discuss the matter with his counterpart in the Navy Police. Both of them ended up struggling to make the notion of a murderer coincide with their notions of what inverts were, what they looked like. They invented monsters. The Police

• From Querelle (1953)

  53 I QUERELLE up his face at the same time, in all innocence, partly shadowed by the screen of his hands. "And what are you going to do?" HMe ... ? Nothing. \Vhat d'you suppose. I'll just be wait ing for you to get back." Once again Dede looked at Mario. He gazed at him for a 'couple of seconds, his mouth half-open and dry. "I'm scared," he thought. He took a pull at his cigarette and said: "All right." He turned to the mirror to adjust the peak of his cap, to bend it over a little more to the left. In the mirror he could see the whole room in which he had now lived for over a year. It was smaii, cold, and on the wails there were some photographs of prize fighters and female movie stars, clipped out of the papers. The only luxury item was the light fixture above the divan: an electric bulb in a pale pink glass tulip. He did not despise Mario for being scared. Quite some time ago he had understood the nobility of self-acknowledged fear, what he called the jitters, or cold feet ... Often enough he had been forced to take to his heels in order to escape from some dangerous and armed foe. He hoped that Mario would accept the chaiienge to fight, having decided himself, should a good occasion arise, to knock off the docker who had just come o ut of the joint. To save Mario would be to save himself. And it was natural enough for anyone to be scared of Tony the Docker. He was a fierce and unscrupulous brute. On the other hand, it seemed strange to Dede that a mere criminal should cause The Police to tremble, and for the first time he had his doubts that this invisible and ideal force which he served and behind which he sheltered migh t just consist of weak humans. And, as this truth dawned on him, through a little crack in himself, he fel t both weaker and-strangely enough-stronger. For the first time he was taking thought, and this frightened him a little. "What about your ch ief? Haven't you told him?" "Don 't you \VOrry about that. I've told you your job: now get

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Who?” she asked herself. “All or one?” And not assisting the harassed young man she was dancing with in the conversation, the thread of which he had lost and could not pick up again, she obeyed with external liveliness the peremptory shouts of Korsunsky starting them all into the _grand rond_, and then into the _chaîne_, and at the same time she kept watch with a growing pang at her heart. “No, it’s not the admiration of the crowd has intoxicated her, but the adoration of one. And that one? can it be he?” Every time he spoke to Anna the joyous light flashed into her eyes, and the smile of happiness curved her red lips. She seemed to make an effort to control herself, to try not to show these signs of delight, but they came out on her face of themselves. “But what of him?” Kitty looked at him and was filled with terror. What was pictured so clearly to Kitty in the mirror of Anna’s face she saw in him. What had become of his always self-possessed resolute manner, and the carelessly serene expression of his face? Now every time he turned to her, he bent his head, as though he would have fallen at her feet, and in his eyes there was nothing but humble submission and dread. “I would not offend you,” his eyes seemed every time to be saying, “but I want to save myself, and I don’t know how.” On his face was a look such as Kitty had never seen before.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  But by the time I came home from India, communal travel had come to seem natural to me. I had learned that being isolated in a car was not always or even usually the most rewarding way to travel: I would miss talking to fellow travelers and looking out the window. How could I enjoy getting there when I couldn’t pay attention? I stopped making excuses for being the rare American who didn’t want to own a car. I even stopped citing environmental excuses, or explaining that Jack Kerouac didn’t drive either. As he said, he didn’t “know how to drive, just typewrite.” I did sometimes quote public opinion polls that rated New Yorkers as the happiest of Americans. Why? Because in the nondriving capital of the nation, we actually see each other in the street instead of being isolated in speeding tin cans. But the truth is, I didn’t decide on not driving. It decided on me. Now when I’m asked with condescension why I don’t drive—and I am still asked—I just say: Because adventure starts the moment I leave my door. I.I am in a taxi on my way with a friend to JFK, an airport named after a president who was assassinated only six years before. Our older driver is like a rough trade character from a Tennessee Williams play—complete with an undershirt revealing tattoos, and an old Marine Corps photo stuck in the frame of his hack license. Clearly, this is his taxi and his world. My friend and I are acting a lot like lovers, which we are. We are also hyperaware that the driver is looking at us in the rearview mirror. That’s because, while we waited with our luggage in a darkening street, a low-slung car full of white teenagers sped by, leaving behind in the evening air the lethal word “Nigger!” Now I can feel us struggling to forget that surreal attack and stay ourselves. When we reach the airport, the driver slides open the divider between the front and back seat. Both my friend and I grow tense. I always think that talking into that opening makes me feel as if I’m ordering French fries, but this time, I am grateful for the barrier. We have no idea what the driver thinks of us. The driver thrusts something through the opening. It turns out to be an old battered photo of a young man in a suit, standing with his arm around a plump and smiling young woman who is clutching her purse with both hands. “That’s me and my wife when we got married,” he says. “Except for when I was in Korea, we haven’t spent a night apart for forty years. She’s my best friend, my sweetheart—but believe me, we weren’t supposed to get married. Her family is Jewish from Poland, mine is Sicilian Catholic—they wouldn’t even speak to each other until after their first grandchild was born.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  His flesh felt hot beneath her, and thrown over his back as she was, she boldly kissed his sore buttocks. Then she was laid down on the bed and realized she was beside the Queen, looking up into her eyes, as the Queen, who rested on her elbow, looked down at her. Beauty's breath left her in rapid gasps. The Queen seemed quite enormous to her. And now she perceived a great resemblance to the Prince, only as always the Queen seemed infinitely colder. Yet there was about her red mouth something which might have once been called sweetness. She had thick eyelashes, a firm chin, and as she smiled dimples showed in her cheeks. Her face was heart shaped. Flustered, Beauty closed her eyes, biting her lip so hard she might have cut it. "Look at me," said the Queen. "I want to see your eyes, naturally. I want no modesty from you now, do you understand me?" "Yes, your Highness," Beauty answered. She wondered if the Queen might hear her heart beat. The bed was soft beneath her, the pillows soft, and she found herself staring at the Queen's great breasts, the dark circle of a nipple beneath the gown, before she looked at the Queen's eyes again obediently. A shock passed through her, collecting in a knot in her belly. The Queen merely studied her in great absorption. Her teeth showed perfectly white between her lips, and those eyes, slanted, long, were black to the core and revealed nothing. "Sit there, Alexi," the Queen said without looking away. And Beauty saw him take his position at the foot of the bed, with his arms folded on his chest, and his back to the bedpost. "Little plaything," the Queen said under her breath to Beauty. "And now I understand perhaps why Lady Juliana is so enraptured over you." She ran her hand over Beauty's face, her cheeks, her eyelids. She pinched Beauty's mouth. She smoothed back her hair, and then she slapped Beauty's breasts to the right and to the left and again. Beauty's mouth quivered but she made no sound. She kept her hands still at her sides. The Queen was like a light that threatened to blind her. If she thought about it, lying here so near the Queen, she would be overcome with panic. The Queen's hand moved over her belly and her thighs. It pinched the flesh of her thighs and then the backs of her legs at the calves. And in spite of herself Beauty felt a tingling everywhere she was touched as if the hand itself had some dreadful power.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  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. Rushing through the hall at the end of Lord Gregory's paddle, the Bridle Path, even the Bridle Path, was better for there was some escape in the movement, and here there was nothing but the pain, her enflamed buttocks laid bare for the Queen who now sought out new spots, spanking on the left buttock and then the right, and then covering Beauty's thighs with smacks while Beauty's buttocks seemed to swell and throb unbearably.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  "Nonsense, my darling, follow the path. It will unwind slowly before you, you will see its turns well in advance, and stop only if you see the slave before you stopped. Now and then the line is stopped, for as the slaves come before the Queen, they must stop for praise or condemnation. She is on a great pavilion to your right, but don't glance at her when you step out of the paddle will catch you off guard." "O, please, I shall faint, I can't, I can't..." "Beauty, Beauty," said the pretty Princess in front of her, "just follow my example." And Beauty realized with horror there was no one left but this girl. But then that one who had just been spanked was placed before her, and ushered out to the waiting paddle. The girl was frantic, sobbing, but she kept her hands on her neck, and soon she was running beside her laughing rider, a tall young Lord who lifted his arm way back as he spanked her. Suddenly another rider appeared, the elderly Lord Gerhardt, and as Beauty watched in terror, the pretty Princess ran out to receive the first blows and run with graceful lifts of her knees beside him. But for all her complaints, the Lord's horse seemed to move terribly fast and the paddle was loud and merciless. Beauty was forced to the threshold of the garden. For the first time she stared at the true immensity of the Court, the dozens upon dozens of tables that sprawled out on the green and appeared in great numbers in the forest beyond it. Everywhere were servants and naked slaves. It was perhaps three times the size she had judged from the windows. She felt tiny, insignificant, for all her terror. Lost and without a name or a soul suddenly. "What am I now," she might have thought, but she could not think. And as if in nightmare, she saw all the faces of those at the nearest tables, Lords and Ladies twisted to see the Bridle Path, and far to her loomed the pavilion of the Queen, canopied and festooned with flowers. She was gasping for breath, and when she looked up and saw the splendid mounted figure of Lady Juliana, her eyes filled with tears of gratitude that it was she, though she knew Lady Juliana would spank her perhaps all the harder to do her duty. The lovely Lady's braids were done with the same silver that threaded her shapely gown. She seemed made for the sidesaddle in which she sat and the handle of her paddle was laced to her wrist. She was smiling. There was no time to see more, to think more.

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

  “I didn’t know if I’d come out on the other side of it,” Spiegelman says in MetaMaus. “I knew I was taking on something enormously difficult… .” He adds, “And from the get-go, I was trying to give shape to it without knowing what that final shape would be… . “The subject of Maus isn’t just the story of a son having problems with his father, and it’s not just the story of what a father lived through. It’s about choices being made, of finding what one can tell, and what one can reveal, and what one can reveal beyond what one knows one is revealing.” He says you’re “putting the dead into little boxes.” RISKING DISTORTION OF THE UNDERLYING REALITY “There are so many choices, so many options and so many ways to assign perspective to the material.” Spiegelman says, “… giving shape also involves, by definition, the risk of distorting the underlying reality. “Perhaps the only honest way to present such material is to say: ‘Here are all the documents I used, you go through them. And here’s a twelve-foot shelf of works to give these documents context, and here’s like thousands of hours of tape recording, and here’s a bunch of photographs to look at. Now, go make yourself a Maus!’“ Art by Art GO MAKE YOURSELF A MAUS. The propulsion for Art Spiegelman to create Maus was in part “an impulse to look dead-on at the root causes of my own deepest fears and nightmares,” and his life was never the same. With Calling Dr. Laura, Nicole Georges ushered in a new relationship with her family. Vanessa Davis says, “I feel a bit unsupervised in the world. Putting the comics out there helps me with that.” In The Photographer, Didier Lefèvre says, “I wonder what I’m doing here? I answer it by taking photos.” Oliver Ka faced down a demon in Why I Killed Peter. And I traced the outlines forward in my own life and tried to follow them into the future. Nicole Georges says something funny about her story: “Internally, it isn’t a part of me anymore. Is it gross to say it was like a placenta? Like, the book is a new organ I grew for a specific purpose, gave birth to, and now it belongs to everyone else. I can let the story go in some ways. I created a bridge between myself and the world where otherwise there was silence and isolation in dysfunctional secrecy.” Whatever metaphor you use, or whatever function it serves, experience that new growth. Nurture it and release it. If there’s one point to this section, it’s that the act of making your book or project or story shouldn’t merely be one of “telling a story.” It should change you. The telling of your story is a process. The best way to finish is to be engaged in that process.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  "Be still, my dear," he said matter-of-factly. "Your nipples are tender and must be slightly toughened. You've been subjected to very little sport so far from your love-stricken master." Beauty was frightened by this. Her nipples felt painfully hard to her; she knew her face had colored darkly. It seemed all the feeling in her breasts swelled and pumped towards those tiny hard nipples. Mercifully, Leon let go of her breasts with a hard squeeze. But then he parted her legs and rubbed the oil into her inner thighs, and this was even worse for her. She could feel her sex throbbing. She wondered if it gave off heat that he could feel with his hands. She hoped he would be quick. Yet even as she lay, red faced and trembling, he pushed her legs farther apart, and to her horror, parted the lips of her sex with his fingers as though inspecting her. "O, please..." she whispered, turning her head from side to side, her eyes stinging. "Now, Beauty," he scolded gently, "you must never never plead for anything from anyone, not even from your loyal and devoted groom. I must inspect you to see if you are sore, and as I thought, you are. Your Prince has been rather...devoted." Beauty bit her lip and closed her eyes as he widened the orifice and now oiled it. She felt as if she were being pulled apart, and even under the plaster that tiny knot of feeling throbbed above the opening Leon's fingers had broadened. "If he touches it, I shall die," she thought, but he was quite careful not to do that, though she felt his fingers entering her, and massaging the lips of her vagina. "Poor darling slave," he whispered to her with feeling. "Now sit up. If I were to have my way, you would rest. But Lord Gregory wants you to see the rest of the Training Hall and the Hall of Punishments. Let me finish your hair quickly." He began to brush Beauty's hair and arrange it in coils on the back of her head as she sat, still trembling, her knees drawn up, and her head bowed. THE TRAINING HALL BEAUTY WASN'T certain that she hated Lord Gregory. Perhaps there was something comforting in his air of command. What would it be like to be here without someone who directed her so completely? But he appeared obsessed with his duties. As soon as he took her out of Leon's hands, he gave her two gratuitous blows with the paddle before ordering her to her knees to follow him. She was to keep close to the heel of his right boot, and she was to observe all that was around her. "But you must never look at the faces of your masters and mistresses, you must never try to meet their eyes, and there is not to be a sound out of you," he directed, "save your answers to me."