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 Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Thomas Hobbes was born to terror. His mother had gone into premature labor upon hearing that the Spanish Armada was about to attack England. “My mother,” Hobbes wrote many years later, “gave birth to twins: myself and fear.” Leviathan, the book in which he famously asserts that prehistoric life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” was composed in Paris, where he was hiding from enemies he’d made by supporting the Crown in the English Civil War. The book was nearly abandoned when he was taken with a near-fatal illness that left him at death’s door for six months. Upon publication of Leviathan in France, Hobbes’s life was now being threatened by his fellow exiles, who were offended by the anti-Catholicism expressed in the book. He fled back across the channel to England, begging the mercy of those he’d escaped eleven years earlier. Though he was permitted to stay, publication of his book was prohibited. The Church banned it. Oxford University banned it and burned it. Writing of Hobbes’s world, cultural historian Mark Lilla describes “Christians addled by apocalyptic dreams [who] hunted and killed Christians with a maniacal fury they had once reserved for Muslims, Jews and heretics. It was madness.”8 Hobbes took the madness of his age, considered it “normal,” and projected it back into prehistoric epochs of which he knew next to nothing. What Hobbes called “human nature” was a projection of seventeenth-century Europe, where life for most was rough, to put it mildly. Though it has persisted for centuries, Hobbes’s dark fantasy of prehistoric human life is as valid as grand conclusions about Siberian wolves based on observations of stray dogs in Tijuana. To be fair, Malthus, Hobbes, and Darwin were constrained by the lack of actual data. To his enormous credit, Darwin recognized this and tried hard to address it—spending his entire adult life collecting specimens, taking copious notes, and corresponding with anyone who could provide him with useful information. But it wasn’t enough. The necessary facts wouldn’t be revealed for many decades. But now we have them. Scientists have learned to read ancient bones and teeth, to carbon-date the ash of Pleistocene fires, to trace the drift of the mitochondrial DNA of our ancestors. And the information they’ve uncovered resoundingly refutes the vision of prehistory Hobbes and Malthus conjured and Darwin swallowed whole. Poor, Pitiful Me We are enriched not by what we possess, but by what we can do without. IMMANUEL KANT If George Orwell was correct that “those who control the past control the future,” what of those who control the distant past?

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  81 The outside walls are stucco, a mixture of sand and Portland cement. The exterior coat is about an eighth-inch thick, with a ratio of four parts of sand to one part of cement. The middle coat is three-eighths of an inch. The ratio of sand to cement is five to one. The first layer of stucco—three-eighths of an inch of four parts of sand to one part cement—was quickly troweled over chicken wire. The wire was furred a quarter-inch from tarpaper sheets nailed to the outside edge of the studs. The surface of a stucco house clings to this network of light wire and not to the wood frame. The wire intersections support the stucco over the empty span of the walls. The brittle exterior of these houses is a little more than an inch thick. 82 The houses on my block have been painted so often that the grains of sand in the surface of the stucco have begun to disappear. 83 Behind the layers of stucco and tar paper are the vertical studs, pine two-by-fours sixteen inches apart. Spanning these are wooden members called fire blocks. The fire blocks are not for support; they separate pockets of dead air inside the finished wall. Fire blocks prevent the empty vertical space between each pair of studs from becoming a chimney that would carry a fire to the rafters and bring the house down. Frame houses are based on a rough balance. The wood frame resists gravity’s downward thrust of the heavy roof; the rafters nailed to the roof’s ridge board brace the walls from falling outward. [image "Image" file=Image00007.jpg] 84 Playing hide-and-seek once, just at sunset, I stood in the doorway of the darkened bedroom I shared with my older brother, knees actually knocking in fear. 85 My house was built by a real estate development company in 1942. The company built eleven hundred houses on land Clark Bonner had sold them. The company built the houses for workers at the Douglas Aircraft plant. My house was bought by a guard at the federal prison on Terminal Island in Long Beach. When my parents bought the house from him in 1946, it was landscaped with a row of palm trees along the driveway. There was a rock garden behind the house. The pile of rocks was higher than the wood fence around the yard. Whitewashed boulders from the San Gabriel River edged the front walk. The guard had used men from the prison to plant the palm trees and build the rock garden. It took my father months to remove the palms, which eventually would have towered over the house. He took down the rock garden and carried the boulders to the county dump in the trunk of his car. The guard left behind several pieces of furniture, made by prisoners from scrap lumber. My parents had to keep the furniture when they bought the house. They couldn’t afford to replace it.

• From Querelle (1953)

  One ear pressed against the inside of his coffin, Querelle listens to the drums and pipes performing, for him alone, the offices for the dead. He wraps himself in prudence, waits for the angel to strike. Crouching in the midst of the black velvet of grasses, arums, ferns, in the living night of his own south seas, he keeps his eyes wide open. Over his face, so gentle, open, offered up like a precious thing, the desire to murder has passed its soft tongue, without causing Querelle to shudder. Only his blond curls are in motion. Sometimes the watchdog, awake between his legs, raises itself onto its front paws, pressing against its master's body and finally blending into the muscles of his shoulders, hiding, waking, growling there. Querelle knows that he is in mortal danger. He also knows that the beast is protecting him . He says: ,.With one bite I'll open up his throat . . . ," without exactly knowing whether he is speaking of the watchdog's throat, or of the white throat of a peeing infant. 0 0 0 164 I JEAN GENET

• From Querelle (1953)

  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 out 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 might just consist of weak humans. And, as this truth dawned on him, through a little crack in himself, he felt both weaker and-strangely enough-stronger. For the first time he was taking thought, and this frightened him a little. "What about your chief? Haven't you told him?" "Don't you \VOrry about that. I've told you your job : now get 54 I JEAN GENET on with it." Mario dimly feared the boy might betray him. The voice in which he answered showed signs of softening, but he caught himself quickly, even before opening his mouth, and the words came out tough and dry. Dede looked at his wristwatch. "It's getting on for four," he said. "It's dark already. And there's some fog rolling in . . . Visibility five meters." ''Well, what are you waiting for?" Mario's voice was suddenly more commanding. He was the boss. Two quick steps had been quite sufficient to take him across the room and bring him, with the same ease of move-.

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  Every house on my block looked much the same. It’s still hard to measure status. One neighbor is a cosmetics salesman. Another is a security guard at Douglas. Two more work for the city of Long Beach. Several are now retired. Some are widows. The man who used to live across the street owned his own painting business. He became moderately well-off repainting school buildings, and he moved away. The family moved to Rancho Palos Verdes, a suburb with horses and swimming pools. 209 State and county grants are helping my city replace thirty-year-old playground equipment at Mae Boyar Park, as well as the three parks named for Latin American heroes. The city’s recreation department has a theme for the equipment at each park. At Bolívar Park, the preschool and school-age play equipment will have a nautical theme. At Del Valle Park, the playground theme is transportation. Playground equipment at San Martín Park already has a storybook theme. There are two metal frameworks in the shape of pumpkin coaches in the park playground. These will only be repainted, because the neighborhood mothers asked that the “Cinderella coaches” not be replaced. At Boyar Park, the theme of the playground equipment is prehistoric life. The new equipment, which must meet the standards of the Americans with Disabilities Act, is accessible to disabled children and disabled parents. 210 According to Laura Winston, who was his nurse and then his mistress, Ben Weingart never read books. He only read the classified section of the Los Angeles Times to see if his rental properties were vacant. He ate precisely the same meals every day. He always carried several hundred dollars in half of a torn envelope. He gave away soap and razors to the bums who hung around the skid row hotels he still owned. He never went to the movies. Winston said he never went anywhere. His idea of a vacation, she said, was visiting the city he had helped to build. 211 The San Gabriel River is paralleled by a trail maintained by the county for joggers and bikers. The trail goes from Long Beach to Whittier, a distance of about fifteen miles. The trail is an asphalt path on top of the levee along the river’s east bank. Several cities have developed the empty land next to the trail as a park, as my city has done. There have been robberies on the trail. One involved a father and his infant son. The man was jogging, pushing his son in a light aluminum-and-nylon stroller. They were confronted by three teenage boys. They demanded the man’s wallet. He was an off-duty police officer. He reached into his pack while one of the boys threatened the baby with a knife. The man pulled out a pistol and shot the teenage boy. He was hit twice. One bullet split his spine. Paralyzed, the boy fell backward and over the edge of the path.

• From Querelle (1953)

  Mario didn't budge. Querelle neither. The thought of blood that was contained in his words, and the hope contained in them, made his O\vn blood circulate a little freer again. He was hesitant to make a move. He feared, so closely linked he felt himself to Mario by a great number of threads, that a single movement (and the gentlest one might release the most fatal mechanism, as it is clear that all fatality depends on a most tenuous equilibrium ) might set Mario off. They now stood in the middle of a low cloud of fog in which the knife nestled, invisible but certain. Querelle was completely unarmed. With a . voice suddenly gentle, deep, and of a profoundly moving quality, he said to the Prince of the Night and the nea!by Trees : "Listen, Mario, I'm here all alone with you. I can't defend myself . . . " He had spoken Mario's name in a loud voice, and already Querelle felt himself to be bound to him in great gentleness, by an emotion comparable to the one we may experience on hearing the excited voice of a young boy penetrate the thin partition of a hotel room at night, saying: "You dirty bastard, listen, I'm only seventeen!" He put all his hopes in Mario. At 199 I QUERELLE first his words were only a musical phrase, timid, hardly breaking through the silence and the fog, merely a lovely vibration in those two elements; but then it grew stronger, without losing its clarity and simplicity of a catch phrase invented by some ingenious orator trying to bewitch Death itself. Querelle repeated it : " . . . can't defend myself. No way." One. Two. Three. Four. Four seconds floating down the river of silence. "You can do what you want, I don't have a blade. If you get me with that, it's all over. Nothing I can do . . . "

• From Querelle (1953)

  so I JEAN GENET Thus, to the birdsong was added a light pollen. Mario felt vaguely like being held captive in one of those fine-meshed widows' veils that are dotted with pea-sized black knots. Then he retired into himself to regain that region of flux and inno cence that can be called limbo_. In his very anguish he escaped from his enemies. He had the right to be a policeman, a copper. He had a right, to let himself slip back into the old complicity that united him with this little sixteen-year-old stoolie. Dede was hoping that a smile might open that head, to let the birds in: but the rock refused to smile, to Bower, to be covered with nests. Mario was closing up. He was aware of the kid's airy whistlings, but he was-that part of him that was ever-watchful Mario-so far gone into himself, trying to face up to fear and to destroy it by examining it, that it would take him a while to return as far as his muscles and to make them move again. He felt that there, behind the severity of his face, his pallor, his immobility, his doors, his walls, he was safe. Around him rose the ramparts of The Police Force, and he was protected by all that only apparent strictness. Dede kissed him on the comer of his mouth, very quickly, then bounded back to the foot of the bed. Perching in front of Mario, he smiled. "What's happening, for crissakes? You sick, or in love, or what?" In spite of his desire, he had never even thought of going to bed with Dede, nor had he ever made the slightest equivocal gesture in that direction. His chiefs and colleagues knew of his association with the kid, who t o them was merely an auxiliary nonentity. Dede had no answer for Mario's sarcasm, but his smile faded a little, without disappearing altogether. His face was pink. "You must be out of your gourd." 'Well I haven't hurt you, have I? I just planted a few friendly kisses on you. You've been sitting there scowling long enough. Just trying to cheer you up." "So I haven't got a right to sit and think things over, eh?"

• From Querelle (1953)

  The insinuating 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 through 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 together, 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 wasn't him?" Gil turned his head and looked Querelle in the eye. 17% I JEAN GENET "It wasn't me, I swear! I can't tell you who did it, I don't know nothing about it. But I'm telling you, by all that's sacred, I swear I didn't do it." "The papers said they was sure it was you, all right. I'm willing to believe you, but you'd have soine explaining to do if the cops got you. See, they found your cigarette lighter, right by that stiff. Anyhow, you better keep the profile low." Gil resigned himself to the second murder. When the monstrousness o_f his deed had first blurred his vision, he had thought of turning himself in. He had thought that once the police had recognized his innocence of the second crime, they would let him go, so that he could go and hide again because of the first one. He thought they would respect the rules of the game. The insanity of this train of thought soon became apparent to him. Thus, little by little, Gil took the murder of the sailor upon himself. He tried to think of reasons for doing it. Sometimes he wondered who the true murderer might be. He interrogated himself to find our how he had managed to lose his cigarette lighter at the scene of the crime. "I would really like to know who did it. I hadn't even noticed I didn't have that lighter any more."

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  No one in the houses nearby called the sheriff’s station next to city hall for help. Help for what? A jogger’s dog on Monday afternoon found the man, a black bundle in the grass the landscape superintendent leaves deliberately tall in the park’s wildflower meadow. 100 The suicide was first reported as a murder—a man had been stabbed to death, his body dumped into the city’s wildflowers, and the body set on fire. Sheriff’s investigators said it was a murder for revenge. Later, they said the man had murdered his stepdaughter. He strangled her. Then he killed his wife, beating her until her face was unrecognizable. Then he got into his car and began to drive. 101 The development of the city bypassed the two-hundred-foot-wide corridors of the Edison transmission towers. Recently, the company began encouraging use of its rights of way. They have become parks, the city’s community garden, wholesale plant nurseries, and truck farms. There are now only a few empty commercial lots in the city. Out of nine-and-a-half square miles, the unbuilt area is about thirty acres. Every square foot of my city has been tilled or built on and fitted into the grid. 102 I work late at city hall, and I walk home in the dark. Sometimes I work late on Sunday. At 10 p.m. on Sunday, walking home on the sidewalk bordering the access road designed to separate the highway from residential streets, I was stopped. A car slowed and pulled up to the curb at the corner of my block. I turned and walked toward it automatically. I am always asked directions, because I am almost always the only pedestrian. A young man quickly stepped from the car. He pointed a gun at my chest and asked for my wallet. I said, “I’m sorry, I don’t understand you.” As I said this, I decided to fall backward onto the lawn of the corner house. As I fell, I may have looked like someone who had just been shot. Nothing else happened. The porch light of the house behind me came on. I heard the door of the car close; I heard the car drive away. I lay still for a few moments longer, looking up at the stars in the clear sky through the limbs of a leafless jacaranda tree. 103 Jacarandas bloom in early May, before the new leaves show. The horn-shaped flowers are the color of the sky at late dusk—a pure, translucent purple. That color is held overhead on the thin branches of the tree’s new growth. Thousands of small flowers fall soon after blooming, covering the sidewalk and lawn with purple in a fifty-foot circle. None of the city’s trees are as exotic as the jacarandas, which are native to the Amazon basin. There were no trees here when the land was farmed, except a stand of eucalyptus planted near the field office of the Montana Land Company.

• From Querelle (1953)

  When he did, he was stone cold sober, made horribly clearheaded by the enormity of his act, and shaking with panic; thus his. main concern was to take the darkest and most deserted streets to some gate that would allow him to escape beyond the city walls. He did not dare return to the shipyards. Then he remembered the old abandoned penitentiary and its easily opened gate. He decided to spend the night in one of its rooms of stone. Cowering in a comer, sheltered by great coils of rope, he communed with fear, despair in his thoughts. A haughty and knowledgeable woman, Madame Lysiane, seated at the cash register, was able to maintain a charming smile while her eyes coolly counted the tricks or silently warned her more nervous lodgers whenever their dresses of pink tulle or silk were in danger of being torn by a table leg or a heel. When she dropped her smile, it was just to pass her tongue more comfortably over her gums behind closed lips. This simple mannerism provided her with a sense of independence, of sovereignty. Sometimes she would raise her heavily beringed hand to her superb blonde hair-do, which was a curly and complicated affair i_ncorporating pastiches. She felt herself a true child of this abundance of mirrors, lights and dance music, and at the same time that sumptuousness emanated from her in each breath, rising from the warm depths of the breast of a truly opulent woman. There is a kind of male passivity (at the point where virility might be characterized by negligence, by indifference to flattery, by the detached observation of the body whether it is being offered pleasure or pleasure is being obtained from it) which makes the one who lets himself be sucked less active than the one who is sucking, just as the latter becomes a more passive being when being fucked. That true passive quality we have 111 I QUERELLE

• From Querelle (1953)

  Nor could any detective have supposed that the murder discovered in the neighborhood of the ramparts might have been the violent and-in terms of time and place-inevitable outcome of a love affair that had developed on board a solid and loyal Navy vessel. No doubt the police knew about the worldwide 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 81 I QUERELLE along. "There's only one thing to be afraid of, and that's the guil1otine. Now even that ain't so terrible. They're not going to execute me every day." His blackface act served him well. Querelle had begun to realize-and to think, for the first time, about doing something about it-the turmoil within Lieutenant Seblon, betrayed by the officer's frowning mien and overly severe tone of voice. Being just a simple sailor, he could not understand the ways of his Lieutenant who would punish him for the slightest infrac· tion and look for the least little pretext for doing so. But one day the officer had happened to pass too close to the machinery and had soiled his hands with axle grease. He had turned to Quere1Ie, who happened to be standing close by. In a suddenly quite humble manner he asked: "D'you happen to have a rag I could use?" Querelle produced a clean handkerchief, still folded, from his pocket and held it out to him. The Lieutenant wiped his hands on it and kept it. "I'll have it washed. Come by and pick it up sometime." Some days later the Lieutenant found an opportunity of addressing Querelle and, he hoped, of wounding him. Harshly: "Don't you know it's against regulations to fix the beret that way?" He grabbed the red pompon on top of the beret and yanked it off the seaman's head. The sun then shone its rays on such a splendid mop of hair that the officer came close to giving him· self away. His arm, his sudden gesture turned leaden. In a changed voice, he went on, holding out the beret to the dumbfounded sai1or ; "That's what you like, to look like some ruffian. You deserve

• From Querelle (1953)

  "Oh, yeah, I'd like to have her here, all right. And you bet your ass I'd screw her, and good, if I had her here, the way I've got you I" Roger said nothing. His smile disappeared. His eyes kept on meeting Gil's stare, and the only gentleness he could see there was in Gil's eyebrows, powdered with chalk and cement dust. "Gill" He thought: "This is Gil. It's Gilbert Turko. He's from Poland. He's been working at the Arsenal, on the gantry, with the other masons. He's in a rage." Close to Gil's ear, under his breath which entered the fog, he murmured: u I JEAN GENET ((Gill" "Oh . . . l Oh . . . ! I sure could use a piece of her, right now. You, you look alike, you know. You've got that same little mouth of hers." He moved his hand closer to Roger's neck. Finding himself so the master, in the heart of the light mass of watery air, increased Gil Turko's desire to be tough, sharp and heavy. To rip the fog, to destroy it with a sudden brutal gesture, would perhaps be enough to affirm his virility, which otherwise, on his return to quarters tonight, would suffer mean and powerful humiliation. ''Got her eyes, too. What a shame you ain't her. Hey, what's this? You passing out?" As if to prevent Roger from "passing out," he pressed his belly closer still to his, pushing him against the wall, while his free hand kept hold of the channing head, holding it above the waves of a powerful and arrogant sea, the sea that was Gil. They remained motionless, one shoring up the other. "What are you going to tell her?" "I'll try to get her to come along tomorrow." Despite his inexperience, Roger understood the extent, if not quite the meaning of his confusion, when he heard the sound of his own voice: it was toneless. "And the other thing I told you about?" "I'll try my best about that too. We going back now?" They pulled apart, quickly. Suddenly they heard the sea. From the very beginning of this scene they had been close to the water's edge. For a moment both of them felt frightened at the thought of having been so close to danger. Gil took out a cigarette and lit it. Roger saw the beauty of his face that looked as if it had been picked, like a flower, by those large hands, thick arid covered with powdery dust, their palms illuminated now by a delicate and trembling flame. 0 0 0 23 I QUERELLE They say that the murderer Menesclou used a spray of lilacs to entice the little girl closer to him so that he could then slit her throat; it is with his hair, with his eyes-with his full smilethat He (Querelle) draws me on. Does this mean that I am going to my death? That those locks, those teeth are lethal?

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  The first fall—Kuzovlev’s, at the stream—agitated everyone, but Alexey Alexandrovitch saw distinctly on Anna’s pale, triumphant face that the man she was watching had not fallen. When, after Mahotin and Vronsky had cleared the worst barrier, the next officer had been thrown straight on his head at it and fatally injured, and a shudder of horror passed over the whole public, Alexey Alexandrovitch saw that Anna did not even notice it, and had some difficulty in realizing what they were talking of about her. But more and more often, and with greater persistence, he watched her. Anna, wholly engrossed as she was with the race, became aware of her husband’s cold eyes fixed upon her from one side. She glanced round for an instant, looked inquiringly at him, and with a slight frown turned away again. “Ah, I don’t care!” she seemed to say to him, and she did not once glance at him again. The race was an unlucky one, and of the seventeen officers who rode in it more than half were thrown and hurt. Towards the end of the race everyone was in a state of agitation, which was intensified by the fact that the Tsar was displeased. Chapter 29 Everyone was loudly expressing disapprobation, everyone was repeating a phrase someone had uttered—“The lions and gladiators will be the next thing,” and everyone was feeling horrified; so that when Vronsky fell to the ground, and Anna moaned aloud, there was nothing very out of the way in it. But afterwards a change came over Anna’s face which really was beyond decorum. She utterly lost her head. She began fluttering like a caged bird, at one moment would have got up and moved away, at the next turned to Betsy. “Let us go, let us go!” she said. But Betsy did not hear her. She was bending down, talking to a general who had come up to her. Alexey Alexandrovitch went up to Anna and courteously offered her his arm. “Let us go, if you like,” he said in French, but Anna was listening to the general and did not notice her husband. “He’s broken his leg too, so they say,” the general was saying. “This is beyond everything.” Without answering her husband, Anna lifted her opera-glass and gazed towards the place where Vronsky had fallen; but it was so far off, and there was such a crowd of people about it, that she could make out nothing. She laid down the opera-glass, and would have moved away, but at that moment an officer galloped up and made some announcement to the Tsar. Anna craned forward, listening. “Stiva! Stiva!” she cried to her brother. But her brother did not hear her. Again she would have moved away. “Once more I offer you my arm if you want to be going,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch, reaching towards her hand. She drew back from him with aversion, and without looking in his face answered: “No, no, let me be, I’ll stay.”

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Vronsky had that winter got his promotion, was now a colonel, had left the regimental quarters, and was living alone. After having some lunch, he lay down on the sofa immediately, and in five minutes memories of the hideous scenes he had witnessed during the last few days were confused together and joined on to a mental image of Anna and of the peasant who had played an important part in the bear hunt, and Vronsky fell asleep. He waked up in the dark, trembling with horror, and made haste to light a candle. “What was it? What? What was the dreadful thing I dreamed? Yes, yes; I think a little dirty man with a disheveled beard was stooping down doing something, and all of a sudden he began saying some strange words in French. Yes, there was nothing else in the dream,” he said to himself. “But why was it so awful?” He vividly recalled the peasant again and those incomprehensible French words the peasant had uttered, and a chill of horror ran down his spine. “What nonsense!” thought Vronsky, and glanced at his watch. It was half-past eight already. He rang up his servant, dressed in haste, and went out onto the steps, completely forgetting the dream and only worried at being late. As he drove up to the Karenins’ entrance he looked at his watch and saw it was ten minutes to nine. A high, narrow carriage with a pair of grays was standing at the entrance. He recognized Anna’s carriage. “She is coming to me,” thought Vronsky, “and better she should. I don’t like going into that house. But no matter; I can’t hide myself,” he thought, and with that manner peculiar to him from childhood, as of a man who has nothing to be ashamed of, Vronsky got out of his sledge and went to the door. The door opened, and the hall-porter with a rug on his arm called the carriage. Vronsky, though he did not usually notice details, noticed at this moment the amazed expression with which the porter glanced at him. In the very doorway Vronsky almost ran up against Alexey Alexandrovitch. The gas jet threw its full light on the bloodless, sunken face under the black hat and on the white cravat, brilliant against the beaver of the coat. Karenin’s fixed, dull eyes were fastened upon Vronsky’s face. Vronsky bowed, and Alexey Alexandrovitch, chewing his lips, lifted his hand to his hat and went on. Vronsky saw him without looking round get into the carriage, pick up the rug and the opera-glass at the window and disappear. Vronsky went into the hall. His brows were scowling, and his eyes gleamed with a proud and angry light in them.

• From Querelle (1953)

  The ghost was under his feet. Gil had to Batten it out, crush it, by planting his steps heavily. The ghost was in his arms, in his legs. Gil had to smother it by moving slowly. Too quick a tum might make it unfold, spread a wing, black or white, and its head would appear next to his own, shapeless and invisible, and then, into his ear, into Gil's ear it would whisper, in a thunderous murmur, the most terrifying threats. The ghost was within him, and it was imperative to keep it from rising. Killing Thea had been useless. A man whom you have killed is more alive than the living. And more dangerous, by not being one of the living. Not for one second did Gil think about Roger-who thought of nothing but him. The circumstances of the tragedy kept eluding him. He knew that he had killed, ki11ed Thea. But had it really been Thea? Was he rea11y dead? He should have asked him first : "It is you, Theo, isn't it?" If he had answered 154 I JEAN GENET yes, that would have been immensely reassuring, although, come to think o.f it, the certainty would not have been any greater. The victim might have said yes out of sheer malice, in order to cause Gil to commit a useless crime. Perhaps Theo had been the kind of guy who had wanted to drive .him exactly to that point, who felt a metaphysical hatred for him. Then again Gil told himself that he had clearly recognized the thousand little wrinkles in his victim's face, the thin lines around his mouth. Then again, fear and trembling. He had committed a crime that had no reward whatsoever. Not a sou. It was an empty crime, like a bottomless bucket. It was a mistake. Gil pondered ways of correcting it.. First of all, crouched in his comer, fetal among the damp stones, his head hanging low, he tried to destroy his act by dividing it up into a series of gestures, each one of them inoffensive in itself: "You open the door! Man's got a right to open a door. You pick up a bottle. Man's got a right to do that. You break it? Well, that can happen. That's all right. You take the bottleneck and point it at the guy? That's not so terrible. You put it up against his neck.- You apply a little pressure. Well, those things happen, you know.

• From Querelle (1953)

  of the wide leather strap he used as a belt, behind his back : he seemed to be implying that their doings were just good clean fun. Since this scene took place close to the beginning of Madame Lysiane's affair with Querelle, and as Querelle was unable to figure out the exact intertwining relationships between Nono, the cop Mario, and his brother, he came close to suspecting some kind of conspiracy. It scared him. The foiiowing evening he told Gil to take off. As soon as he entered the old penitentiary, he methodicaily went into the routine he had planned the night before and which was designed to ensure h is own safety. The first thing was to get the revolver back from Gil, by starting out with the cunning question : "You stiii got the-heater?" "Sure. I've got it hidden in here." "Can I see it?" "Why? 'What's the matter?" Gil was afraid to ask whether the time had come to use it, but feared this might be the case. Quereiie had spoken in very gentle tones. He knew that he had to proceed very carefuiiy so as not to arouse any suspicions in Gil's mind. He was doing a great acting job. Holding back the explanation while making it impossible for Gil to refuse or even hesitate, he did not say "] ust give it to me," but "Let's see it, I'Il tell you what it's about . . . " Gil watched Quereiie watching him, and both of them were bewildered by the gentleness of their O\vn voices-in the dark, they sounded almost te�der. The shadows and this gentleness plunged both of them, naked, flayed alive, into the same vat of sweet balm. Quereile truly felt friendship, more than that, love for Gil, and Gil reciprocated. We do not want to imply that Gil already suspected what Quereiie was leading him to ( that sacrificial and necessary end ) , we only want to point out the universality contained in a particular occasion. It was not a case of forebodings-not that we don't believe in such, it is only that they belong to a realm of scientific study that no longer is art-because the work of art is free. Reading, 249 I QUERELLE

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  He tunneled under the floor of the garage, lined the empty space with rows of old water heaters filled with concrete, and braced the garage floor with railroad ties. A metal hatch lets down into the underground room. The concrete slab of the garage floor spans the excavation. The city inspector believes that the garage floor will collapse if a car is driven on it. The new owner of the house is angry. He should never have bought the house, he says. He doesn’t know how much it will cost to bring the house into compliance with the city’s building ordinances. 111 You and I were trained for a conflict that never came. At my grade school, the Sisters of St. Joseph made me hate Communists, then intolerance, and finally everything that could break the charmed pattern of our lives. I am not sure the Sisters of St. Joseph expected this from their daily lessons on the Red threat. 112 The nuns’ stories made me want to keep everything that I could. First, I would keep my faith. Much later, I would keep our regard for each other, and the ways in which we revealed ourselves in these small houses. 113 A loss of belief is what separates us from the much-handled things we grew up with. 114 My father and I returned to our house from my mother’s funeral, and I never spoke to him of her again. Once, shortly before my father’s death, he broke down in tears and said, “You and your brother never talk about her.” Still, I would say nothing to him. 115 My father’s life seemed to be about this: It was necessary to choose, but only once. Every choice limited God’s choices, and cut you off forever from other graces. 116 I cannot tell you what I care for. I can only tell you what I fear to lose. 117 Three businessmen arranged to buy the Montana Land Company in 1949. With $8.9 million in borrowed money, they bought the company’s stock and ten square miles of indifferent Southern California farmland on the outskirts of Long Beach. The sale included the empty lots—70 feet wide by 120 feet long—in a residential subdivision the Montana Land Company had laid out in 1929. The company’s dead-level acres of former sugar beet fields surrounded a golf course. The Montana Land Company had hoped to sell the land as house lots. To lure middle-class buyers from Long Beach, about six miles away, the company first built the golf course. It was 175 acres of what had been a river bed. In 1978, I wrote a history of the suburb the three businessmen built on the mostly empty land they bought. The suburb had become a city, and city officials had the history printed for students to use in school projects. Boy Scouts still use it to earn a merit badge for citizenship. Clark J.

• From Querelle (1953)

  47 I QUERELLE cotton bedspread pulled over unmade sheets. Dede jumped on to the bed to kneel beside the immobile profile of Mario's face and torso. The detective didn't say anything. Not a muscle in his face moved. Never before had Dede seen him look so hard, dra\vn, and sad; his lips were dry and set in a mean expression. "And now what? \Vhat's going to happen? I'll go down to the port, take a good look around ... I'll see if he's there. \Vhat d'you say?" !vlario's face remained grim. A strange heat seemed to ani mate it, without heightening its color; it was pale, but the lines were set so hard and so rigidly dra\vn and patterned that they lit the face up with an infinity of stars . It looked as if Mario's whole life were surging upwards, mounting from his calves, parts, torso, heart, anus, guts, anns, elbows, and neck, right up into the face, where it grew desperate at not being able to escape, to go on, to disappear into the night and come to an end in a shower of sparks. His cheeks were a little hollowed, making the chin look firmer. He wasn't fro\vning; his eyeballs were slightly protuberant, and his eyelid looked like a small amber rosebud attached to the stem of his nose. In the front of his mouth Mario was rolling around an ever increasing amount of spittle, not daring, not knowing how to swallow it. His fear and his ha tred mingled and massed there, at the farthest reaches of himself. His blue eyes looked almost black, under brows which had never appeared so ligh t, so blond. Their very brightness troubled Dede's peace of mind. (The boy was far more peaceful than his friend was agitated-profoundly agitated, as if he alone had dredged up to the surface all the mud deposited in both of th em; and this new force of purpose in the detective made him look both desperate and grave, with a touch of that restrained irritation so typical a trait in accredited heroes. Dede seemed to have recognized this and could find no better means of display ing his gratitude than by accepting, with elegant simplicity, his purification, his becoming endowed with the verna l grace of April woodlands.) We were saying-that extreme brightness of

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  Much of the water that my city delivers to residents originally came from the California Aqueduct and the Colorado River, from hundreds of miles away. 274 My city acquired the right to the water under its neighborhoods when the city bought the water company Louis Boyar, Mark Taper, and Ben Weingart had formed. The three developers bought the right to the water from The Montana Land Company. The company got its rights from the Bixby family, who bought them with the land from Don Juan Temple, who married into them through his wife Rafaela Cota, who received them as an inheritance from her grandfather Manuel Nieto, who was provisionally granted them by the governor of California, who had them by right of possession of the king of Spain. Most people who live on the semiarid Los Angeles plain cannot explain precisely where their water comes from. The rivers, spreading grounds, dams, injection wells, and aqueducts are part of a landscape people rarely notice. 275 When it rains hard here, flood control channels fill quickly. In a few minutes the water can rise higher than your head, and it flows faster than you can run. I grew up when my neighborhood was crossed by unfenced flood control channels, where boys in packs of four or five played after school and on weekends. Hunting for frogs in the rain in one of the channels, boys would sometimes be caught in the suddenly rising water. Neighborhood parents, or the fire department, rescued them when they could. Once a boy drowned in one of the channels; another boy drowned in a flooded sump. Frightened and angry parents petitioned the County Board of Supervisors to improve the ditches. The county built cement walls and chain-link fences. When the channels were cemented and fenced, the frogs disappeared from them, along with the boys.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  There was an interval between the races, and so nothing hindered conversation. The adjutant-general expressed his disapproval of races. Alexey Alexandrovitch replied defending them. Anna heard his high, measured tones, not losing one word, and every word struck her as false, and stabbed her ears with pain. When the three-mile steeplechase was beginning, she bent forward and gazed with fixed eyes at Vronsky as he went up to his horse and mounted, and at the same time she heard that loathsome, never-ceasing voice of her husband. She was in an agony of terror for Vronsky, but a still greater agony was the never-ceasing, as it seemed to her, stream of her husband’s shrill voice with its familiar intonations. “I’m a wicked woman, a lost woman,” she thought; “but I don’t like lying, I can’t endure falsehood, while as for _him_ (her husband) it’s the breath of his life—falsehood. He knows all about it, he sees it all; what does he care if he can talk so calmly? If he were to kill me, if he were to kill Vronsky, I might respect him. No, all he wants is falsehood and propriety,” Anna said to herself, not considering exactly what it was she wanted of her husband, and how she would have liked to see him behave. She did not understand either that Alexey Alexandrovitch’s peculiar loquacity that day, so exasperating to her, was merely the expression of his inward distress and uneasiness. As a child that has been hurt skips about, putting all his muscles into movement to drown the pain, in the same way Alexey Alexandrovitch needed mental exercise to drown the thoughts of his wife that in her presence and in Vronsky’s, and with the continual iteration of his name, would force themselves on his attention. And it was as natural for him to talk well and cleverly, as it is natural for a child to skip about. He was saying: “Danger in the races of officers, of cavalry men, is an essential element in the race. If England can point to the most brilliant feats of cavalry in military history, it is simply owing to the fact that she has historically developed this force both in beasts and in men. Sport has, in my opinion, a great value, and as is always the case, we see nothing but what is most superficial.” “It’s not superficial,” said Princess Tverskaya. “One of the officers, they say, has broken two ribs.” Alexey Alexandrovitch smiled his smile, which uncovered his teeth, but revealed nothing more.