Fear

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Querelle (1953)

  2.l6 I JEAN GENET Gil had never stolen anything._ It surprised him how difficult yet easy it was. After looking up and down the fog-shrouded street Querelle, without a sotind, opened the door and went into the hallway. Gil followed him. Querelle took his han d and put it on the staircase banister. "Go," he whispered in his ear, then turned away and quickly slid into the space below the stairs. When he estimated that Gil had reached the second-Boor landing he began to make a series of very quiet scratching noises. Gil was listening. 'What he heard was the rumbling of a stagecoach he and the other guys were getting ready to hold up. A shot rang out in the lonely forest, an axletree broke, young girls were raising their veils, and Marie Taglioni went off danc ing under the rain-soaked trees, on carpets unrolled by the happy bandits. He pricked up his ears. He heard a hissing whistle in the dark. He understood the message: "Gil, come on, Gil." Slowly, his heart beating loudly, he descended the stair case. Querelle shut the door quietly behind them. Returning the way they had come they walked along in silence. Gil was anxious to know and finally whispered: "Did you get it?" "Yup. Let's keep goin' ." They passed through the same masses of fog and darkness. Gil felt the old prison drawing closer, the sense of security returning, calming him down. In his cave they lit the candle and Querelle pulled the loot out of his pocket. Two thousand six- h undred francs. He handed half of it over to Gil. "It ain't no fortune, but what can you do? It's the day's takings." "B ut listen, that ain't bad at alii I can get by on that. " "B oy, are you nuts. Where would that get you? You don't even have any threads. No, kiddo, there's more work to do." "Well, all right. Count on me. But the next time I want to be the one does the job. No use your getting messed up because of me." "We'll see. Now why don't you just stash that dough."

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  C A N T O I X Dante grows pale with fear when he sees his Guide come back from the gate, repulsed by the Demons, and disturbed in countenance. Virgil endeavours to encourage him, but in perplexed and broken words which only increase his fear. They cannot enter the City of Lucifer in their own strength. The three Furies suddenly appear, and threaten Dante with the head of Medusa. Virgil bids him turn round; and screens him from the sight of it. The Angel, whom Virgil has been expecting, comes across the angry marsh; puts all the Demons to flight, and opens the gates. The Poets then go in, without any opposition; and they find a wide plain, all covered with burning sepulchres. It is the Sixth Circle; and in the sepulchres are punished the Heretics, with all their followers, of every sect. The Poets turn to the right hand, and go on between the flaming tombs and the high walls of the city. THAT COLOUR which cowardice painted on my face, when I saw my Guide turn back, repressed in him more quickly his new colour. 1 He stopped attentive, like one who listens: for his eye could not lead him far, through the black air and the dense fog. “Yet it behoves us to gain this battle,” he began; “if not ... such help was offered to us. Oh! how long to me it seems till some one come!” I saw well how he covered the beginning with the other that came after, which were words differing from the first. But not the less his language gave me fear: for perhaps I drew his broken speech to a worse meaning than he held. “Into this bottom of the dreary shell, does any ever descend from the first degree, whose only punishment is hope cut off?” 2 This question I made, and he replied to me: “Rarely it occurs that any of us makes this journey on which I go. It is true, that once before I was down here, conjured by that fell Erichtho, 3 who recalled the shadows to their bodies. My flesh had been but short time divested of me, when she made me enter within that wall, to draw out a spirit from the Circle of Judas. That is the lowest place, and the most dark, and farthest from the Heaven, which encircles all; well do I know the way: so reassure thyself. This marsh, which breathes the mighty stench, all round begirds the doleful city, where we cannot now enter without anger.” And more he said, but I have it not in memory: for my eye had drawn me wholly to the high tower with glowing summit, where all at once had risen up three Hellish Furies, stained with blood; who had the limbs and attitude of women, and were girt with greenest hydras; for hair, they had tittle serpents and cerastes, wherewith their horrid temples were bound.

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  The ambulance turned left from my street, then left again on the boulevard, and then right to the hospital. The boulevard bisects this suburb. The median is planted with a double row of sycamore trees paid for by the city’s redevelopment agency. Because trees are thought to encourage business growth, the state’s redevelopment law encourages cities to plant trees with borrowed money. Both the boulevard and the city are named after a speculative subdivision laid out a dozen years before my parents’ house was built. College teachers, naval officers, and doctors built houses in this subdivision in the 1930s and 1940s. Its developer pointed out that the subdivision had "restrictions of an all-inclusive nature." When the residents of the young suburb voted for incorporation as a city in 1954, these older neighborhoods retreated into the city of Long Beach. The residents were afraid they would be caretakers of the slum my city was supposed to become. 53 William A. Clark of Montana bought 8,139 acres of farmland from the Bixby family in 1897. They sold him a small corner of a remnant of the land given to Manuel Nieto in 1784 for his service as a soldier of Spain in California. The governor of California gave Nieto all the land between the San Gabriel and the Santa Ana rivers and from the Pacific Ocean to the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. The grant had a pointless grandeur. It was four or five hundred square miles. The land belonged to Manuel Nieto in the form of a drawing called a diseño . It was a sketch that showed three vague rivers, the mountains, and the Pacific Ocean. Nieto built an adobe house of one or two rooms by a spring, at the foot of some low hills, a few miles north of my house. Nieto never visited the twenty-five miles of white sand beach he owned. He never made a map of his property or knew precisely where he lived on it. 54 In Montana, William A. Clark owned silver mines. In Arizona, he owned one of the nation’s richest copper mines. In California, he owned an anonymous stretch of alluvial plain that was neither beach front nor an oil field. Clark formed the Montana Land Company with his brother to grow sugar beets because a protective tariff encouraged domestic production. Wire worm infestation eventually ruined the crop. The government also lowered the tariff, and foreign suppliers drove the price of sugar down. Beginning in 1928, the Montana Land Company began leasing its land to tenant farmers who grew acres of lima beans, alfalfa, and carrots. 55 He sat on the edge of his bed in the middle room and waited for his father to die. His father walked down the hall to take a shower. It was after 11 p.m. He was rehearsing his father’s death in his imagination.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “If you want to hear my confession of faith on the subject, I tell you that in your quarrel with Sergey Ivanovitch I take neither side. You’re both wrong. You’re more wrong externally, and he inwardly.” “Ah, ah! You see that, you see that!” Nikolay shouted joyfully. “But I personally value friendly relations with you more because....” “Why, why?” Konstantin could not say that he valued it more because Nikolay was unhappy, and needed affection. But Nikolay knew that this was just what he meant to say, and scowling he took up the vodka again. “Enough, Nikolay Dmitrievitch!” said Marya Nikolaevna, stretching out her plump, bare arm towards the decanter. “Let it be! Don’t insist! I’ll beat you!” he shouted. Marya Nikolaevna smiled a sweet and good-humored smile, which was at once reflected on Nikolay’s face, and she took the bottle. “And do you suppose she understands nothing?” said Nikolay. “She understands it all better than any of us. Isn’t it true there’s something good and sweet in her?” “Were you never before in Moscow?” Konstantin said to her, for the sake of saying something. “Only you mustn’t be polite and stiff with her. It frightens her. No one ever spoke to her so but the justices of the peace who tried her for trying to get out of a house of ill-fame. Mercy on us, the senselessness in the world!” he cried suddenly. “These new institutions, these justices of the peace, rural councils, what hideousness it all is!” And he began to enlarge on his encounters with the new institutions. Konstantin Levin heard him, and the disbelief in the sense of all public institutions, which he shared with him, and often expressed, was distasteful to him now from his brother’s lips. “In another world we shall understand it all,” he said lightly. “In another world! Ah, I don’t like that other world! I don’t like it,” he said, letting his scared eyes rest on his brother’s eyes. “Here one would think that to get out of all the baseness and the mess, one’s own and other people’s, would be a good thing, and yet I’m afraid of death, awfully afraid of death.” He shuddered. “But do drink something. Would you like some champagne? Or shall we go somewhere? Let’s go to the Gypsies! Do you know I have got so fond of the Gypsies and Russian songs.” His speech had begun to falter, and he passed abruptly from one subject to another. Konstantin with the help of Masha persuaded him not to go out anywhere, and got him to bed hopelessly drunk. Masha promised to write to Konstantin in case of need, and to persuade Nikolay Levin to go and stay with his brother. Chapter 26

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I was in territory ab solutely hostile and exceedingly strange, and I was old enough to realize that I could be destroyed. It was lucky, oddly enough, that I had been out of the country for so long and had come South from Paris, in effect, instead of fr om New York. If I had not come from Paris, I would certainly have attempted to draw on my considerable kit of New York sur vival tricks, with what results I cannot imagine, for they would certainly not have worked in the South. But I had so far for gotten all my New York tricks as to have been unable to use TAKE ME TO THE WATER 395 them in New York, and now I was simply, helplessly, nakedly, an odd kind of foreigner and could only look on the scene that way. And this meant that, exactly like a foreigner, I was more fascinated than frightened. There was more than enough to fascinate. In the Deep South-Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, for example there is the great, vast, brooding, welcoming and blood stained land, beautiful enough to astonish and break the heart. The land seems nearly to weep beneath the burden of this civilization's unnameable excrescences. The people and the children wander blindly through their forest of billboards, antennae, Coca-Cola bottles, gas stations, drive-ins, motels, beer cans, music of a strident and invincible melancholy, stilted wooden porches, snapping fans, aggressively blue jeaned buttocks, strutting crotches, pint bottles, condoms, in the weeds, rotting automobile corpses, brown as beetles, car rings flashing in the gloom of bus stops: over all there seems to hang a miasma of lust and longing and rage. Every South ern city seemed to me to have been but lately rescued from the swamps, which were patiently waiting to reclaim it. The people all seemed to remember their time under water, and to be both dreading and anticipating their return to that fr ee dom fr om responsibility. Every black man, whatever his style, had been scarred, as in some tribal rite; and every white man, though white men, mostly, had no style, had been maimed. And, everywhere, the women, the most fearfully mistreated creatures of this region, with narrowed eyes and pursed lips lips turned inward on a foul aftertaste-watched and rocked and waited. Some of them reminded me of a moment in my adolescent life when a church sister, not much older than I, who had been my girl fr iend, went mad, and was incarcerated. I went to visit her, in the women's wing of the asylum, and, coming out into the courtyard, stood there for a moment to catch my breath. Something, eventually, made me turn my head.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  He lifted her chin, kissed her throat, and drawing his organ out of her tight sex, heard her moan beneath him. She was stunned. He lifted her until she sat naked, one knee crooked on the ruin of her velvet gown on the bed which was as flat and hard as a table. "I've awakened you, my dear," he said to her. "For a hundred years you've slept and so have all those who loved you. Listen. Listen! You'll hear this castle come alive as no one before you has ever heard it." Already a shriek had come from the passage outside. The serving girl was standing there with her hands to her lips. And the Prince went to the door to speak to her. "Go to your master, the King. Tell him the Prince has come who was foretold to remove the curse on this household. Tell him I shall be closeted now with his daughter." He shut the door, bolting it, and turned to look at Beauty. Beauty was covering her breasts with her hands, and her long straight golden hair, heavy and full of a great silky density, flared down to the bed around her. She bowed her head so that the hair covered her. But she looked at the Prince and her eyes struck him as devoid of fear or cunning. She was like those tender animals of the wood just before he slew them in the hung: eyes wide, expressionless. Her bosom heaved with anxious breath. And now he laughed, drawing near, and lifting her hair back from her right shoulder. She looked up at him steadily, her cheeks suffused with a raw blush, and again he kissed her. He opened her mouth with his lips, and taking her hands in his left hand he laid the down on her naked lap so that he might lift her breasts now and better examine them. "Innocent beauty," he whispered. He knew what she was seeing as she looked at him. He was only three years older than she had been. Eighteen, newly a man, but afraid of nothing and no one. He was tall, black haired; he had a lean build which made him agile. He liked to think of himself as a sword -- light, straight, and very deft, and utterly dangerous. And he had left behind him many who would concur with this. He had not so much pride in himself no as immense satisfaction. He had gotten to the core of the accursed castle. There were knocks at the door, cries. He didn't bother to answer them. He laid Beauty down again. "I'm your Prince," he said, "and that is how you will address me, and that is why you will obey me."

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  In a year of normal rain, this system holds about 24 billion gallons of runoff long enough for it to sink into the sand and gravel of the current bed of the San Gabriel River. 273 That isn’t enough to recharge the aquifers. Every year, the replenishment district blends 17 billion gallons of reclaimed waste water with fresh water from the Colorado River and pumps the mixture onto the San Gabriel River spreading grounds. The reclaimed water disappears into the ground along with the winter’s runoff. This isn’t enough to maintain hydrostatic pressure in the saltwater intrusion zones. Electric pumps force fresh water through perforated steel casings driven into the depleted aquifers. Think of the pumps as reverse wells. The replenishment district maintains four barriers to saltwater intrusion. The barriers are made of twelve billion gallons of fresh water pumped back into the aquifers each year. Two of the freshwater barriers are at the borders of my city. A third barrier slows the plume under Torrance. By an accident of geology, my city’s sixteen wells pump from aquifers maintained by the replenishment district’s injection program. 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 The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  and appointed for me to do in wedlock withal. Now was our bed finely and bravely prepared, shining with the tortoise-shell of Ind, rising with bolsters of feathers, and covered with silk and other things neces- sary ; but I, beside the shame to commit publicly this horrible fact and to pollute my body with this wicked harlot, did greatly fear the danger of death; for I thought in myself, that when she and I were together, the savage beast appointed to devour the woman was not so instructed and taught or would so temper his greediness as that he would tear her in pieces at my side and spare me with a regard of mine innocency. Wherefore I was more careful for the safeguard of my life than for the shame that I should abide; and in the mean season, while my master diligently made ready the bed, and all the residue did prepare themselves for the spectacle of hunting and delighted in the pleasantness of the triumph, I began to think and devise for myself; and when I perceived that no man had regard to me, that was so tame and gentle an ass, I stole secretly out of the gate that was next me, and then I ran away with all my force, and came after about six miles very swiftly passed to Cenchreae, which is the most famous town of all the Corinthians, bordering upon the seas called Aegean and Saronic. There is a great and mighty haven frequented with the ships of many a sundry nation, and there because I would avoid the multitude of people, I went to a secret place of the sea-coast, hard by the sprinklings of the waves, where I laid me down upon the bosom of the sand to ease and refresh myself; for now the day was past and the chariot of the sun gone down, and I lying in this sort on the ground did fall in a sweet and sound sleep. 537 LIBER XI 1 Creca primam ferme noctis vigiliam, experrectus pavore subito, video praemicantis lunae candore nimio completum orbem commodum marinis emer- gentem fluctibus, nanctusque opacae noctis silentiosa secreta, certus etiam summatem deam praecipua maiestate pollere resque prorsus humanas ipsius regi providentia, nec tantum pecuina et ferina, verum inanima etiam divino eius luminis numinisque nutu vegetari, ipsa etiam corpora terra caelo marique nunc incrementis consequenter augeri, nunc detri- mentis obsequenter imminui, fato scilicet iam meis tot tantisque cladibus satiato et spem salutis, licet tardam, subministrante, augustum specimen deae praesentis statui deprecari, confestimque discussa pigra quiete alacer exsurgo méque protinus purifi- candi studio marino lavacro trado, septiesque sub- merso fluctibus capite, quod eum numerum prae- cipue religionibus aptissimum divinus ille Pythagoras prodidit, laetus et alacer deam praepotentem lacri- moso vultu sic apprecabar : 538 BOOK X"

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Very well, let us suppose I do that,” she said. “Do you know what the result of that would be? I can tell you it all beforehand,” and a wicked light gleamed in her eyes, that had been so soft a minute before. “‘Eh, you love another man, and have entered into criminal intrigues with him?’” (Mimicking her husband, she threw an emphasis on the word “criminal,” as Alexey Alexandrovitch did.) “‘I warned you of the results in the religious, the civil, and the domestic relation. You have not listened to me. Now I cannot let you disgrace my name,—’” “and my son,” she had meant to say, but about her son she could not jest,—“‘disgrace my name, and’—and more in the same style,” she added. “In general terms, he’ll say in his official manner, and with all distinctness and precision, that he cannot let me go, but will take all measures in his power to prevent scandal. And he will calmly and punctually act in accordance with his words. That’s what will happen. He’s not a man, but a machine, and a spiteful machine when he’s angry,” she added, recalling Alexey Alexandrovitch as she spoke, with all the peculiarities of his figure and manner of speaking, and reckoning against him every defect she could find in him, softening nothing for the great wrong she herself was doing him. “But, Anna,” said Vronsky, in a soft and persuasive voice, trying to soothe her, “we absolutely must, anyway, tell him, and then be guided by the line he takes.” “What, run away?” “And why not run away? I don’t see how we can keep on like this. And not for my sake—I see that you suffer.” “Yes, run away, and become your mistress,” she said angrily. “Anna,” he said, with reproachful tenderness. “Yes,” she went on, “become your mistress, and complete the ruin of....” Again she would have said “my son,” but she could not utter that word. Vronsky could not understand how she, with her strong and truthful nature, could endure this state of deceit, and not long to get out of it. But he did not suspect that the chief cause of it was the word—_son_, which she could not bring herself to pronounce. When she thought of her son, and his future attitude to his mother, who had abandoned his father, she felt such terror at what she had done, that she could not face it; but, like a woman, could only try to comfort herself with lying assurances that everything would remain as it always had been, and that it was possible to forget the fearful question of how it would be with her son. “I beg you, I entreat you,” she said suddenly, taking his hand, and speaking in quite a different tone, sincere and tender, “never speak to me of that!” “But, Anna....”

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  I waited. 'So a little amusement has been arranged,' he continued when I said nothing. 'You shall perform a little circus for her Highness. Surely you have seen the trainers of animals in circuses, who with deft strokes of their whips place their trained cats on stools, and force them through hoops, and other tricks for the amusements of the audience.' "I felt desperate but I did not answer. 'Well, on the morrow, when your handsome buttocks have healed somewhat, such a little spectacle shall be arranged with the Princess Lynette and her strap to drive you through the performance.' "I knew my face was scarlet with rage and indignation, or worse, it showed my frantic despair, but it was too dark for him to see it. I could see only the gleam of his eyes, and how I knew that he smiled I wasn't certain. 'And you shall perform your little tricks quickly and well,' he went on, 'for the Queen is eager to see you hop upon this stool and tat, crouch on all fours, and then jump through the hoops that are just now being prepared for you. Because you are a two-legged pet with hands as well as feet, you can as well swing from a little trapeze that is being prepared for you, with Princess Lynette's paddle ever to spur you on, and entertain all of us as you show your agility.' "It seemed unthinkable to me, performing this. It was not service after all, not the dressing and adorning of my Queen, not the fetching for her to show I accepted her power and worshiped her. Not suffering for her, receiving her blows. But rather a series of willfully executed ignominious positions. I couldn't endure the thought of it. But worst of all, I couldn’t imagine myself managing to do it. I should be dreadfully humiliated when I failed in will, and was then dragged off again to the kitchen surely. "I was beside myself with rage and fear, and this menace, this brutal Lord Gregory whom I hated so was smiling at me. He took hold of my cock and pulled me forward. Of course he had it at the root, not near the tip where it might have given me some pleasure. And as he tugged my hips so that I lost my footing, he said, 'This will be a grand spectacle. The Queen, the Grand Duke and others shall witness it. And Princess Lynette shall be very eager to impress the Court. See to it that she does not outshine you.'" Beauty shook her head then and kissed Prince Alexi.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  Through it all there moved a handful of young Princes on their hands and knees polishing boots as quickly as they could, their own buttocks raw, their necks encircled by a little cord of leather to which was attached a sign that Beauty could not read. But now as Leon brought her up standing again and gave some finishing touches to her lips and eyelashes, one of these Princes was now buffing her boots though he was weeping. His buttocks were as red as it could have been. And she saw the sign about his neck said, "I am in Disgrace," in small letters. A Page approached and gave the Prince a sound crack with a belt to hurry him on to another. But Beauty had no time to think of it. Leon had affixed the accursed little brass bells to her nipples. She shuddered almost instinctively but they were firmly attached, and he told her to fold her arms behind her back tightly. "Now forward, only you are to bend your knees slightly and to march, lifting each knee high," he told her. She started, awkwardly, reluctant to obey, but then she saw all about her other Princesses marching in an almost sprightly manner, their breasts bouncing gracefully as they moved into the corridor. She hurried, the heavy boots difficult for her to lift with any decorum, but soon she had fallen into a rhythm and Leon was walking beside her. "Now, darling," he said, "the first time is always difficult. Festival Night is frightening. I had thought some easier duty would be yours this first time, but the Queen has ordered you especially for the Bridle Path, and the Lady Juliana will drive you." "Ah, but what..." "Shah, or I shall have to gag you and that will very much displease the Queen as well as make your mouth quite ugly." All the girls were now in a long room, and through narrow windows on one wall, Beauty could see the garden. Torches flared in the dark trees, throwing an uneven glare on the leafy boughs above them. The line of girls formed right beside these windows, and Beauty was now able to see more of what lay beyond them. There was a great roar as of many people conversing, laughing. And then to her shock Beauty saw slaves all through the garden positioned in various ways for their torment. On high stakes here and there were strapped Princes and Princesses painfully contorted, their ankles bound to the stakes, their shoulders bent over the tops of them. They seemed no more than ornaments, the torchlight causing their twisted limbs to glow, the hair of the Princesses falling free in the air behind them. Surely they could see only the sky above, though all could see their miserable contortions.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  She now saw what he meant when he said he had only just begun to yield. "But Alexi," she said gently, almost as if she could save him from his fate, as if it hadn't already happened long ago, "When you were brought by the stable boy to the Queen's presence, when she made you fetch the golden balls for her in the parlor, was this not something of the same thing?" She stopped. "O, how shall I ever do these things!" "But you can do them, all of them, that's the point of my story," he said. "Each new thing seems terrible because it is new, because it is a variation. But at the heart it is all the same ultimately. The paddle, the strap, the exposure, the bending of the will. Only they infinitely vary it. "But you do well to mention this first session with the Queen. It was similar. But remember I was raw and shaken from the kitchen, and thoughtless. I had regained my strength since then, and my strength had to be broken down again. Now perhaps had the little circus been constructed when I was fresh from the kitchen I would have taken to it eagerly then too. But I think not. It encompassed much greater exposure, much greater stamina, much greater surrender of self into positions and attitudes that appeared grotesque and inhuman. "No wonder they need no real cruelty, no fire, no whips, to teach their lessons or amuse themselves," he sighed. "But what happened? Did it come about?" "Yes, of course, though Lord Gregory had no need of telling me beforehand except to rob me of sleep. I spent a painful restless night. I awoke many times thinking others were near, the stable boys, or the kitchen servants, that they had found me helpless and alone and meant to torment me. But no one approached me. "During the night I heard whispers of conversation as Lords and Ladies walked under the stars. Now and then I even hears a slave driven past, crying fitfully under the inevitable smack of the leather. A torch would flicker under the trees, nothing more. "When the morning came, I was bathed, and rubbed with oil, and all this time, my penis was not touched, save when it flagged. Then it was cleverly awakened. "At twilight, the Slaves' Hall was full of talk of the circus. I was told by my groom, Leon, that the circle of performance had been prepared in a spacious hall near the Queen's apartments. There would be four rows of Lords and Ladies surrounding it, and they would bring their slaves, too, to see the amusement. The slaves were in a state of dread, lest they be made to perform.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  C A N T O I Dante finds himself astray in a dark Wood, where he spends a night of great misery. He says that death is hardly more bitter, than it is to recall what he suffered there; but that he will tell the fearful things he saw, in order that he may also tell how he found guidance, and first began to discern the real causes of all misery. He comes to a Hill; and seeing its summit already bright with the rays of the Sun, he begins to ascend it. The way to it looks quite deserted. He is met by a beautiful Leopard, which keeps distracting his attention from the Hill, and makes him turn back several times. The hour of the morning, the season, and the gay outward aspect of that animal, give him good hopes at first; but he is driven down and terrified by a Lion and a She-wolf. Virgil comes to his aid, and tells him that the Wolf lets none pass her way, but entangles and slays every one that tries to get up the mountain by the road on which she stands. He says a time will come when a swift and strong Greyhound shall clear the earth of her, and chase her into Hell. And he offers to conduct Dante by another road; to show him the eternal roots of misery and of joy, and leave him with a higher guide that will lead him up to Heaven. IN THE middle of the journey of our life 1 I came to myself in a dark wood 2 where the straight way was lost. Ah! how hard a thing it is to tell what a wild, and rough, and stubborn wood this was, which in my thought renews the fear! So bitter is it, that scarcely more is death: but to treat of the good that I there found, I will relate the other things that I discerned. I cannot rightly tell how I entered it, so full of sleep was I about the moment that I left the true way. But after I had reached the foot of a Hill 3 there, where that valley ended, which had pierced my heart with fear, I looked up and saw its shoulders already clothed with the rays of the Planet 4 that leads men straight on every road. Then the fear was somewhat calmed, which had continued in the lake of my heart the night that I passed so piteously. And as he, who with panting breath has escaped from the deep sea to the shore, turns to the dangerous water and gazes: so my mind, which still was fleeing, turned back to see the pass that no one ever left alive. After I had rested my wearied body a short while, I took the way again along the desert strand, so that the right foot always was the lower.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  And he, knowing well the handmaids of the Queen 4 of everlasting lamentation, said to me: “Mark the fierce Erinnyes! 5 This is Megæra on the left hand; she, that weeps upon the right, is Alecto; Tisiphone is in the middle”; and therewith he was silent. With her claws each was rending her breast; they were smiting themselves with their palms, and crying so loudly, that I pressed close to the Poet for fear. “Let Medusa come, that we may change him into stone,” 6 they all said, looking downwards; “badly did we avenge the assault of Theseus.” 7 “Turn thee backwards, and keep thy eyes closed: for if the Gorgon show herself, and thou shouldst see her, there would be no returning up again.” Thus said the Master, and he himself turned me, and trusted not to my hands, but closed me also with his own. O ye, who have sane intellects, mark the doctrine, which conceals itself beneath the veil of the strange verses! 8 And now there came, upon the turbid waves, a crash of fearful sound, at which the shores both trembled; a sound as of a wind, impetuous for the adverse heats, which smites the forest without any stay; shatters off the boughs, beats down, and sweeps away; dusty in front, it goes superb, and makes the wild beasts and the shepherds flee. He loosed my eyes, and said: “Now turn thy nerve of vision on that ancient foam, there where the smoke is harshest.” As frogs, before their enemy the serpent, run all asunder through the water, till each squats upon the bottom: so I saw more than a thousand ruined spirits flee before one, who passed the Stygian ferry with soles unwet. He waved that gross air from his countenance, often moving his left hand before him; and only of that trouble seemed he weary. Well did I perceive that he was a Messenger of Heaven; and I turned to the Master; and he made a sign that I should stand quiet, and bow down to him. Ah, how full he seemed to me of indignation! He reached the gate, and with a wand opened it: for there was no resistance. “O outcasts of Heaven! race despised!” began he, upon the horrid threshold, “why dwells this insolence in you? Why spurn ye at that Will, whose object never can be frustrated, and which often has increased your pain? What profits it to butt against the Fates? Your Cerberus, if ye remember, still bears his chin and his throat peeled for doing so.” 9 Then he returned by the filthy way, and spake no word to us; but looked like one whom other care urges and incites than that of those who stand before him. And we moved our feet towards the city, secure after the sacred words. We entered into it without any strife; and I, who was desirous to behold the condition which such a fortress encloses,

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  She had black hair and round cheeks, and a very tiny waist, and she dressed as many peasant women did, in a low-cut ruffled shirtwaist, and a short broad skirt that revealed her smart little ankles. She had an innocent face. She was watching Beauty in wonder, her big brown eyes moving anxiously to the Prince and then shyly back to Beauty who knelt at the Prince's feet in the firelight. "Now, as I told you," the Prince said softly to Beauty, "all here admire you, and they enjoy you, the sight of you, your plump little rear, your lovely legs, those breasts which I cannot stop myself from kissing. But there is no one here, not the lowliest, who is not better than you, my Princess, if I command you to serve him." Beauty was frightened. She nodded quickly as she answered "Yes, my Prince," and then very impulsively she bent and kissed the Prince's boot, but then she appeared terrified. "No, that is very good, my darling," the Prince stroking her neck, reassured her. "That is very good. If I allow you one gesture to speak your heart unbidden it is that one. You may always show me respect of your own accord in that manner." Again Beauty pressed her lips to the leather. But she was trembling. "These townspeople hunger for you, hunger for more of your loveliness," the Prince continued. "And I think they deserve a little taste of it that will delight them." Beauty kissed the Prince's boot again, and let her lips rest there. "O, don't think I should really let them have their fill of your charms. O, no," the Prince said thoughtfully. "But I should you this opportunity, both to reward their devoted attention and teach you that punishment will come whenever I desire to give it. You need not be disobedient to merit it. I will punish when it pleases me. Sometimes that will be the only reason for it." Beauty couldn't keep herself from whimpering. The Prince smiled and beckoned to the Innkeeper's daughter. But she was so frightened of him that she didn't come forward until her father pushed her. "My dear," said the Prince gently. "In the kitchen, have you a flat wooden instrument, for shoveling the hot pans into the oven?" There was a faint movement throughout the room as the soldiers glanced at one another. The people outside were pressing closer to the windows. The young girl nodded and quickly returned with a wooden paddle, very flat and smooth from years of use, with a good handle. "Excellent," said the Prince. But Beauty was crying helplessly.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  To miss the excitement! But in spite of her fear, Beauty nodded at this as if it were perfectly natural. A calm descended upon her in which she heard her own heart and felt her body as if there were limitless time in which to know it. She felt the sheathing of the leather boots, the click of her horseshoes on the stones, the air on her neck, her belly. And she thought, "Yes, this is what I am, so I should not wish to miss it either. Yet I rebel in my soul; why do I rebel?" "O, I despise that miserable Lord Gerhardt, why must he drive me?" asked the girl before her in a low voice. The groom said something that made her laugh. "But he's so slow," she said, "savoring every moment. And I like to run!" The groom laughed at her. She went on, "and what do I get out of it? -- the most miserable spanking. I could take the spanking if I could only cut loose and run..." "You want everything!" said the groom. "And what do you want? Don't tell me you don't like it when I'm covered with welts and almost blistered!" The groom laughed. He had a cheerful face, and was small of build, keeping his hands clasped behind his back, though his chestnut hair fell down over his eyes slightly. "My dear, I love everything about you," he said. "And so does Lord Gerhardt. Now say something to comfort Leon's little pet, she's so frightened." The girl turned and Beauty saw her pert face, eyes slanting at the ends somewhat like the eyes of the Queen, but they were smaller, with no cruelty. She smiled with full little red lips. "Don't be frightened, Beauty," she said, "but you have no need for comfort from me. You have the Prince. I have only Lord Gerhardt." A great current of laughter passed through the garden. The musicians were playing loudly, with much strumming of their lutes and tapping of the tambourines, and then Beauty quite distinctly heard the thunder of hooves approaching. A rider shot past the windows, his cape flying out behind him, his horse bridled in silver and gold which made a streak of light as he rushed forward. "O, at last, at last," said the girl in front of Beauty. Other riders were coming, and they were making a line all along the wall that almost blocked Beauty's view of the garden. She could not bear to look up at them, but she did and saw they were splendid Ladies and Lords, and each held the reins of the horse in his or her left hand, and in the right a long rectangular black paddle.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “You see, I’ve come to you,” said Nikolay in a thick voice, never for one second taking his eyes off his brother’s face. “I’ve been meaning to a long while, but I’ve been unwell all the time. Now I’m ever so much better,” he said, rubbing his beard with his big thin hands. “Yes, yes!” answered Levin. And he felt still more frightened when, kissing him, he felt with his lips the dryness of his brother’s skin and saw close to him his big eyes, full of a strange light. A few weeks before, Konstantin Levin had written to his brother that through the sale of the small part of the property, that had remained undivided, there was a sum of about two thousand roubles to come to him as his share. Nikolay said that he had come now to take this money and, what was more important, to stay a while in the old nest, to get in touch with the earth, so as to renew his strength like the heroes of old for the work that lay before him. In spite of his exaggerated stoop, and the emaciation that was so striking from his height, his movements were as rapid and abrupt as ever. Levin led him into his study. His brother dressed with particular care—a thing he never used to do—combed his scanty, lank hair, and, smiling, went upstairs. He was in the most affectionate and good-humored mood, just as Levin often remembered him in childhood. He even referred to Sergey Ivanovitch without rancor. When he saw Agafea Mihalovna, he made jokes with her and asked after the old servants. The news of the death of Parfen Denisitch made a painful impression on him. A look of fear crossed his face, but he regained his serenity immediately. “Of course he was quite old,” he said, and changed the subject. “Well, I’ll spend a month or two with you, and then I’m off to Moscow. Do you know, Myakov has promised me a place there, and I’m going into the service. Now I’m going to arrange my life quite differently,” he went on. “You know I got rid of that woman.” “Marya Nikolaevna? Why, what for?” “Oh, she was a horrid woman! She caused me all sorts of worries.” But he did not say what the annoyances were. He could not say that he had cast off Marya Nikolaevna because the tea was weak, and, above all, because she would look after him, as though he were an invalid. “Besides, I want to turn over a new leaf completely now. I’ve done silly things, of course, like everyone else, but money’s the last consideration; I don’t regret it. So long as there’s health, and my health, thank God, is quite restored.”

• 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.