Grief

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)

  However, the friendship linking him to the victim-turning the latter into an extension of the murderer's own personalitygives rise to a magical phenomenon we'll try to express in the following terms : I have just been engaged in an enterprise that involved a part of myself ( my affection for the victim ) . Now I know how to enter into a kind of (nonverbal ) pact with the Devil in which I do not give Him my soul, or an arm; but something equally precious : I give him a friend of mine. The death of this friend sanctifies my thieving. It is not a matter of formal arrangement (there are reasons stronger than the provi· sions of any law, inherent in tears, grief, death, blood, in gestures, objects, matter itself) , but an act of true magic that makes me the only true possessor of the object for which a friend has been voluntarily bartered. I say voluntarily because my victim, in being a friend, was (and my grief confirms this ) a greening leaf somewhere close to the tip of one of my branches, nourished by my own sap. Querelle knew that no one on this earth, without committing a sacrilege Querelle himself would try to prevent by fighting against it to his very last breath, would ever succeed in taking certain stolen jewels away from him, as his accomplice (and friend ) whom he had delivered into the hands of the police in order to escape more quickly himself, had been sentenced to five years' solitary confinement. It did not exactly cause him grief to find himself the true owner of those stolen goods, but he regarded them with a feeling we have to call more noble, and not in the least tainted by affec· tion, a kind of manly faithfulness to a wounded companion. Not that our hero had the idea that he was holding the booty for his accomplice, in order to share it with him later; the main thing, for him, was to keep the loot intact and out of reach of human justice. Every time he stole or robbed again, Querelle immediately felt the need to establish a mystical connection between the stolen objects and · himself. "The right of con· quest" became a phrase that meant something. Querelle meta· 241 I QUERELLE morphosed his friends into bracelets, necklaces, gold watches, earrings. Thus turning one of his feelings-friendship-into cash with some success, he put himself without the pale of any man's judgment. That transmutation concerned only himself. Anyone who tried to make him "cough up the stuff again" would commit an act of grave-desecration. Thus Gil's arrest caused Querelle considerable grief, but at the same time he was keenly aware of becoming almost physically encrusted with all the imaginary jewels and gold that symbolized the money acquired with Gil's help. It is our contention that the mechanism we have just described is a very common one in our time.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  But I assume she will overcome these obstacles because she always has. I have been with her through dialysis because of kidney disease inherited from her father, a kidney transplant, cancer brought on by immune suppressants to maintain the transplant, chemotherapy and a second transplant, then a second bout with cancer. For a long time, we’ve wanted to write a book together. Now we’ve made plans to set aside the month of May 2010 to spread out our notes and research on her kitchen table and start writing about traditional practices in original cultures that modern ones could learn from. She has even less time for writing than I do, so we’re excited about it. Also, if we have one more start-up left in us, it will be a school for organizers. Wilma can pass on her gift for creating independence; I can explain why stories and listening are part of change that comes from the bottom up. Organizers from this and other countries can come to teach and brainstorm solutions to one another’s problems. In March I’m at a conference at my own college, where I always imagine my former self on campus, a little scared and out of place. Yet now I’m about to be seventy-six and planning to live to a hundred. I’m doing work I love, with friends I love. What could be better than that? Then I get an unusual message from Wilma: Can I come now instead of waiting for May ? I know what this means. I cancel conference and birthday plans. On the phone with Charlie, I learn that Wilma has been diagnosed with fourth-stage pancreatic cancer. It is one of the least curable and most painful forms. Two plane flights and a long drive later, I arrive at Wilma and Charlie’s house on Mankiller Flats. Her caregiving team is assembling. Besides Charlie, there are Gina and Felicia, her two daughters, who come and go from their nearby homes; Dr. Gloria Grim, a young physician who heads the Cherokee Rural Health Clinics that Wilma started; also two of Wilma’s longtime women friends, one a nurse. They have had a lifetime pact to come and stay whenever one of Wilma’s many health crises seems likely to be her last. Wilma herself is lying in a hospital bed next to the big four-poster she shares with Charlie, so they will still be in the same room. She is calm, honest, laconic, even funny, and as clear as any doctor about what is happening inside her body. She can tell I haven’t accepted any of this yet. As if to comfort me, she says most Americans want to die at home, but many spend their last weeks in a hospital without friends and family. I ask her if she’s now organizing a campaign for the right to die at home. This makes her laugh, and I buy some time.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Their politics were also too organic to imagine either one metamorphosing, as Eugene McCarthy would later do, into supporting Ronald Reagan against Jimmy Carter, a stunner for aging idealists who had been “Clean for Gene.” But in each era, deep feelings about social justice at home and an unpopular war abroad produced candidates who were not so different in content, yet different enough in form and style to generate conflict among intimate allies. McCarthy/Obama came to symbolize hope because they were new and unknown, while Kennedy/Clinton seemed like pragmatists just because they had been near power. In fact, all four were both. —I FLED THIS UNCIVIL civil war and went to California, where Cesar Chavez and his United Farm Workers had asked me to help get the word out about the consumer boycott that they hoped would pressure growers into giving farmworkers the same rights as other workers. And it was Cesar and his main organizer, Dolores Huerta, who reminded me of what I’d learned in India: the clearest view is always from the bottom. Kennedy’s compassion, his peculiar ability to identify with the excluded, was far more important than whether he had declared before or after a New Hampshire primary. Only Bobby Kennedy had supported the farm workers’ strike, even though the growers were key Democratic contributors. Only Bobby Kennedy had credentials and a track record acceptable to the Latino and African American nation-within-a-nation. At home in New York a month later, I turned on the television to see Bobby Kennedy delivering the news of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, murder to a largely black crowd in Indianapolis. Security forces and his own campaign staff had urged him not to be the one to tell this volatile crowd, but he went on stage anyway. He stood quietly at the microphone until the crowd understood something was wrong—and quieted, too. Then he announced the death of Martin Luther King. Over cries and shouts, he just kept on talking in a low voice—about King’s legacy as a man dedicated to “love and justice,” about the white man who shot him and had been caught, and about the country’s choice now between revenge and healing. Finally he said, “For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and mistrust…I had a member of my family killed…by a white man.” There was silence. Then applause that went on and on. —LESS THAN TWO MONTHS later, just after a victory in the California and South Dakota primaries probably would have given Bobby Kennedy the Democratic nomination, a self-described Arab nationalist assassinated him as he left a victory speech in Los Angeles. From a hotel room on the road, I had been watching Kennedy’s speech and the familiar faces of friends like Dolores Huerta and Rafer Johnson, who were celebrating with him. Then there were shots, his body on the concrete floor…I just kept watching.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  So did her belief that Franklin and Eleanor understood our lives at the bottom, even though they were born at the top. “Always look at what people do,” as my mother said, “not at who they are.” She also was sure the Roosevelts wanted us to become independent, not dependent. Since, like most children, I said things like “It’s not fair” and “You are not the boss of me,” this idea made me love them even more. Not all my mother’s stories had a happy ending. When I saw a mysterious newspaper photo of police dragging dark-skinned people through city streets, she explained there were race riots in nearby Detroit—because the Depression had never ended for people called Negroes. I imagined people making soup from potato peelings and coats from blankets, yet somehow I couldn’t imagine my family being attacked by police. She also sat with me as we listened to a radio drama about a mother and child trying to survive in a place called a concentration camp. I knew my mother didn’t want to frighten me, only to teach me something serious, and this made me feel important and grown-up. In later years, I wondered if she meant such small doses of hard realities to immunize me against the depression that, in her, could be triggered by as little as a sad movie or a hurt animal. Yet I never asked why my happy-go-lucky father had zero interest in politics. Both were kind and loving, just very different. I was eleven when President Roosevelt died. By then, my mother and I were living in the small town in Massachusetts where we had moved after she and my father separated. I can still see the exact look of the cracks in the sidewalk where I was riding my bike when my mother came out to tell me. It was hard to believe that Franklin and Eleanor would no longer be part of our lives. It was harder still when I realized that not everyone was sorry. Some in that town blamed the president for getting us into World War II, and others thought his idea of a United Nations would just let foreigners tell us what to do. A newspaper cartoon said, “Goodbye to President Rosenfeld.” My mother explained that no, Roosevelt wasn’t Jewish; it was just that prejudiced people linked together things they didn’t like. Our only companion in mourning was an elderly man across the street who wore a tie with FDR woven into it, something he showed to us as if to coconspirators. My mother was brave enough to put a black-draped photo of the president in our front window, but not brave enough to explain it to the neighbors. I was beginning to suspect that conflict follows politics as night follows day, yet the mere thought of conflict was enough to depress my already depressed mother.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  An older man who seems to be the leader of the Jesus T-shirt group says that the Bible forbids abortion in its commandment “Thou shall not kill.” But being in the Bible Belt, people really know their Bible, and an older woman cites Exodus 21:22–23, a passage that says a man who causes a pregnant woman to miscarry must pay a fine but is not charged with murder, not unless the woman herself dies. Thus the Bible is making clear that a dependent life is not the same as an independent life. This quiets the T-shirt wearers, but probably not for long; I can see them conferring. Meanwhile another student rises to object to parental and judicial consent laws that treat a young woman as if she were the property of her parents or the state. “If you’re old enough to get pregnant,” she says, “you’re old enough to get unpregnant.” A man chimes in, pointing out that if a woman serving in the military is raped by another soldier or even by the enemy, she can’t get an abortion in an army hospital or anywhere with government funds. She’s not even guaranteed a leave to find one on her own. There is a rumble of disapproval and learning. A nurse arises to explain the metal bracelet she is wearing. It looks like the prisoner of war bracelets that bear the birth date of a loved one, but she explains that hers bears the birth and death dates of Rosie Jimenez, the first woman—but not the last—to die from an illegal abortion because the Hyde Amendment forbids not only the use of military tax dollars but health care or any tax dollars for abortion. Rosie was on welfare, only a few months away from graduating with teaching credentials so she could support herself and her five-year-old daughter. But she got pregnant, crossed the Mexican border to get an illegal abortion, the only kind she could afford, returned to Texas, and spent seven painful and fevered days in a hospital being treated for septic shock—at hundreds of times the taxpayers’ expense of an abortion. She died, leaving behind her daughter and a $700 scholarship check that was proof of Rosie’s promising future. This happened only two months after the Hyde Amendment went into effect. Hundreds and perhaps thousands of women have lost their health or lives since. With an eye on the T-shirt group, I explain that reproductive freedom means what it says and also protects the right to have a child. A woman can’t be forced into an abortion, just as she can’t be forced out of childbirth by sterilization or anything else: the women’s movement is as devoted to the latter as the former—including the economic ability to support a child. It just seems lopsided because the opponents of safe and legal abortion have focused there.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  But I assume she will overcome these obstacles because she always has. I have been with her through dialysis because of kidney disease inherited from her father, a kidney transplant, cancer brought on by immune suppressants to maintain the transplant, chemotherapy and a second transplant, then a second bout with cancer. For a long time, we’ve wanted to write a book together. Now we’ve made plans to set aside the month of May 2010 to spread out our notes and research on her kitchen table and start writing about traditional practices in original cultures that modern ones could learn from. She has even less time for writing than I do, so we’re excited about it. Also, if we have one more start-up left in us, it will be a school for organizers. Wilma can pass on her gift for creating independence; I can explain why stories and listening are part of change that comes from the bottom up. Organizers from this and other countries can come to teach and brainstorm solutions to one another’s problems. In March I’m at a conference at my own college, where I always imagine my former self on campus, a little scared and out of place. Yet now I’m about to be seventy-six and planning to live to a hundred. I’m doing work I love, with friends I love. What could be better than that? Then I get an unusual message from Wilma: Can I come now instead of waiting for May ? I know what this means. I cancel conference and birthday plans. On the phone with Charlie, I learn that Wilma has been diagnosed with fourth-stage pancreatic cancer. It is one of the least curable and most painful forms. Two plane flights and a long drive later, I arrive at Wilma and Charlie’s house on Mankiller Flats. Her caregiving team is assembling. Besides Charlie, there are Gina and Felicia, her two daughters, who come and go from their nearby homes; Dr. Gloria Grim, a young physician who heads the Cherokee Rural Health Clinics that Wilma started; also two of Wilma’s longtime women friends, one a nurse. They have had a lifetime pact to come and stay whenever one of Wilma’s many health crises seems likely to be her last. Wilma herself is lying in a hospital bed next to the big four-poster she shares with Charlie, so they will still be in the same room. She is calm, honest, laconic, even funny, and as clear as any doctor about what is happening inside her body. She can tell I haven’t accepted any of this yet. As if to comfort me, she says most Americans want to die at home, but many spend their last weeks in a hospital without friends and family. I ask her if she’s now organizing a campaign for the right to die at home. This makes her laugh, and I buy some time.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Whip out your gun and follow that car. Now tumble out, and take cover. Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze. Her dream-gray gaze never flinches. Ninety pounds is all she weighs With a height of sixty inches. My car is limping, Dolores Haze, And the last long lap is the hardest, And I shall be dumped where the weed decays, And the rest is rust and stardust. By psychoanalyzing this poem, I notice it is really a maniac’s masterpiece. The stark, stiff, lurid rhymes correspond very exactly to certain perspectiveless and terrible landscapes and figures, and magnified parts of landscapes and figures, as drawn by psychopaths in tests devised by their astute trainers. I wrote many more poems. I immersed myself in the poetry of others. But not for a second did I forget the load of revenge. I would be a knave to say, and the reader a fool to believe, that the shock of losing Lolita cured me of pederosis. My accursed nature could not change, no matter how my love for her did. On playgrounds and beaches, my sullen and stealthy eye, against my will, still sought out the flash of a nymphet’s limbs, the sly tokens of Lolita’s handmaids and rosegirls. But one essential vision in me had withered: never did I dwell now on possibilities of bliss with a little maiden, specific or synthetic, in some out-of-the-way place; never did my fancy sink its fangs into Lolita’s sisters, far far away, in the coves of evoked islands. That was all over, for the time being at least. On the other hand, alas, two years of monstrous indulgence had left me with certain habits of lust: I feared lest the void I lived in might drive me to plunge into the freedom of sudden insanity when confronted with a chance temptation in some lane between school and supper. Solitude was corrupting me. I needed company and care. My heart was a hysterical unreliable organ. This is how Rita enters the picture. 26 She was twice Lolita’s age and three quarters of mine: a very slight, dark-haired, pale-skinned adult, weighing a hundred and five pounds, with charmingly asymmetrical eyes, an angular, rapidly sketched profile, and a most appealing ensellure to her supple back—I think she had some Spanish or Babylonian blood. I picked her up one depraved May evening somewhere between Montreal and New York, or more narrowly, between Toylestown and Blake, at a darkishly burning bar under the sign of the Tigermoth, where she was amiably drunk: she insisted we had gone to school together, and she placed her trembling little hand on my ape paw. My senses were very slightly stirred but I decided to give her a try; I did—and adopted her as a constant companion.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  So was it brought to pass that my death was delayed till the next morrow; but what thanks did 1 give to that good boy who at least (being so slain) was the cause of my pardon for one short day! Howbeit I had no time then to rest myself, for the mother of the boy, weeping and lamenting for his cruel death, attired in mourning vesture, tore her hair and threw ashes upon it, and beat her breast, crying and howling very bitterly, and came presently into the stable, saying: ‘Is it reason that this careless beast should do nothing all day but hold his head in the manger, filling and bolling his guts with meat, without com- passion of my great misery or remembrance of his slain master? Surely, contemning my age and in- firmity, he thinketh that I am unable to revenge his great mischiefs. Moreover he would persuade me that he were not culpable; indeed it agreeth with the manner of malefactors to hope for safety, even when as the conscience doth confess the offence: but, O good Lord, thou cursed beast, if thou couldest for the nonce utter the contents of thine own mind, whom (if he were the veriest fool in all the world) mightest thou persuade that this murder was void or without thy fault, when it lay in thy power either to keep off the thieves from this poor boy with thy heels or else to bite and tear them with thy teeth? Couldest not thou (that so oft in his lifetime didst spurn and kick him) defend him now from his death by like means? Yet at least thou shouldest have taken him upon thy back, and so brought him from the cruel hands of thieves, where contrary : 341 28 LUCIUS APULEIUS postiemum deserto deiectoque illo conservo magistro comite pastore non solus aufugeres. An ignoras eos etiam, qui morituris auxilium salutare denegarint, quod contra bonos mores id ipsum fecerint, solere puniri? Sed non diutius meis cladibus laetaberis, homicida: senties, efficiam, misero dolori naturales vires adesse." Et cum dicto subsertis manibus ex- solvit suam sibi fasciam pedesque meos singillatim iligans indidem constringit artissime, scilicet ne quod vindictae meae superesset praesidium, et pertica, qua stabuli fores offirmari solebant, abrepta non prius me desiit obtundere quam victis fessisque viribus, suopte pondere degravatus manibus eius fustis esset elapsus. Tune de brachiorum suorum cita fatigatione conquesta, procurrit ad focum, arden- temque titionem gerens mediis inguinibus obtrudit, donec, solo quod restabat nisus praesidio, liquida fimo strictim egesta faciem atque oculos eius con- foedassem. Qua caecitate atque faetore tandem fugata est a me pernicies : ceterum titione deliranti Altheae Meleager asinus interissem. e on LEES CAR AMET CIUBP Be 1 Ovid, Metamorphoses, VIII. 451:

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  And when you bear in mind that these were the raised eyebrows and parted lips of a child, you may better appreciate what depths of calculated carnality, what reflected despair, restrained me from falling at her dear feet and dissolving in human tears, and sacrificing my jealousy to whatever pleasure Lolita might hope to derive from mixing with dirty and dangerous children in an outside world that was real to her. And I have still other smothered memories, now unfolding themselves into limbless monsters of pain. Once, in a sunset-ending street of Beardsley, she turned to little Eva Rosen (I was taking both nymphets to a concert and walking behind them so close as almost to touch them with my person), she turned to Eva, and so very serenely and seriously, in answer to something the other had said about its being better to die than hear Milton Pinski, some local schoolboy she knew, talk about music, my Lolita remarked: “You know, what’s so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own”; and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling’s mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate—dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions; for I often noticed that living as we did, she and I, in a world of total evil, we would become strangely embarrassed whenever I tried to discuss something she and an older friend, she and a parent, she and a real healthy sweetheart, I and Annabel, Lolita and a sublime, purified, analyzed, deified Harold Haze, might have discussed—an abstract idea, a painting, stippled Hopkins or shorn Baudelaire, God or Shakespeare, anything of a genuine kind. Good will! She would mail her vulnerability in trite brashness and boredom, whereas I, using for my desperately detached comments an artificial tone of voice that set my own last teeth on edge, provoked my audience to such outbursts of rudeness as made any further conversation impossible, oh my poor, bruised child. I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t’aimais, je t’aimais!

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  his greedy desire to drink ; but he had scarce touched the water with his lips when behold, the wound of his throat opened wide, and the sponge suddenly fell into the water and after issued out a little remnant of blood, and his body (being then without life) had fallen into the river, had not I caught him by the leg, and so with great ado pulled him up. And after that I had lamented a good space the death of my wretched companion, I buried him in the sands to dwell for ever there by the river. Which done, trembling and in great fear I rode through many outways and desert places, and as if culpable of murder, I forsook my country, my wife and my children, and came to Aetolia, an exile of my own free will, where I married another wife." This tale told Aristomenes, and his fellow which before obstinately would give no credit unto him, began to say: “ Verily there was never so foolish a tale, nor a more absurd lie told than this" ; and then he spake unto me, saying : “ Ho, sir, what you are J know not, but your habit and countenance declareth that you should be some honest gentleman, do you believe his tale?" — * Yea, verily,” quoth I, “Why not? I think nothing impossible ; for whatsoever the fates have appointed to men, that I "believe shall happen. For many things chance unto me, and unto you, and to divers others, wonderful and almost unheard of, which being declared unto the ignorant be accounted as lies. But verily I give credit unto his tale, and render entire thanks unto him in that (by the pleasant relation of this pretty tale) he hath distracted us so that I have quickly passed and shortened this long and weariful journey, and I think that my horse also was delighted with the same, and he brought me to the gate of this city without any 35 LUCIUS APULEIUS sui me usque ad istam civitatis portam non dorso illius sed meis auribus provecto.”

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  As he says, “We have to fight with all our hearts for choices we wouldn’t dream of making.” This has also motivated him to head the Campaign for Military Service in Washington, D.C., an effort to support a newly elected President Bill Clinton in ending discrimination against gay men and lesbians in the military, as he promised in his campaign. That’s why we are marching with uniformed gay men and lesbians to show that New York supports their presence in the military. Still, Tom sees the irony of trying to get people into the army instead of out of it. Because he looks tired—and because making him laugh is always a reward in itself—I tell him my general rule: Shit equally divided is always better than shit unequally divided . He laughs, and we dance to the military music, somehow demilitarizing it. I ask if it’s a hardship for him to go back and forth to Washington every week. After all, his home is here in New York with Walter Rieman, his partner of five years, also a lawyer, and they were married recently in a ceremony that had every blessing but a legal one. Tom says yes, it is hard—especially now that he needs more rest. And suddenly, in a heart-stopping moment, I know what I hadn’t known before. He is revealing a secret that will cut short his future. Later we have one more long dinner. Tom is his usual enthusiastic self, making plans, talking tactics. He tells me that Walter is a scholar of Jane Austen’s novels—as if introducing us for a time to come. Tom’s own work has ended in the bitter compromise of President Clinton’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, yet Tom makes clear that secrecy is never acceptable and the campaign will go on. I see him at a few more meetings and marches. He looks fragile and is carrying a bag of antiviral drugs—but he is still working, still caring. Then in 1997, when he is forty-eight, Tom’s heart simply stops beating. I can feel my own heart beating harder in disbelief. I join his friends at a memorial, and everyone tells Tom stories. The good news is that we all leave knowing him even better than ever before. The bad news is that we also know he could have been anything, including president of the United States. In this new century, his former students, now lawyers and activists themselves, tell me that Tom was the best teacher they ever had. He taught them that legal cases are worth fighting because even if they lose, they change consciousness, and if they win, they change lives. He didn’t live to see his own marriage become equal under the law, yet he lived marriage equality for all to see. Tom wanted to free us from secrets, both legal and internalized. When I think about all the people still made to hide an essential part of themselves, I know we still need him.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Still, I thought I could get through the hospital procedures without breaking down. And I did—until I held my father’s worn wallet in my hands, its leather shaped to the curve of his body by years in his back pocket as he drove the road. I can feel it still. I will never stop wishing I had been with him. I will always wonder: Alone in a hospital within sound of the freeway, would he have traded the freedom of the road for the presence of family and friends? Having lived his life in the belief that something great could be just around every corner, did he realize for the first time that no more corners could be turned?

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “We have met, though we were not acquainted, at Soden,” she said. “You never thought I was to be your sister?” “You would not have recognized me?” he said, with a radiant smile at her entrance. “Yes, I should. What a good thing you let us know! Not a day has passed that Kostya has not mentioned you, and been anxious.” But the sick man’s interest did not last long. Before she had finished speaking, there had come back into his face the stern, reproachful expression of the dying man’s envy of the living. “I am afraid you are not quite comfortable here,” she said, turning away from his fixed stare, and looking about the room. “We must ask about another room,” she said to her husband, “so that we might be nearer.” Chapter 18 Levin could not look calmly at his brother; he could not himself be natural and calm in his presence. When he went in to the sick man, his eyes and his attention were unconsciously dimmed, and he did not see and did not distinguish the details of his brother’s position. He smelt the awful odor, saw the dirt, disorder, and miserable condition, and heard the groans, and felt that nothing could be done to help. It never entered his head to analyze the details of the sick man’s situation, to consider how that body was lying under the quilt, how those emaciated legs and thighs and spine were lying huddled up, and whether they could not be made more comfortable, whether anything could not be done to make things, if not better, at least less bad. It made his blood run cold when he began to think of all these details. He was absolutely convinced that nothing could be done to prolong his brother’s life or to relieve his suffering. But a sense of his regarding all aid as out of the question was felt by the sick man, and exasperated him. And this made it still more painful for Levin. To be in the sick-room was agony to him, not to be there still worse. And he was continually, on various pretexts, going out of the room, and coming in again, because he was unable to remain alone.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  But after that hour there passed another hour, two hours, three, the full five hours he had fixed as the furthest limit of his sufferings, and the position was still unchanged; and he was still bearing it because there was nothing to be done but bear it; every instant feeling that he had reached the utmost limits of his endurance, and that his heart would break with sympathy and pain. But still the minutes passed by and the hours, and still hours more, and his misery and horror grew and were more and more intense.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  The world is indeed so wholly desert of every virtue, even as thy words sound to me, and heavy and covered with sin; but I pray that thou point the cause out to me, so that I may see it, and that I may show it to others; for one places it in the heavens and another here below.” A deep sigh, which grief compressed to “Alas!” he first gave forth, and then began: “Brother, the world is blind, and verily thou comest from it. Ye who are living refer every cause up to the heavens alone, even as if they swept all with them of necessity. Were it thus, Free Will in you would be destroyed, and it were not just to have joy for good and mourning for evil. The heavens set your impulses in motion; I say not all, but suppose I said it, a light is given you to know good and evil, and Free Will, which, if it endure the strain in its first battlings with the heavens, at length gains the whole victory, if it be well nurtured. Ye lie subject, in your freedom, to a greater power and to a better nature;5 and that creates in you mind which the heavens have not in their charge. Therefore, if the world to-day goeth astray, in you is the cause, in you be it sought, and I now will be a true scout to thee therein. From his hands who fondly loves her ere she is in being, there issues, after the fashion of a little child that sports, now weeping, now laughing, the simple, tender soul, who knoweth naught save that, sprung from a joyous maker, willingly she turneth to that which delights her. First she tastes the savour of a trifling good; there she is beguiled and runneth after it, if guide or curb turn not her love aside. Wherefore ’twas needful to put law as a curb, needful to have a ruler who might discern at least the tower of the true city. Laws6 there are, but who putteth his hand to them? None; because the shepherd that leads may chew the cud, but hath not the hoofs divided.7 Wherefore the people, that see their guide aiming only at that good whereof he is greedy, feed on that and ask no further. Clearly canst thou see that evil leadership is the cause which hath made the world sinful, and not nature that may be corrupted within you. Rome, that made the good world, was wont to have two suns, which made plain to sight the one road and the other; that of the world, and that of God. One hath quenched the other; and the sword is joined to the crook; and the one together with the other must perforce go ill; because, being joined, one feareth nor the other. If thou believest me not, look well at the ear, for every plant is known by the seed.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  Thou hearest hence the eternal part of this man for one little tear that snatches him from me; but with the other will I deal in other fashion.’ Thou knowest how in the air that damp vapour gathers, which turns again to water soon as it ascends where the cold condenses it. He united that evil will, which seeks ill only, with intellect, and stirred the mist and wind by the power which his nature gave. Then when day was spent, he covered the valley from Pratomagno to the great mountain chain with mist, and the sky above made lowering so that the saturated air was turned to water: the rain fell, and to the water-rills came what of it the earth endured not; and as it united into great torrents, so swiftly it rushed towards the royal stream, that naught held it back. My frozen body at its mouth the raging Archian found, and swept it into the Arno, and loosed the cross on my breast, which I made of me when pain o’ercame me: it rolled me along its banks and over its bed, then covered and wrapped me with its spoils.” “Pray, when thou shalt return to the world, and art rested from thy long journey,” followed the third spirit after the second, “Remember me, who am La Pia: 5 Siena made me, Maremma unmade me: ’tis known to him who, first plighting troth, had wedded me with his gem.” 1. The Miserere—Psalm li. 2. Medieval science held falling stars and weather lightning to be due to “flaming vapours.” 3. Jacopo del Cassero (probably related to the Guido of Inf. xxviii), a Guelf of Fano (situated in the mark of Ancona, between Romagna and the kingdom of Naples, which was ruled by Charles II of Anjou) was Podestà of Bologna in 1296. Having incurred the wrath of Azzo VIII of Este (for whom see Inf. xii; cf. also Purg xx), whose designs on the city he had frustrated, he hoped to escape his vengeance by exchanging the office at Bologna for a similar one at Milan (1298). He was, however, murdered by Azzo’s orders [among the assassins being Riccardo da Cammino, for whom see Par. ix] while on his way thither, at Oriaco, between Venice and Padua [the Paduans are called Antenori, from their reputed founder Antenori for whom see Inf. xxxii, noie 10; his escape to Italy after the fall of Troy, and he building of Padua are recorded by Virgil, Æn. i], Oriaco is situated in a marshy country, while La Mira would have been easier of access to Jacopo in his flight. 4. Buonconte of Montefeltro, son of the Guido whose death forms the subject of a very similar episode in Inf. xxvii, and, like his father, a Ghibelline leader. He was in command of the Arctines when they were defeated by the Florentine Guelfs at Campaldino, on June 11, 1289, and was himself among the slain. [According to Bruni’s testimony, Dante took part in this battle on the Guelf side; see Inf. xxi, note 7]. Giovanna was Buonconte’s wife. Campaldino is in the Upper Val d’Arno, or District of Casentino (bounded by the mountains of Pratomagno on the west and by the principal chain of the Apennines on the east; cf. Inf. xxv and Purg. xiv) between Poppi and Bibbiena. At the latter place the Archiano which rises in the Apennines at the monastery of Camaldoli (cf. Par. xxii note 4), falls into the Arno.—Cf. Purg. xxviii. 5. Until recently the story of La Pia, as given by the various commentators, was as follows:—The unfortunate lady belonged to the Sienese family of the Tolomei, and married Nello d’Inghiramo dei Pannocchieschi (Podestà of Volterra in 1277, and of Lucca in 1314; captain of the Tuscan Guelfs in 1284; still living in 1322). She was put to death by her husband in 1295 at the Castello della Pietra, in the Sienese Maremma: some say that she was thrown out of a window, by Nello’s orders, others that she died in some mysterious way (which probably gave rise to the tradition that the unhealthy marshes of the district were intended to, and actually did, kill her). Nello’s motives are variously given; according to some accounts he was jealous (with or without cause); according to others he wished to get rid of his wife in order to be able to marry the Countess Margherita degli Aldobrandeschi, the widow of Guy of Montfort.—In the year 1886 this identification of La Pia was proved (by Banchi) to be impossible; and it is difficult to say how much truth there may be in the legends clustering round her name, till fresh documents concerning her are unearthed. Showing the hours at which the several signs of the Zodiac begin to rise at the spring equinox. Each sign begins to set twelve hours after it begins to rise. The spectator is looking North.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  All I can think of is her description of her near-death experience after the head-on car crash years earlier. She told me it felt as if she were flying through space, faster than any living thing could fly, feeling warm and loved in every pore of her being, as if she were one with the universe, then realizing: This is the purpose of life! Only the thought of her two young daughters made her turn back. I’ve always remembered that and hoped other people I love would share this last feeling. One day I hope I will, too. But I can’t think about such a moment for Wilma now. I can’t wish it for her, because then she will be gone. She shows me a statement she is making about her illness, explaining that she is “mentally and spiritually prepared for the journey.” She’s definitely more ready than I am. That night I’m bolted awake by hearing Wilma cry out in pain. I find Charlie warming blankets on a potbellied stove. As a traditional healer, he not only knows the uses of herbs but has an instinct for the untried. He has devised a system of spreading heated blankets over Wilma’s body, and it does seem to relieve the pain. This terrifying sequence is repeated several times. The next day I ask the young Dr. Grim, who could not be more different from her name, what can be done about the pain. She says Wilma knows that morphine and other opiates would help, but taking enough to cut the pain would also dull her consciousness. She wants to be fully present for as long as she can. In the next few days, relatives, friends, and colleagues come from miles around to pay their respects. They sit near her, reminisce about the past, argue politics for the future, and bring pies, cakes, and casseroles for ever-increasing numbers of visitors. Children bring flowers, or sing a song from church or school, or just watch television. Some stare at Wilma and their parents in a way that says they will never forget. As some of the older visitors leave, they say, “I’ll see you on the other side of the mountain.” I’ve never seen such honesty about dying. People closest to the family do the small and continuous tasks: laundry, bringing in firewood, feeding Wilma’s indoor dog and outdoor cats. They include our mutual friends from San Francisco, Kristina Kiehl and Bob Friedman. Kristina has been there for three weeks, helping with this final challenge as she has with so many others. She invents a way of washing Wilma’s hair in bed. Bob takes over the continual task of washing dishes for the many people who gather in the big kitchen, talking softly. At night Wilma calls out in pain. Then it begins during the day, too. I can’t bear it. I go into full research mode and phone every physician I know.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  We’ve stopped at a construction roadblock in the searing desert heat, and a big man is walking toward us carrying a pickax. Suddenly, we’re hyperaware that no other car is in sight. Leaning into my window, he says he noticed our Ms. T-shirts—he’s a Ms. reader. This seems so improbable that I’m sure it’s a joke or a con. Then he cites an article of a year ago about los feminicidios, the hundreds of young women whose raped, tortured, and mutilated bodies have been found in the Mexican desert across from El Paso. Speculation about the motive has ranged from sex trafficking to the sale of organs, from raping and murdering young women as part of a gang initiation to a twisted taking of revenge against women for being wage earners. These murders have been going on for decades, but since they are sexualized and the victims are “only” workers in the maquiladoras —factories just across the Mexican border where products are assembled cheaply for sale in the United States—news coverage has been sensational and arrests have been zero. I notice tears in this man’s eyes. He is saying that ten years ago his sixteen-year-old sister became one of las feminicidios and today is the anniversary of her death. He wants to thank us for paying attention, for remembering. He is grateful to anyone who makes these deaths visible. He himself will remain in mourning until her murderer is caught. We shake his callused hands. He says there is something mystical about our appearance on this day. We are feeling it, too. As he walks back to his roadwork, we sit silent for a long time. Over the years, I will forget the larger purpose of this trip, but I will never forget this man and his sister. • In 2000 I’m driving with a friend from Texas into rural Oklahoma. I can tell where the first state ends and the second begins because roads get better, cattle roam freely instead of being tethered in the boiling sun, and roadside businesses are more likely to be gas stations with convenience stores than topless bars and entertainment arcades. This seems like a good thing—until the Bible Belt gets tighter, and I see paired billboards along the road. One promises everlasting life through Jesus Christ. The other promises to reverse vasectomies. • During a discussion after a university lecture in the early fall of 2003, a student stands up in the audience and says that President George W. Bush will board a plane carrying a large plastic turkey and fly to Iraq for a Thanksgiving photo op with our troops. Since we’ve been discussing the phony pretext of weapons of mass destruction with which Bush justified the invasion of Iraq in the first place, the phony turkey gets a big laugh.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  After dinner, however, Kitty got up and went as usual with her work to the sick man. He looked at her sternly when she came in, and smiled contemptuously when she said she had been unwell. That day he was continually blowing his nose, and groaning piteously. “How do you feel?” she asked him. “Worse,” he articulated with difficulty. “In pain!” “In pain, where?” “Everywhere.” “It will be over today, you will see,” said Marya Nikolaevna. Though it was said in a whisper, the sick man, whose hearing Levin had noticed was very keen, must have heard. Levin said hush to her, and looked round at the sick man. Nikolay had heard; but these words produced no effect on him. His eyes had still the same intense, reproachful look. “Why do you think so?” Levin asked her, when she had followed him into the corridor. “He has begun picking at himself,” said Marya Nikolaevna. “How do you mean?” “Like this,” she said, tugging at the folds of her woolen skirt. Levin noticed, indeed, that all that day the patient pulled at himself, as it were, trying to snatch something away. Marya Nikolaevna’s prediction came true. Towards night the sick man was not able to lift his hands, and could only gaze before him with the same intensely concentrated expression in his eyes. Even when his brother or Kitty bent over him, so that he could see them, he looked just the same. Kitty sent for the priest to read the prayer for the dying. While the priest was reading it, the dying man did not show any sign of life; his eyes were closed. Levin, Kitty, and Marya Nikolaevna stood at the bedside. The priest had not quite finished reading the prayer when the dying man stretched, sighed, and opened his eyes. The priest, on finishing the prayer, put the cross to the cold forehead, then slowly returned it to the stand, and after standing for two minutes more in silence, he touched the huge, bloodless hand that was turning cold. “He is gone,” said the priest, and would have moved away; but suddenly there was a faint stir in the mustaches of the dead man that seemed glued together, and quite distinctly in the hush they heard from the bottom of the chest the sharply defined sounds: “Not quite ... soon.” And a minute later the face brightened, a smile came out under the mustaches, and the women who had gathered round began carefully laying out the corpse.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  It is the oldest continuous democracy in the world.20 Whenever Wilma or I used to ask him something serious, he always answered, “I have to consult with my women elders first.” In fact, it was the equality of women in those nations that inspired white women neighbors to begin organizing the suffrage movement. Wilma’s own mother is there every morning, having walked from her house just down a dirt road. She tells me that Wilma took her to Ireland to see her own hereditary land for the first time. We both know that she will outlive her daughter. I’ve promised to bring Wilma conversations from her kitchen table, since she is unable to have them herself. Over the two weeks I’ve been here, this house has become like a ship at sea for me; nothing else exists. I tell her that, thanks to her, I’ve come to understand the power of community. There is silence. I fear her good hours are gone. Then she smiles and says, “You’ll never be the same.” Later, a medical attendant arrives, and I know she has decided to accept morphine. Since this is real life, not a novel, there is no sharp line, no definitive good-bye. Wilma just seems to pull away from us, like an ocean tide receding from all of us left standing on the beach. The moment after is utterly different from the moment before. Now I understand why people believe the soul departs with the last breath. Everything looks the same, yet everything is different. We stand in the room around Wilma’s bed. She is no longer there. Respectful attendants come with a stretcher on wheels, open the French doors, and move her slowly across the porch where she loved to sit, and onto her beloved land one last time. Later, her ashes will be returned to the banks of the spring where Charlie’s medicinal herbs grow. This is where she wanted to be. —IT’S THE BEAUTIFUL SATURDAY MORNING of April 10, 2010, and we are sitting outdoors at the Cherokee Cultural Grounds. Though it’s only four days after Wilma’s death, 150 tribal, state, and national leaders, including President Clinton and President Obama, have sent messages, and about fifteen hundred people have gathered to hear friends and family share personal memories. It’s the best kind of memorial because each of us will leave knowing Wilma a little better than we did when we arrived. Among her last requests was that everyone wear or carry something in her improbable favorite color: bright pink. A symbolic drink made of strawberries is served. Strawberries are called ani in Cherokee and are supposed to help her make her way through the sky to the ancestors. For me, this is the beginning of years of picking up the phone—and realizing I can’t talk to her; of thinking about our book—and knowing we can’t write it together; of hearing something that would make her laugh—yet I can’t tell her.