Hope

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)

  "Nucor obeyed. He put the socks on the table and slipped into one of them a lump of sugar, handed to him by Rosa; then, after pouring some kirsch into the bottom of a bowl, he picked up the two socks, held them above the bowl and dipped them into it, taking care not to let the kirsch moisten anything but the tips, and then offered them to Dirbel, saying: " 'Take your pick, suck either one, with suga, or without. Don't act disgusted. This is the way one joins, to eat and drink at the same trough. There must be honor among thieves.' " And the latest Querelle, born in one piece at the age of twenty-five, arisen, defenseless; from a shadowy region within ourselves, strong, solid, swung his shoulders round gladly to greet his self-chosen, smiling, happy brothers, each one of them both younger and older than himself. And each Querelle regarded him with sympathy. In his dark moments Querelle was 119 I QUERELLE aware of their presence around him. \Vhile the fact that they were creatures of memory made them a little hazy, that very haze endowed them with a lovable gracefulness, a feminine quality that gently arched over him. If he had been inventive enough, he might have called them his "daughters," as Beethoven used to call his symphonies. By dark moments we mean those instants when the other Querelles crowded closer round the latest athlete, and when the haze around them was more like a veil of mourning than one of bridal tulle : when he himself already felt those gentle folds of oblivion descending over his body. "Seems they just don't know who it was cut him down." "Did you know him?" "Sure. Everybody knew him. But he wasn't no buddy of . , mine. Nona said : "\Veil, that mason, he must've been like the other one that got killed. The same type, most probably." "\Vhat mason?" Querelle said it slowly, stretching the vowels. "Haven't you heard?" Then Querelle and his brother were talking. The brothelkeeper stood leaning his elbows on the counter. He was observing them, especially Querelle, as Robert was telling him about Gil's ferocious deed . A powerful feeling of hope, the source of which seemed to be the universe itself, was gradually mounting in Querelle. An exquisite sense of freshness spread a11 through him . More and more he came to see himself as an exceptional and blessed being. His limbs and their gestures showed greater strength, greater grace. He was aware of this, gravely recorded the fact in his mind, all the while retaining the custom-ary smile. The two brothers had been fighting for five minutes. As they didn't really know where to strike or grab the other, their tactics 120 I JEAN GENET

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  “Well, that would be a more authentic rebirth. Have you seen any Tarkovsky? Haven’t you read Rousseau?” “I was born into privilege,” I told Ping Xi. “I am not going to squander that. I’m not a moron.” “I might have to, like, downgrade to Super 8 then. Can I take down the blinds in the bedroom?” He pulled a handwritten document from his messenger bag. “Put the contract away,” I said. “I won’t sue you. Just don’t fuck this up for me.” Ping Xi shrugged. I gave him the key to the new lock. “If I need anything, I’ll stick a Post-it note here,” I said, pointing to the dining table. “You see this red pen?” Each time Ping Xi came over, he was to mark off the days on a calendar hanging on the door to my bedroom. Every three days, I’d wake up, look at the calendar, eat, drink, bathe, et cetera. I would only spend one hour awake each time. I did the math: for the next four months, 120 days total, I would spend only forty hours in a conscious state. “Sweet dreams,” said Ping Xi. His face was wan, fleshy, something blurry about it—maybe it was the Vaseline on his chin—but his eyes were sharp, hooded, dark, clear, and although I understood that he was foolish, I trusted his resolve. He wouldn’t let me out of there. He was too conceited to fail to keep his word, and too ambitious to give up the opportunity to take advantage of my offer. A woman out of her mind, locked in an apartment. I shut the door in his face. I heard him slide in the key and lock it. I took the first of forty Infermiterol, went into the bedroom, fluffed the pillow, and lay down. • • • THREE NIGHTS LATER, I came to in pitch darkness, crawled off the mattress, turned on the lights, and went into the living room, expecting to find scratches at the door, evidence of a wild animal being held against her will. But I found nothing. Ping Xi hadn’t even crossed out the days on the calendar. My apartment was almost unrecognizable in its blankness, clean and empty. I could imagine some well-dressed real estate agent bursting in —a floral scarf fluttering like a sail from her upheld arm as she extolled the virtues of the unit to a newly married couple: “High ceilings, hardwood, all the original molding, and quiet, quiet. From those windows, you can even see the East River.” The agent’s suit was canary yellow. The couple, I imagined, were the ones whose photo I’d taken a few days earlier on the Esplanade. My memory had blundered into my imagination, but I knew what was what. I understood that three days had passed without me, and there was a long way ahead.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  He saw now distinctly that Kauffmann and Michelli had nothing to tell him. He knew what he wanted. He saw that Russia has splendid land, splendid laborers, and that in certain cases, as at the peasant’s on the way to Sviazhsky’s, the produce raised by the laborers and the land is great—in the majority of cases when capital is applied in the European way the produce is small, and that this simply arises from the fact that the laborers want to work and work well only in their own peculiar way, and that this antagonism is not incidental but invariable, and has its roots in the national spirit. He thought that the Russian people whose task it was to colonize and cultivate vast tracts of unoccupied land, consciously adhered, till all their land was occupied, to the methods suitable to their purpose, and that their methods were by no means so bad as was generally supposed. And he wanted to prove this theoretically in his book and practically on his land. Chapter 30 At the end of September the timber had been carted for building the cattleyard on the land that had been allotted to the association of peasants, and the butter from the cows was sold and the profits divided. In practice the system worked capitally, or, at least, so it seemed to Levin. In order to work out the whole subject theoretically and to complete his book, which, in Levin’s daydreams, was not merely to effect a revolution in political economy, but to annihilate that science entirely and to lay the foundation of a new science of the relation of the people to the soil, all that was left to do was to make a tour abroad, and to study on the spot all that had been done in the same direction, and to collect conclusive evidence that all that had been done there was not what was wanted. Levin was only waiting for the delivery of his wheat to receive the money for it and go abroad. But the rains began, preventing the harvesting of the corn and potatoes left in the fields, and putting a stop to all work, even to the delivery of the wheat. The mud was impassable along the roads; two mills were carried away, and the weather got worse and worse. On the 30th of September the sun came out in the morning, and hoping for fine weather, Levin began making final preparations for his journey. He gave orders for the wheat to be delivered, sent the bailiff to the merchant to get the money owing him, and went out himself to give some final directions on the estate before setting off.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  He speculated a little on what African Christianity might become, and how it might contribute to the rebirth of Christianity e\·erywhere; and left his audience to chew on this momentous speculation: Considering, he said, that what Ati·ica wishes to wrest from Europe is power, will it be necessary fo r Attica to take the same bloody road which Europe has fo llowed? Or !60 NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME will it be possible fo r her to work out some means of avoiding this? M. Wahal, from the Sudan, spoke in the afternoon on the role of the law in culture, using as an illustration the role the law had played in the history of the American Negro. He spoke at length on the role of French law in Africa, pointing out that French law is simply not equipped to deal with the complexity of the African situation. And what is even worse, of course, is that it makes virtually no attempt to do so. The result is that French law, in Africa, is simply a legal means of administering injustice. It is not a solution, either, simply to revert to African tribal custom, which is also helpless before the complexities of present-day African life. Wahal spoke with a quiet matter-of-factness, which lent great fo rce to the ugly story he was telling, and he concluded by saying that the ques tion was ultimately a political one and that there was no hope of solving it within the framework of the present colonial system. He was fo llowed by George Lamming. Lamming is tall, raw-boned, untidy, and intense, and one of his real distinc tions is his refusal to be intimidated by the fa ct that he is a genuine writer. He proposed to raise certain questions per taining to the quality of life to be lived by black people in that hypothetical tomorrow when they would no longer be ruled by whites. "The profession of letters is an untidy one," he began, looking as though he had dressed to prove it. He di rected his speech to Aime Cesaire and Jacques Alexis in par ticular, and quoted Djuna Barnes: "Too great a sense of identity makes a man feel he can do no wrong. And too little docs the same." He suggested that it was important to bear in mind that the word Negro meant black-and meant noth ing more than that; and commented on the great variety of heritages, experiences, and points of view which the confer ence had brought together under the heading of this single noun.

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  What we hope for, I think, is tenderness in this encounter. Holy Land is the story of growth as a reflection of optimism. In southern California today, growth is the prime source for pessimism. Can we conclude that the suburban experiment has failed? The builders of my suburb turned lima bean fields into housing tracts with an astonishing degree of good luck and wisdom. Some of the good luck has run out of suburban development, and much of the wisdom in the building of Lakewood has been ignored. Have suburbs failed as a result? In Los Angeles, suburbs like mine are all we have. They’d better not fail, or 13 million of us will be homeless. Of course, new suburbs can be made better, and what we value in older suburbs can be preserved. The preference of a majority of people for neighborhoods that look remarkably like mine won’t go away, however, even though the suburban frontier has grown harsher. Optimism still makes bearable the risks of our lives together. Los Angeles is often described as an increasingly polarized community from which people “in the middle” are being squeezed out, leaving a great many working poor and the few who are relatively wealthy. If that’s so, what is in store for the kind of homeowner Holy Land describes? The suburb described in Holy Land depended then—and depends now—on jobs that let men and women with ordinary skills make a living. Once those jobs were riveting jets together at Douglas and cracking crude oil into gasoline at Shell and Texaco. Today, it takes two jobs in an insecure economy to make the mortgage payment, feed and clothe a family, and keep up a fifty-four- year-old tract house. Often in my town, those jobs are held by the second generation of immigrant families—like the Latino, Filipino, and Chinese families in my neighborhood. They bring a different dynamic to the suburban experience, more like the urban immigrants of the first half of the twentieth century. My neighborhood struggles economically, but I’m not sure that its struggles are worse than what they were in the past. Some families still live paycheck to paycheck. Maybe more are only a family crisis away from falling out of the not-quite-middle-class into something less secure. These anxieties affect this suburb. But the loyalty of these diverse

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Stepan Arkadyevitch saw Matvey wanted to make a joke and attract attention to himself. Tearing open the telegram, he read it through, guessing at the words, misspelt as they always are in telegrams, and his face brightened. “Matvey, my sister Anna Arkadyevna will be here tomorrow,” he said, checking for a minute the sleek, plump hand of the barber, cutting a pink path through his long, curly whiskers. “Thank God!” said Matvey, showing by this response that he, like his master, realized the significance of this arrival—that is, that Anna Arkadyevna, the sister he was so fond of, might bring about a reconciliation between husband and wife. “Alone, or with her husband?” inquired Matvey. Stepan Arkadyevitch could not answer, as the barber was at work on his upper lip, and he raised one finger. Matvey nodded at the looking-glass. “Alone. Is the room to be got ready upstairs?” “Inform Darya Alexandrovna: where she orders.” “Darya Alexandrovna?” Matvey repeated, as though in doubt. “Yes, inform her. Here, take the telegram; give it to her, and then do what she tells you.” “You want to try it on,” Matvey understood, but he only said, “Yes, sir.” Stepan Arkadyevitch was already washed and combed and ready to be dressed, when Matvey, stepping deliberately in his creaky boots, came back into the room with the telegram in his hand. The barber had gone. “Darya Alexandrovna told me to inform you that she is going away. Let him do—that is you—as he likes,” he said, laughing only with his eyes, and putting his hands in his pockets, he watched his master with his head on one side. Stepan Arkadyevitch was silent a minute. Then a good-humored and rather pitiful smile showed itself on his handsome face. “Eh, Matvey?” he said, shaking his head. “It’s all right, sir; she will come round,” said Matvey. “Come round?” “Yes, sir.” “Do you think so? Who’s there?” asked Stepan Arkadyevitch, hearing the rustle of a woman’s dress at the door. “It’s I,” said a firm, pleasant, woman’s voice, and the stern, pockmarked face of Matrona Philimonovna, the nurse, was thrust in at the doorway. “Well, what is it, Matrona?” queried Stepan Arkadyevitch, going up to her at the door. Although Stepan Arkadyevitch was completely in the wrong as regards his wife, and was conscious of this himself, almost everyone in the house (even the nurse, Darya Alexandrovna’s chief ally) was on his side. “Well, what now?” he asked disconsolately. “Go to her, sir; own your fault again. Maybe God will aid you. She is suffering so, it’s sad to see her; and besides, everything in the house is topsy-turvy. You must have pity, sir, on the children. Beg her forgiveness, sir. There’s no help for it! One must take the consequences....” “But she won’t see me.” “You do your part. God is merciful; pray to God, sir, pray to God.”

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  home. Holy Land took shape as I took this daily, hour-long walk through my neighborhood and across the grid of its streets. You avoided the temptation to sentimentalize. Why? I resisted being contemptuous, too. Too many accounts of a suburban life fall into the trap of sentimentality or contempt. I have no desire to romanticize my past or set fire to it. This suburb hasn’t any barriers to tragedy. It’s a place that’s just as mortal as me. To what do you attribute the popularity of Holy Land? How do you explain its appeal? Readers—not all readers—have told me that Holy Land touched them. Maybe there are some readers who think the book is a kind of puzzle: How do all these small parts go together? Some readers tell me that they’ve bought a copy and almost immediately began reading parts of it aloud to a companion. Maybe a few think Holy Land is beautiful; I’d like to think that some of it is. My intention was to speak as plainly as possible to my neighbors of what they had made of themselves by living here. Their habits, raised on the framework of their city, did not shame them. Perhaps other readers want to see their habits that way, too. The work of every generation includes reconciliation with its past. Holy Land has some of that character. What does the picture of the past in your book tell us about who we are today? Does Holy Land provide us with something more than a nostalgic view of a disappearing world? Who we are today is entangled with what we were. The past is always slipping away, nowhere more quickly than in Los Angeles, but the past isn’t always distant. Holy Land documents the material basis of a place—from its geology to the technology built into its houses—because these elements persist, despite the erasure of so much. Holy Land isn’t about a “disappearing world” in that sense. Not just the houses, but the hopes and losses of sixty years ago, materialized in the patterns of the street grid, are around me every day. The intersections of place and character persist, too, muted by new circumstances but still grounded in the habits that grow out of a life in a particular place. The experience of a 1950s childhood can’t be re-created for new

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  After dinner Levin was sitting, as he usually did, in an easy chair with a book, and as he read he went on thinking of the journey before him in connection with his book. Today all the significance of his book rose before him with special distinctness, and whole periods ranged themselves in his mind in illustration of his theories. “I must write that down,” he thought. “That ought to form a brief introduction, which I thought unnecessary before.” He got up to go to his writing-table, and Laska, lying at his feet, got up too, stretching and looking at him as though to inquire where to go. But he had not time to write it down, for the head peasants had come round, and Levin went out into the hall to them. After his levee, that is to say, giving directions about the labors of the next day, and seeing all the peasants who had business with him, Levin went back to his study and sat down to work. Laska lay under the table; Agafea Mihalovna settled herself in her place with her stocking. After writing for a little while, Levin suddenly thought with exceptional vividness of Kitty, her refusal, and their last meeting. He got up and began walking about the room. “What’s the use of being dreary?” said Agafea Mihalovna. “Come, why do you stay on at home? You ought to go to some warm springs, especially now you’re ready for the journey.” “Well, I am going away the day after tomorrow, Agafea Mihalovna; I must finish my work.” “There, there, your work, you say! As if you hadn’t done enough for the peasants! Why, as ’tis, they’re saying, ‘Your master will be getting some honor from the Tsar for it.’ Indeed and it is a strange thing; why need you worry about the peasants?” “I’m not worrying about them; I’m doing it for my own good.” Agafea Mihalovna knew every detail of Levin’s plans for his land. Levin often put his views before her in all their complexity, and not uncommonly he argued with her and did not agree with her comments. But on this occasion she entirely misinterpreted what he had said. “Of one’s soul’s salvation we all know and must think before all else,” she said with a sigh. “Parfen Denisitch now, for all he was no scholar, he died a death that God grant everyone of us the like,” she said, referring to a servant who had died recently. “Took the sacrament and all.” “That’s not what I mean,” said he. “I mean that I’m acting for my own advantage. It’s all the better for me if the peasants do their work better.” “Well, whatever you do, if he’s a lazy good-for-nought, everything’ll be at sixes and sevens. If he has a conscience, he’ll work, and if not, there’s no doing anything.” “Oh, come, you say yourself Ivan has begun looking after the cattle better.”

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  She gave me a hug, kissed my cheek. “I’m proud of you,” she said. “I know you can get through this.” When she pulled away, there were tears in her eyes, maybe just from the cold. “I feel like I won the lottery!” She was happy. I watched her through the tinted glass, smiling and waving as she drove off. • • • AT THE BODEGA, I got two coffees and a piece of prepackaged carrot cake, bought all the garbage bags the Egyptians had in stock, then went back upstairs and packed everything up. Every book, every vase, every plate and bowl and fork and knife. All my videos, even the Star Trek collection. I knew I had to do it. The deep sleep I would soon enter required a completely blank canvas if I was to emerge from it renewed. I wanted nothing but white walls, bare floors, lukewarm tap water. I packed up all my tapes and CDs, my laptop, unmelted candles, all my pens and pencils, all my electric cords and rape whistles and Fodor’s guides to places I never went. I called the Jewish Women’s Council Thrift Shop and told them my aunt had died. Two guys came with a van an hour later, lugging the garbage bags four at a time into the hallway and out of my life forever. They took most of the furniture, too, including the coffee table and the bed frame. I got them to carry out the sofa and the armchair and leave them on the curb. The only pieces of furniture I kept were the mattress, the dining table, and a single aluminum folding chair with a cushion whose stained gray linen cover I threw down the trash chute. Ta-ta. What I kept for myself amounted to one set of towels, two sets of sheets, the duvet, three sets of pajamas, three pairs of cotton underpants, three bras, three pairs of socks, a comb for my hair, a box of Tide laundry detergent, a large bottle of Lubriderm moisturizing lotion. I bought a new toothbrush and four months’ worth of toothpaste and Ivory soap and toilet paper at Rite Aid. A four months’ supply of iron supplements, a women’s daily vitamin, aspirin. I bought packages of plastic cups and plates, plastic cutlery. I had instructed Ping Xi to bring me one large mushroom pepperoni pizza with extra cheese every Sunday afternoon. Whenever I came to, I’d drink water, eat a slice of pizza, do some sit-ups and push-ups, some squats, some lunges, put the clothes I was wearing into the washer, transfer the washed set into the dryer, put on the clean set, then take another Infermiterol. In this way, I could stay in the black until my year of rest was up. When the locksmith came, I told him to install the new lock on the outside of the door, so that anyone inside the apartment would need the key to get out.

• From Querelle (1953)

  119 I QUERELLE aware of their presence around him. \Vhile the fact that they were creatures of memory made them a little hazy, that very haze endowed them with a lovable gracefulness, a feminine quality th at gently arched over him. If he had been inventive en ough, he might have called them his "daughters," as Bee thoven used to call his symphonies. By dark moments we mean those instants when the other Querelles crowded closer round the latest athlete, and when the haze around them was more like a veil of mourning than one of bridal tulle : when he him self already felt those gentle fol ds of oblivion descending over his body. "Seems they just don't know who it was cut him down." "Did you know him?" "Sure. Everybody knew him. But he wasn't no buddy of . , mine. Nona said: "\V eil, that mason, he must've been like the other one that got killed. The same type, most probably." "\Vhat mason?" Querelle said it slowly, stretching the vowels. "Haven't you heard?" Then Querelle and his brother were talking. The brothel keeper stood leaning his elbows on the counter. He was observ ing them, especially Querelle, as Robert was telling him about Gil's ferocious deed. A powerful feeling of hope, the source of which seemed to be the universe itself, was gradually mounting in Querelle. An exquisite sense of freshness spread a11 through him. More and more he came to see himself as an exceptional and blessed being. His limbs and their gestures showed greater st rength, greater grace. He was awar e of this, gravely recorded th e fact in his mind, all the while retaining the custom-ary smile. The two brothers had been fighting for fiv e minutes. As they didn't really know where to strike or grab the other, their tactics

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  One is East Texas State University, where future farmers study agriculture, and another is Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where future leaders study whatever they please. Yet as different as they are, a pair of women students approach us afterward with the same passionate message in each place: If you think this is bad, you should come to Texas Women’s University. Each pair is also one white woman and one black woman, unusual in itself. Back home in New York, we keep hearing from more TWU students. It’s a campaign to get us there, without a speakers’ program to pay expenses—at least, without one willing to invite us. Who can resist? Denton turns out to be a small town known for its rodeos and hot summers. Students take us around the campus of low buildings, plus one tower that is topped by the president’s office—like a warden’s aerie overlooking a prison, as the students point out. The good news about this state-supported women’s university is that its low cost invites women who might never otherwise be able to go to college, including black and Latina students. The not-so-good news is that TWU is known for two specialties. One is domestic science, which was originally a way of elevating women’s work in the home but has become a field that students feel is training them for marriage or domestic service jobs. The other is nursing, the most organized of the professions that are mostly female, but it is still paid less than such similar but mostly male professions as pharmacy. The worst news is that the many sexual assaults on campus have been met with fences, curfews, and male guards that restrict the victims, but not the victimizers. In fact, students suspect that a couple of the guards are the rapists. Margaret and I find ourselves in TWU’s main auditorium. It is packed with students and exploding with new feminism, combined with civil rights and black power, plus the newly founded La Raza Unida, a national party created by Mexican American leaders in Texas. Already, La Raza has confounded expectations by becoming the first national political party to support reproductive freedom, including abortion. Many of these students have experienced the double discrimination of sex and race—not only in the mainstream but also by race in the women’s movement, and by sex in the black power movement. They applaud when Margaret says, “I still have scars on my head and dust between my toes from marching across that bridge in Selma. Once I was left for dead.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  When the solution to my problems came to me, it landed in my mind like a hawk on a cliff. It was as though it had been circling up there the whole time, studying every little thing in my life, putting all the pieces together. “This is the way.” I knew exactly what I had to do: I needed to be locked up. If one tablet of Infermiterol put me into a state of vacuous unconsciousness for three days, I had enough to keep me in the dark until June. All I needed was a jailkeeper, and I could live in constant sleep without fear of going out and getting involved in anything. This all seemed like a practical matter. The Infermiterol would work for me. I was relieved, almost happy. I didn’t mind at all that when Reva finally came home and wrestled the bathroom door open, she shrieked, expressed her grave concern for my sanity, all while rushing me out the door, I guessed, because she had a stomach full of junk she wanted to puke up. I left the pills with her, all but the Infermiterol. At home, I called a locksmith, arranged a meeting with Ping Xi for the following afternoon, and called Dr. Tuttle to tell her I was going off the grid for the next four months. “Hopefully I won’t ever need to see you again,” I told her. “People say that to me all the time,” she said. That was the last time we spoke. Seven “ARE YOU SURE you won’t wear this stuff? What if I stretch something out, and then you want it back?” I had called Reva to say that I was cleaning out my closets. She brought over a collection of large paper shopping bags from various Manhattan department stores, bags she’d obviously saved in case she had to transport something and needed a vessel that would connote her good taste and affirm that she was respectable because she’d spent money. I’d seen housekeepers and nannies do the same thing, walking around the Upper East Side with their lunch in tiny, rumpled gift bags from Tiffany’s or Saks Fifth Avenue. “I never want to see any of these clothes again,” I told Reva when she arrived. “I want to forget it all existed. Whatever you don’t take, I’ll donate or throw away.” “But all of it?” She was like a kid in a candy store, methodically and vampirically pulling out every dress, every skirt, every blouse, hangers and all. Every pair of designer jeans, every bit of packaged lingerie, every pair of shoes except for the filthy slippers I wore on my feet. “They kind of fit,” she said, trying on an unworn pair of Manolo Blahniks. “Good enough.”

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  We had met when I wrote about her community child care center for New York magazine. 7 As we sat on child-size chairs, sharing lunch on paper plates, her one assistant, a young Italian radical, told us he was sad: the girl he loved wouldn’t marry him because he wouldn’t allow her to work after marriage. Dorothy and I didn’t know each other, but we went to work pointing out parallels between equality for women and the rest of his radical politics. It actually worked. Since we had been successful one on one, Dorothy suggested we speak to audiences as a team. Then we could each talk about our different but parallel experiences, and she could take over if I froze or flagged. Right away we discovered that a white woman and a black woman speaking together attracted far more diverse audiences than either one of us would have done on our own. I also found that if I confessed my fear of public speaking, audiences were not only tolerant but sympathetic. Public opinion polls showed that many people fear public speaking even more than death. I had company. We started in school basements with a few people on folding chairs, and progressed to community centers, union halls, suburban theaters, welfare rights groups, high school gyms, YWCAs, and even a football stadium or two. Soon we discovered the intensity of interest in the simple idea that each person’s shared humanity and individual uniqueness far outweighed any label by group of birth, whether sex, race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, religious heritage, or anything else. That’s why my first decade or so on the road wasn’t spent going to meetings of the Business and Professional Women or the American Association of University Women or even the National Organization for Women. I was traveling to campuses, meetings of the National Welfare Rights Organization, the United Farm Workers, 9-to-5, which was a new group of and for clerical workers, lesbian groups sometimes excluded both by mainstream feminists and by gay men, and the political campaigns of anti–Vietnam War and new feminist candidates. We came to see our job as creating a context in which audiences themselves could become one big talking circle, and discover they were neither crazy nor alone in their experiences of unfairness or efforts to be both their unique selves and to find a community. As in India all those years earlier, they told their own stories. Often, these talking circles went on twice as long as our talks. When we first started speaking at the very end of the 1960s, the war in Vietnam was the main cause of activism. Buildings were being occupied and draft cards burned. At the same time, the gay and lesbian movement was moving out of the underground and into a public arena, and the Native American movement was trying to stop the purposeful obliterating of their languages, culture, and history. As always, the idea of freedom was contagious.

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  In the 1890s, America’s big cities were said to be divided by class conflict and deadened by the rapid pace of life. In the 1920s, America’s rural towns were ridiculed as culturally blighted and narrow-minded. In the 1960s, America’s new suburbs were vilified by Lewis Mumford in The City in History as “a multitude of uniform unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly at uniform distances on uniform roads, in a treeless command waste inhabited by people of the same class, the same incomes, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold manufactured in the same central metropolis.” The targets change, but the language of doubt stays much the same. An American place is never just neutral ground. It’s always a moral sign. Why demonize the suburban experience ? The harsh, judgmental line in American thought that stretches from Mumford, through Peter Blake in God’s Own Junkyard , to James Howard Kunstler in Geography of Nowhere , to Andrés Duany in Suburban Nation defines all mass-produced housing since 1945 as a failure, not just a failure of design but a failure of the spirit, too. Kunstler, at the 1999 Congress of New Urbanism, dismissed postwar suburbs as “the place where evil dwells.” That’s been reflected in the critical response to Holy Land , some of which has been strongly negative and some indifferent to the book’s implications about the capacity of places like mine to inspire loyalty or be redemptive. As far as I could tell by their lives together, my parents did not escape to their suburb. They didn’t imagine it to be a bunker in which they could avoid the demands of living with other people. My parents and their neighbors in the 1950s understood, more generously than Mumford, what they had gained and lost by becoming suburban. You write about the suburbs with a certain religiosity. You use words like “redemption” and “grace.” What does these words mean to you ? Wes Jackson, the founder of the Land Institute, insisted that Americans had not yet become “native” to their country. His concern was rural America, but the difference between a prairie town and my place is only a difference of degree. Because I don’t have any other words, I pin the word “redemptive” on the conscious vulnerability to a place that makes me more native to it. I use the word “grace” to describe what someone else might experience as the unbidden, unstoppable inrush of feeling that comes from being in the company of a place to which one hopes to be native. We all live on land we’ve wounded by our living on it. Yet we must be here or be nowhere and have nothing with which to make our lives together. How should one act knowing that making a home requires this? How should I regard my neighbors?

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  Newly made suburban places today are governed by the hard certainties of a homeowners association. The accommodations and politics built into suburban life in the 1950s have been replaced with the rigidity and authority of contract law. Citizens are being made into mere consumers. The loss is obvious. You don’t deal with real violence in Holy Land. You stay away from the crimes that have marred your town and other suburbs . In the tabloid and nightly news versions of our lives—in stories that swing from the heartwarming to the horrific—suburban crime is the final proof that no place is safe, every comfort is an illusion, and all efforts at making a community are merely ironic. These are despairing beliefs. Hopeful, imperfect people live in my suburb. Their hope has sometimes led them to acts of courage and generosity. Their flaws lead them sometimes to abuse and violence. Holy Land is about the effects of hope in the midst of the imperfect lives we lead in imperfect places. Your roots are deep, but perhaps not enough to hold you in place. Will you ever move out of Lakewood ? I’m not sure. Probably. What would you be seeking that you don’t have now? What would please you to leave behind ? I don’t think there is anything that I could erase from the story I tell myself, despite the appeal of amnesia. If I moved away, I’d go looking for a different kind of solitude. ABOUT THE AUTHORD. J. Waldie still lives in the house his parents bought in 1946 in Lakewood. His essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles magazine, and the New York Times . PHOTOGRAPHSGrading lots in Lakewood in mid-1950 (William Garnett Photo) Trenching foundations on July 20, 1950 (William Garnett Photo) Framing houses in August 1950 (William Garnett Photo) Finished houses on November 20, 1950 (William Garnett Photo) Lakewood on March 2, 1951 (William Garnett Photo) Stuccoing (Rothschild Photo) Road grader (Author’s collection) Houses under construction in 1951 (Rothschild Photo) Letter M (Rothschild Photo) The May Co. (Rothschild Photo) Grand opening platform (Rothschild Photo) Moving day (J.R.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Despite all their faults, campaigns are based on the fact that every vote counts, and therefore every person counts. As freestanding societies, they are more open than academia, more idealistic than corporations, more unifying than religions, and more accessible than government itself. Campaign season is the only time of public debate about what we want for the future. It can change consciousness even more than who gets elected. In short, campaigns may be the closest thing we have to democracy itself. —LIVING IN INDIA, where people lined up for hours and even days to cast their ballots, confirmed my oddball love of campaigns. So did returning home to find a growing and brave civil rights movement of people willing to risk their lives to register and vote. But as a freelance writer, it was hard to combine what I loved with what I did. If I tried for an assignment covering a major political leader, I would be asked to write about his wife instead. If I worked hard, I could get assignments I was proud of—for instance, a profile of Truman Capote, or a long article about the contraceptive pill—but the world of politics allowed few women into it, even as journalists. Then, in 1968, I joined a group of writers—led by Clay Felker, my editor at Esquire —who were starting New York magazine. I was the only “girl reporter,” but finally I would be able to write about politics. This was the home of the New Journalism as practiced by Tom Wolfe, and also of Jimmy Breslin, an in-the-streets chronicler of New York life. Since Wolfe wrote satirically from outside about subjects he probably disliked, and Breslin wrote from inside about the lives of people he probably loved, they helped establish the right of nonfiction writers to be both personal and political—as long as we got our facts straight.1 When I joined the press corps on campaign planes, I noticed that each one seemed to reflect the candidate’s character. Eugene McCarthy isolated himself, talked philosophy, and told reporters that only the well educated supported him—as if that were a good thing. This set the tone for his staff, who also seemed cool and disengaged. On the other hand, Richard Nixon gave the same speech at every stop, disappeared behind closed doors with local political leaders, and once on every campaign trip walked back in the plane to greet each reporter with a carefully memorized personal fact, almost always out of date. Reporters on his plane seemed to overcompensate for not really liking him by being less critical, and there was none of the usual air of excitement about talking to the candidate. When Bobby Kennedy’s campaign plane was scheduled for a stop at an Indian reservation, his staff objected because there were too few votes to be worth his time. He accused them of not caring and stopped anyway. His was probably the only plane with a folksinger playing guitar in the aisle.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  My sister came during my father’s visit that summer because she had a plan: if he would take responsibility for our mother for a year, I could live with my sister in Washington, D.C., where she was a jewelry buyer in a department store. This would give me a carefree senior year of high school. I told my sister that our father would never do it—and when the three of us went out for a breakfast together, this was exactly what he said. After she stormed out in anger, my father drove me to my summer job as a salesgirl. Opening the car door to go to work, I surprised us both by starting to cry. I had no idea that a ray of hope had crept in. Because he couldn’t bear to see anyone cry, certainly not the daughter he’d known mostly as a child, he reluctantly said okay—but only if we synchronized our watches to exactly one year. Somehow my father did manage to take care of my mother, even while driving around California, from one motel to the next. I had a glorious year finishing high school, getting sympathy for being without my parents and secretly feeling free. When our father brought our mother to Washington to live with my sister and me—and after I left for college in the fall—my sister realized she couldn’t both work and be a full-time caregiver. Instead, she found a kindhearted doctor at a mental hospital near Baltimore, who admitted our mother as a resident and began to give her some of the help she should have had years before. When I visited her there on weekends from my summer job and then on college vacations, I slowly began to meet someone I’d never known. I discovered that we were alike in many ways—something I either hadn’t seen or couldn’t admit out of fear that I would share her fate. I learned that the poems I remembered her reciting by heart were by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Omar Khayyam; that teaching me to fold a sheet of typing paper into three columns for note-taking had been sharing a tool of her journalistic trade; and that she had wanted with all her heart to leave my father and go with a girlfriend to try their luck as journalists in New York. As I looked into her brown eyes, I saw for the first time how much they were like my own. If I pressed and said, “But why didn’t you leave? Why didn’t you take my sister and go to New York?” she would say it didn’t matter, that she was lucky to have my sister and me. If I pressed hard enough, she would add, “If I’d left, you never would have been born.” I never had the courage to say: But you would have been born instead. —AT COLLEGE I LIVED in a dormitory, happy to be responsible for no one but myself.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  African American women and men who had supported Hillary also worried that some would punish them for working across racial lines. Oprah Winfrey and other women in public life who had supported Obama paid a price, too. Some criticized them for not supporting Hillary Clinton, since women were their main supporters and constituency. This was also true for Karen Mulhauser, a white woman and an important and longtime feminist leader, who supported Obama. I had written and spoken in support of their right to choose Obama, and now they, too, helped to heal the wounds of Hillary Clinton’s defeat. As my last campaign effort, I made hundreds of buttons that said: HILLARY SUPPORTS OBAMA SO DO I Then I got on the plane to Washington, went to join the crowd at her historic and generous concession speech—in which she pledged her wholehearted support to Obama—and distributed the buttons to the audience. They were in great demand. IV.All my years of campaigning have given me one clear message: Voting isn’t the most we can do, but it is the least. To have a democracy, you have to want one. Still, I realize this fully only by looking back. At the beginning of the 1980s, I went to Missouri to campaign for Harriett Woods in her U.S. Senate race. She was a great candidate, and I empathized with the difficult time she’d had as a woman journalist. Her path into politics was so improbable that no one could have made it up. As a mother of two young children, she complained about a noisy manhole cover that awakened them every time a car rolled over it in her otherwise quiet street. When she got nowhere with the city council, she circulated a neighborhood petition to close the street to cars. It worked. This success led her to run for the city council. She won, served eight years, got appointed to the state highway commission, ran a successful race for the state legislature, and was reelected there, too. She also became the producer of a much-loved local television show. All this made her a viable statewide candidate. Still, this was not enough for the state Democratic Party. When it came time to choose a primary candidate in a U.S. Senate race, it backed a well-to-do banker who had never run for anything, just written checks. To be fair, Woods might have seemed like a lost cause in Missouri, where no woman had ever won a statewide office. She also wasn’t rich like the banker. But she turned out to have something more important than her party’s blessing: community support and volunteers. She beat the rich guy two to one. Suddenly, Harriett Woods was in a race with Republican Senator John Danforth. He was not only the incumbent but a former attorney general of Missouri, an ordained Episcopal priest, and the rich grandson of the founder of Ralston Purina. It was as if she were running against the entire patriarchy.

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

  If you keep yourself open to symbology and messages from the universe, sometimes they come in highly coincidental, powerful ways. For instance, when the book Raw Power arrived for me in the mail just as I had decided to give blood. The contrast was striking. The figure on the cover, strong, full of power, even bravado. Me weak, and incapable of much, not ready to take on the world. Just seeing your story in another image, even its opposite, can help that story deepen. Change Your Life DO THIS THE WHAT AND THE WHY Outline who you need to be at the end of this book. Ask yourself, • What relationships need to change? • What pressures need to be relieved, or what troubles need to be processed or better understood? Our original question of “What story needs to be told?” could be amended to include, “What story needs to be experienced?” Continue by completing these statements: • I need to share this story because __________. • When I finish this book I want to feel __________. • When working on this book, I need to maintain the value of __________ above all else. • I hope __________ will read this story and feel __________. Change Your Life GO FURTHER DAILY REFLECTION LOG I don’t have a good name for this, but let’s call it a Daily Reflection Log. In it, I ask that you hold on to your story, think about your story throughout the day for a week, and look around you to try to interpret the things you see through the ideas and themes of your own story. When you see something or engage with something, ask how it reflects on your story? How does it relate to your story? Try for one a day. Make a list. See my Live Example to see how that might work. FOR FURTHER READING Mary Karr’s The Art of the Memoir is about the best book on memoir and life out there. Change Your Life LIVE EXAMPLE THE WHAT AND THE WHY While writing this section, I became more convinced that this needs to be a story in which I find—or at least try my best to find—my best friend. If this leads me to a story about forests or something else about the passage of time, so be it. I’ll work with what the story gives me. When I decided to go this route, I had my rough script, which led me through the first three or four pages. After that, I knew I would be visiting my hometown and that I would at least make the drive I made weekly almost thirty years earlier. And so, using the model of Oliver Ka’s Why I Killed Peter, I’m going to leave the ending open. Finding her or not, that will close the story. I also want to answer my own questions here. What relationships need to change? My relationship with forests, and my relationship with my friend.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Together with Charlie Soap, a full-blooded Cherokee who also worked for the Nation—and who was fluent in Cherokee, as Wilma was not—she took on what was seen as an impossible project: trying to make positive change for the residents of Bell, an isolated rural community of three hundred families. It was such a place of poverty and despair that even people who escaped were ashamed to say they ever lived there.16 Because Wilma was patient, respectful, listened, and understood that people could only gain confidence by making decisions for themselves, she slowly persuaded families to trust her enough to come to a community meeting and decide what they needed most. Wilma thought it might be a school, but they chose something that would help everyone, young and old: running water. They had been surviving with one pump by carrying pails every day. To connect to the main water supply would mean digging eighteen miles of deep ditches, laying large pipes, and adding two miles of smaller ones to every house. Wilma told them she would raise the money and find the equipment—if they did the work themselves. No one had thought this was even a possibility, but Wilma’s faith in them raised the hope that they could help themselves. Entire families, from children to the elderly, did the work of digging and laying pipe. It took fourteen long and hard months, but in the end there were two successes: running water and a community with confidence instead of despair. It was such a feat that CBS News covered it, people around the country were inspired, and so were viewers in the underdeveloped parts of the world that Bell so resembled.17 In times to come, this story of Wilma and Bell would be made into a feature movie, The Cherokee Word for Water. Charlie and Wilma bonded over this long struggle, and in 1986, the same year she joined the Ms. board, they were married. Once after a painful Ms. Foundation meeting, with too many proposals from rape crisis centers and too little money to give them, Wilma told me the story of something she hadn’t dealt with herself. In a movie house near her housing project in San Francisco, she was sexually assaulted by a group of teenage boys. She had talked with them because she felt flattered that anyone wanted to talk to her—and then was betrayed. She didn’t tell her parents or her friends. She didn’t go into much detail with me either. The experience still felt both too serious and not serious enough. Only sitting in a circle of women, listening to similar stories, allowed her to realize that she wasn’t alone, it wasn’t her fault, she could speak up. From then on I realized she had said yes to joining us for a reason, conscious or not. I thought of this again when she and Charlie and I spent a winter holiday in Mexico with Alice Walker.