Joy

Passages

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

Page 163 of 299 · 20 per page

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  I soon learned there was a very Indian habit of asking personal questions. It must have driven the reticent English crazy. “Why hasn’t your family found you a husband?” “All Americans are rich, so why are you with us in third class?” “Does everyone in America carry a gun?” “If I came to your country, would I be welcome?” And once we got to know each other: “How do American women keep from having too many babies?” Later I would listen to Indira Gandhi describe her youthful travels in these women-only railway cars as her best preparation for becoming prime minister. She was the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, yet she felt she learned more from these women, whose view was personal. They knew that khadi, India’s hand-spun, handwoven cloth, was being driven out of business by machine-made cloth from England—even if they didn’t know this was the familiar colonial pattern of taking raw material from a colony, transforming it in England, and selling it back at a profit. They could see why Mahatma Gandhi himself had adopted the spinning wheel as his symbol of Indian independence. Also, despite the belief of population experts that uneducated women wouldn’t use birth control, these women knew very well when their own bodies were suffering from too many pregnancies and births. That’s why as prime minister, Indira Gandhi took on the controversy of creating the first national family planning program. Her early journeys in those women-only cars had taught her that ordinary women would use it, even if in secret, and literacy had little to do with it. For myself, I remember not only the learning but the laughing. I was asked to sing an American song—everybody in India seems to sing as part of everyday life—but even they had to admit I wasn’t a singer. They taught me how to squeeze my hands and slip on glass bangles hardly bigger than my wrist, and explained that cholis, the tight blouses worn under saris, are the Indian equivalents of bras. They introduced me to fresh lychees, though I’d never seen one out of a can, and warned me about Indian men who would try to marry an American just to get a visa and a job. Decades later, these women still live in my memory. As their first close-up foreigner, perhaps I still live in theirs. Had I been isolated in a car, this talking circle could never have happened. After we said our good-byes, I boarded a rickety bus inland, headed to an ashram of Vinoba Bhave, the leader of a land reform movement inspired by Gandhi. He had been assassinated a decade before, but Bhave was still walking from village to village, asking landowners to give a small percentage of their acreage to the landless. I’d written to a former American missionary who was part of this movement, and he had arranged for me to stay in a guesthouse nearby.

• From Querelle (1953)

  III I QUERELLE dearly that the mason was interfering with his love for Roger. He also realized that this love rid him of Theo, but not com pletely. Minuscule as Theo now was, he was still lurking in a corner of his mind. By compressing his love like a gas, Gil hoped to crush, to stifle what remained of the idea of Theo and that Idea, fading into Theo's physical presence,. now grew ever smaller in relation to Gil. Climbing the steps up from the Rue Casse would have sobered him up, most probably, had he not run into the boy right in the middle of the fog. He might well have resumed his lugubrious existence among the other masons. As it was, he uttered a joyful shout, quickly wiping off the tears with the back of his hand. "Roger, my buddy, let's go have a drink!" He put his ann round the boy's neck. Roger smiled. He looked at the cold and damp face separated from his own by a thin curtain of fog they were both breathing through. "You all right, Gil?" "I'm fine, kiddo. Shipshape. That old fucker, he's out of it now. It won't take much. He better not mess around with me. I wasn't born yesterday, you know. He ain't no man, anyway, he's a faggot! A goddamn faggot! D'you hear me, Roger, a dirty faggot! Or a fairy, if you prefer. But us, we're buddies, we're like brothers. We can do as we damn well please. We have a right, being like brothers-in-law. It's all in the family. But that one, he's just a faggot!" He talked fast so as not to falter, he walked fast so as not to stumble. "Listen, Gil, haven't you had a few too many?" "Don ' t you worry, kid. Paid for 'em meself. Don't need his shitty dough. But like I said, now we're gonna have a drink. Come on." Roger smiled. He was happy. His neck felt proud under Gil's calloused and gentle hand. "No room for him, no more. He's a mosquito. I tell you, that's what he is, just a damn little skeeter. And I'll swat him."

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Farmworkers from Mexico and California will meet in a massive rally at Calexico, a town whose very name is a blend of two countries, and declare that the poor of one country will no longer be used against the poor of another. The problem is press coverage. Hours of driving time from the surrounding airports, plus the 110-degree desert heat, have discouraged any media interest. This historic event is like a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear. I have no idea what to do about it, but when Cesar says in his soft-spoken but urgent way that you have to be someplace, you have to be there. At the Los Angeles airport, I am picked up by a union guy in his battered car, and we drive through the night to catch up with the marchers. In the distance, on an asphalt road stretching like a ribbon through the desert, I finally see hundreds of workers and their families. They are carrying a swaying image of Our Lady of Guadalupe on a palanquin, their banners shimmering in the heat waves like a mirage. Only famous supporters will attract media, but Bobby Kennedy, the one national political leader to champion the farmworkers’ cause, was assassinated the year before by a lone gunman. Now, from gas stations and motels along the march route, I make calls to celebrities in Cesar’s name. Several movie stars say no, with either condescension or deep regret. So does California senator George Murphy; not surprising, since he once said that Mexicans were farmworkers because they were “built close to the ground.” The first to say yes is Reverend Ralph Abernathy, the civil rights veteran who marched with the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I ask if he wants to stay with a farmworker’s family, and there is silence. Then in a voice filled with long years of movement fatigue, he says he needs an air-conditioned motel room. After more calls, I get word that Senators Walter Mondale, Ted Kennedy, and John Tunney will show up when we reach the border. All this finally makes a few reporters sign on, though they warn me that extreme heat may keep TV cameras from working. As the long lines of marchers draw close from both sides of the border, a flatbed truck pulls up to serve as a stage. Cesar climbs onto it to call out to them through a bullhorn. When the two groups finally meet and embrace, I can feel tears welling up, then drying instantly in the desert heat. Reverend Abernathy and the senators speak to the crowd about the need for a living wage for all farmworkers. The cameras roll. The rally becomes national news. By the time I get home to New York a day later, even my taxi driver knows about this Poor People’s March. I’m surprised by how much this means to me. There are few rewards greater than uncovering a secret that shouldn’t be a secret.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  “I can’t believe it,” he says. “I think that guy serving you was my older brother. He did become an engineer—and he helped build the Folk Art Theater, one of the biggest arenas in Manila.” As I head into the airport, I look back to see the driver in his taxi, overhead light on, studying. If you travel long enough, every story becomes a novel. —MY TWO LONGEST-LASTING TAXI stories are ones that I owe to friends as well as drivers. • In our co-lecturing days, Flo Kennedy and I were sitting in the back of a taxi on the way to the Boston airport, discussing Flo’s book Abortion Rap. The driver, an old Irish woman, the only such cabbie I’ve ever seen, turned to us at a traffic light and said the immortal words, “Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament!” Would she have wanted to own her words in public? I don’t know, but I so wish we had asked her name. When Flo and I told this taxi story at speeches, the driver’s sentence spread on T-shirts, political buttons, clinic walls, and protest banners from Washington to Vatican Square, from Ireland to Nigeria. By 2012, almost forty years after that taxi ride, the driver’s words were on a banner outside the Republican National Convention in Tampa, when the party nominated Mitt Romney for president of the United States on a platform that included criminalizing abortion. Neither Flo nor the taxi driver could have lived to see him lose—and yet they were there. • Years ago, when I was often staying with a friend in Brooklyn, I began to use Black Pearl, a car service in that oldest borough where residents are more than a third African American. Because Yellow cabs in Manhattan often avoid black neighborhoods and also refuse long trips to other boroughs—though by law they are required to take passengers wherever they want to go—many gypsy cabs and car services have sprung up. Among the oldest is Black Pearl. Its slogan has always been “We’re Not Yellow, We’ll Go Anywhere.” Every time I called the dispatcher, a driver showed up within minutes, always in a big old low-slung American car with such comforts as incense, seats covered in fake fur, surround-sound music, and no safety barrier to interfere with talking to the driver. It was like riding in a placenta with Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, or Chaka Khan—listening to anything from the oldest blues and reggae to the newest dance or rap music. The first time I thanked a driver for this peak experience—I’d been blissed out and unaware of traffic—he just smiled. “One day I turned around,” he said, “and a couple on the backseat were—dancing.” I discovered from drivers just how important this car service was.

• From Querelle (1953)

  Return for good. QuereJle knows that I love him. He knows it from the way I look at him, and I know that he knows from his sly and almost insolent smile. But everything within him proves to him that I am attached to him, and thus everything in him seems to work toward the end of making my attachment grow even stronger. And a11 the embarrassment we are experiencing helps us to see the exceptional significance of this day even more clearly. Even if it had appeared necessary, I could not have made 144 I JEAN GENET love to Querelle tonight. Nor to anyone else, for that matter. All my affective powers Bow into this joy of return, make me feel crowded with happiness. Just awoke from a horrible dream. This much I can say about it: We were in a stable ( ten or so unknown accomplices ) . Which one of us would have to kill him (I don't know whom ) ? One young man accepted the task. The victim did not deserve to die. We watched the murder being done. The voluntary executioner struck the greenish back of the unfortunate man several times with a pitchfork. Above the victim, a mirror suddenly appeared, just in time for us to see our faces go pale. They grew paler and paler as the victim's back grew bloodier. The executioner kept on striking, in despair. (I am sure, now, that this is a faithful description of the dream, because it is not as if I were remembering it: I am reconstructing it, with the help of words. ) The victim-innocent-despite his atrocious suffering, helped the murderer. He showed him where to strike. He took part in the drama, despite the desolate expression of reproach in his eyes. I also note the beauty of the murderer, and the sense of his being wrapped in garments of malediction. The whole day has been as if stained with blood by this dream. Almost literally, the day had a bleeding wound. Querelle' s hand was thick and strong, and Mario, though without giving it much thought, had expected it to be effeminate and somewhat fragile. His own hand had not been prepared for such a paw. He scrutinized Querelle. A large fellow, exceptionally handsome despite a day's growth of stubble, with the same face and athletic bearing as Robert; he looked manly, a little brutal, tough. (The curtness of his gestures underlined this appearance of strength and brutality. ) "Nono ain't here?" "No, he went out." "So you're in charge of the joint?" 145 I QUERELLE "Well, there's the lady. Surely you know her?" Having said that, lVlario looked Querelle in the eye and curled his lips in a light sneer. But if the mouth expressed mere irony, tne eyes were hard and pitiless. But Quere11e did not suspect anything. "Yeah . . ."

• 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)

  When I was in college, he had improved on my short-lived engagement ring by dipping it in water made bluish by swishing an indelible pencil, thus making a yellowish diamond look white. Yet this star problem was something he couldn’t fix. He knew he would be lucky to get his money back. Rolling with the punches, he offered to introduce me to a friend who made aerosol cans and might employ me to sell this new invention on the road. I would get paid for traveling—in my father’s eyes, the best of all worlds. When I didn’t say yes to that either, he said he had enough gas and food money to get us to Las Vegas. I asked worriedly what would happen then, and he said, “Then you’ll be lucky at the one-armed bandits—beginners always are—and you can help me sell jewelry on the road back east.” In a windowless Las Vegas casino filled with silent gamblers and noisy slot machines, he staked me to a fifty-dollar bucket of coins. After a couple of hours of twirling fruits and no idea what I was doing, I’d multiplied our money by five. Only then did he confess this had been his last fifty dollars. To celebrate, we stuffed ourselves with the food kept cheap to attract gamblers, saw a free show by his tried-and-true method of walking in after it was well under way, and set off on the road again. Since I’d won only enough money to get us out of Nevada, his next plan was to sell jewelry to small-town stores along the route east. He was sure that if I wore, say, a ring and a pin or a bracelet when we went into a jewelry store, the store owners would assume they were making a killing at the expense of a down-on-our-luck father and daughter. It was the same technique he had used on condescending antique dealers in my childhood. Besides, as my father pointed out, the stores really were getting a bargain. This tactic worked well enough to pay for gas, food, and motels all the way to Washington, D.C., where my mother and sister waited. Much later, when I saw the father-and-daughter team in Paper Moon, this trip came back in all its precarious optimism. So did my father’s joy at defeating fate. Only then did I realize that we really were a down-on-our-luck father and daughter. He had turned our plight into a game we could win. —MY FATHER’S NOMADIC LIFE continued until he was almost sixty-four. “If we’re ever in an accident on a freeway,” he had said to me as a child, “get out and run—the cars are coming too fast to stop.” On a freeway in the urban sprawl of Orange County, California, this was exactly what happened to him.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Marta thought about that for a moment. She did not see how it related to Thad’s stealing Sigrid’s money. She did not see how it had anything to do with her, either. It seemed like the sort of thing that people did at parties. A game, a guessing game of the self. “So if I’m Anne of Cleves, what does that mean?” “It means you’re practical about your limitations, and you do the best you can.” “And who are you?” Marta asked. Sigrid smiled and lay back down. She closed her eyes. “I’m Catherine of Aragon.” “And what does that mean?” Marta asked. She put her hand on Sigrid’s stomach, came close to her on the bed. Sigrid turned to look at her and shook her head. “It means I’m mad as hell.” They did get the place that summer. It was a small cabin near a river—more a shack than a cabin, really, but Marta did not mind it. The air was fresh and clear, the clearest she’d breathed in a long time. The world had a deep, saturated hue, and the tops of the trees were so green that they were almost black. They fished but didn’t catch anything. They waded into the edge of the river, where it was still and cool, up to their ankles, and they splashed one another. Sigrid cut her foot on a sharp rock, and Marta bandaged it and drove her into town, where a local doctor, who had hair growing out of his ears, stitched it up for twenty dollars. At night, it was colder than Marta had thought summer could get. There were deer in the yard. There were birds in the trees. The sky was so vast that Marta felt small when she walked from the porch to the edge of the road. They drank lemonade on the swing, and Sigrid braided Marta’s hair for her, weaving in blue wildflowers. It was the most beautiful place. The most beautiful time. On their last night, they lay outside on a flannel blanket and watched the slow progression of the stars, the smooth carapace of the sky like glass. “I never want to leave here,” Sigrid said. “You’ll have to take it up with the owners,” Marta said, but she knew what Sigrid meant. She wrapped her arms around her, and they shed their clothes and held each other tight as they touched each other. They didn’t get off. They tried and tried, stroking and touching each other’s bodies every way they knew, but as the pressure inside them rose, it dissipated just as quickly, so that by the end of it they were frustrated and hot and damp. They couldn’t get traction on their desire. Every time it seemed that as they were cresting into the oblivion of orgasm, sadness drenched them. Sadness at leaving. Sadness at going back to their lives. The sadness of knowing it would never again be this perfect, this easy.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Yes, but what is a girl to do who has no family?” put in Stepan Arkadyevitch, thinking of Masha Tchibisova, whom he had had in his mind all along, in sympathizing with Pestsov and supporting him. “If the story of such a girl were thoroughly sifted, you would find she had abandoned a family—her own or a sister’s, where she might have found a woman’s duties,” Darya Alexandrovna broke in unexpectedly in a tone of exasperation, probably suspecting what sort of girl Stepan Arkadyevitch was thinking of. “But we take our stand on principle as the ideal,” replied Pestsov in his mellow bass. “Woman desires to have rights, to be independent, educated. She is oppressed, humiliated by the consciousness of her disabilities.” “And I’m oppressed and humiliated that they won’t engage me at the Foundling,” the old prince said again, to the huge delight of Turovtsin, who in his mirth dropped his asparagus with the thick end in the sauce. Chapter 11 Everyone took part in the conversation except Kitty and Levin. At first, when they were talking of the influence that one people has on another, there rose to Levin’s mind what he had to say on the subject. But these ideas, once of such importance in his eyes, seemed to come into his brain as in a dream, and had now not the slightest interest for him. It even struck him as strange that they should be so eager to talk of what was of no use to anyone. Kitty, too, should, one would have supposed, have been interested in what they were saying of the rights and education of women. How often she had mused on the subject, thinking of her friend abroad, Varenka, of her painful state of dependence, how often she had wondered about herself what would become of her if she did not marry, and how often she had argued with her sister about it! But it did not interest her at all. She and Levin had a conversation of their own, yet not a conversation, but some sort of mysterious communication, which brought them every moment nearer, and stirred in both a sense of glad terror before the unknown into which they were entering. At first Levin, in answer to Kitty’s question how he could have seen her last year in the carriage, told her how he had been coming home from the mowing along the highroad and had met her.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  “I just want to tell you,” she says cheerfully, “how much Ms. magazine has meant to me over the years—and my husband, too. He reads some now that he’s retired. But what I wanted to ask—isn’t one of the women you’re traveling with Alice Walker? I love her poetry.” It turns out that she and her husband have been coming to this motorcycle rally every year since they were first married. She loves the freedom of the road and also the mysterious moonscape of the Badlands. She urges me to walk there, but to follow the paths marked by ropes. During the war over the sacred Black Hills, she explains, Lakota warriors found refuge there because the cavalry got lost every time. Her husband stops by on his way to the cashier and suggests I see the huge statue of Crazy Horse that’s being dynamited out of the Black Hills. “Crazy Horse riding his pony,” he says, “is going to make all those Indian-killing presidents on Mount Rushmore look like nothing.” He walks away, a gentle, lumbering man, tattoos, chains, and all. Before she leaves, my new friend tells me to look out of the big picture window at the parking lot. “See that purple Harley out there—the big gorgeous one? That’s mine. I used to ride behind my husband, and never took the road on my own. Then after the kids were grown, I put my foot down. It was hard, but we finally got to be partners. Now he says he likes it better this way. He doesn’t have to worry about his bike breaking down or getting a heart attack and totaling us both. I even put ‘Ms.’ on my license plate—and you should see my grandkids’ faces when Grandma rides up on her purple Harley!” On my own again, I look out at the barren sand and tortured rocks of the Badlands, stretching for miles. I’ve walked there, and I know that, close up, the barren sand reveals layers of pale rose and beige and cream, and the rocks turn out to have intricate womblike openings. Even in the distant cliffs, caves of rescue appear. What seems to be one thing from a distance is very different close up. I tell you this story because it’s the kind of lesson that can be learned only on the road. And also because I’ve come to believe that, inside, each of us has a purple motorcycle. We have only to discover it—and ride. [image "With Alice Walker near the Badlands, 1994. From Gloria Steinem’s personal collection" file=Image00005.jpg] WITH ALICE WALKER NEAR THE BADLANDS, 1994. FROM GLORIA STEINEM’S PERSONAL COLLECTION [image "Introduction" file=Image00006.jpg] Road SignsW hen people ask me why I still have hope and energy after all these years, I always say: Because I travel. For more than four decades, I’ve spent at least half my time on the road.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  I remember going from city to city, buying doughnuts and coffee for men who loaded boxes of magazines onto the trucks at dawn, hoping they would persuade newsstand dealers to at least open our boxes. Soon I was also traveling state by state to campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment, or for new women candidates who represented women’s majority needs and views, or for male candidates who were doing this, too, or to fund-raise for various parts of this movement that I cared about so much. In the 1980s, I published my first real book, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, and discovered the author’s tour as a new kind of road trip. There were actually author’s escorts—often freelancers themselves—who knew each city and schlepped authors around to book signings and media appearances. That plus two more books and tours in the 1990s made me realize that bookstores were the great community centers. Anybody could come, whether they could afford a book or not, and the spaces reserved for talks and signings invited talking circles. Since no computer can provide this companionship, the more personal the store, the more likely it is to survive. I know that some authors hate book tours—and maybe I would, too, if I had to keep repeating the plot of one novel—but I grew to love these spontaneous gatherings in shopping malls, university bookstores, and specialty bookshops that couldn’t be replaced by the big chains, all the spaces with coffee, comfortable chairs, and the presence of books that allow people to browse and discover interests they didn’t know they had. Recently when a book of mine was published in India,10 I did a tour of bookstores from Jaipur and New Delhi to Kolkata. Those, too, range from big cheerful chains to small, discussion-filled, art-filled shops. Altogether, if I had to pick one place to hang out anywhere, from New York to Cape Town and Australia to Hong Kong, a bookstore would be it. Every author also creates a world of her or his own. I watched Bette Midler signing every last book for her hundreds of fans lined up around the block, all while wearing a perky hat made to look like a piano. Oliver North of the Iran-Contra arms scandal had two guards carrying poorly concealed guns, took no questions, and signed copies of Under Fire: An American Story—The Explosive Autobiography of Oliver North. Ai-jen Poo, who won a MacArthur “genius” award for her organizing of domestic workers, turned book signings into rallies. No one left one of her events without knowing that living longer is not a crisis, it’s a blessing, that the twelve million Americans over eighty-five will double in number by 2035, that many more home care workers will be needed, and that these workers deserve the same legal rights as workers anywhere else. Altogether, I can’t imagine technology replacing bookstores completely, any more than movies about a country replace going there.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Levin ceased thinking, and only, as it were, listened to mysterious voices that seemed talking joyfully and earnestly within him. “Can this be faith?” he thought, afraid to believe in his happiness. “My God, I thank Thee!” he said, gulping down his sobs, and with both hands brushing away the tears that filled his eyes. Chapter 14 Levin looked before him and saw a herd of cattle, then he caught sight of his trap with Raven in the shafts, and the coachman, who, driving up to the herd, said something to the herdsman. Then he heard the rattle of the wheels and the snort of the sleek horse close by him. But he was so buried in his thoughts that he did not even wonder why the coachman had come for him. He only thought of that when the coachman had driven quite up to him and shouted to him. “The mistress sent me. Your brother has come, and some gentleman with him.” Levin got into the trap and took the reins. As though just roused out of sleep, for a long while Levin could not collect his faculties. He stared at the sleek horse flecked with lather between his haunches and on his neck, where the harness rubbed, stared at Ivan the coachman sitting beside him, and remembered that he was expecting his brother, thought that his wife was most likely uneasy at his long absence, and tried to guess who was the visitor who had come with his brother. And his brother and his wife and the unknown guest seemed to him now quite different from before. He fancied that now his relations with all men would be different. “With my brother there will be none of that aloofness there always used to be between us, there will be no disputes; with Kitty there shall never be quarrels; with the visitor, whoever he may be, I will be friendly and nice; with the servants, with Ivan, it will all be different.” Pulling the stiff rein and holding in the good horse that snorted with impatience and seemed begging to be let go, Levin looked round at Ivan sitting beside him, not knowing what to do with his unoccupied hand, continually pressing down his shirt as it puffed out, and he tried to find something to start a conversation about with him. He would have said that Ivan had pulled the saddle-girth up too high, but that was like blame, and he longed for friendly, warm talk. Nothing else occurred to him. “Your honor must keep to the right and mind that stump,” said the coachman, pulling the rein Levin held. “Please don’t touch and don’t teach me!” said Levin, angered by this interference. Now, as always, interference made him angry, and he felt sorrowfully at once how mistaken had been his supposition that his spiritual condition could immediately change him in contact with reality.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Mother, darling, sweet one!” he shouted, flinging himself on her again and hugging her. It was as though only now, on seeing her smile, he fully grasped what had happened. “I don’t want that on,” he said, taking off her hat. And as it were, seeing her afresh without her hat, he fell to kissing her again. “But what did you think about me? You didn’t think I was dead?” “I never believed it.” “You didn’t believe it, my sweet?” “I knew, I knew!” he repeated his favorite phrase, and snatching the hand that was stroking his hair, he pressed the open palm to his mouth and kissed it. Chapter 30 Meanwhile Vassily Lukitch had not at first understood who this lady was, and had learned from their conversation that it was no other person than the mother who had left her husband, and whom he had not seen, as he had entered the house after her departure. He was in doubt whether to go in or not, or whether to communicate with Alexey Alexandrovitch. Reflecting finally that his duty was to get Seryozha up at the hour fixed, and that it was therefore not his business to consider who was there, the mother or anyone else, but simply to do his duty, he finished dressing, went to the door and opened it. But the embraces of the mother and child, the sound of their voices, and what they were saying, made him change his mind. He shook his head, and with a sigh he closed the door. “I’ll wait another ten minutes,” he said to himself, clearing his throat and wiping away tears. Among the servants of the household there was intense excitement all this time. All had heard that their mistress had come, and that Kapitonitch had let her in, and that she was even now in the nursery, and that their master always went in person to the nursery at nine o’clock, and everyone fully comprehended that it was impossible for the husband and wife to meet, and that they must prevent it. Korney, the valet, going down to the hall-porter’s room, asked who had let her in, and how it was he had done so, and ascertaining that Kapitonitch had admitted her and shown her up, he gave the old man a talking-to. The hall-porter was doggedly silent, but when Korney told him he ought to be sent away, Kapitonitch darted up to him, and waving his hands in Korney’s face, began: “Oh yes, to be sure you’d not have let her in! After ten years’ service, and never a word but of kindness, and there you’d up and say, ‘Be off, go along, get away with you!’ Oh yes, you’re a shrewd one at politics, I dare say! You don’t need to be taught how to swindle the master, and to filch fur coats!”

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  « By and by the great banquet and marriage feast was sumptuously prepared. Cupid sat down in the uppermost seat with his dear spouse between his arms: Juno likewise with Jupiter and all the other gods in order : Ganymedes, the rustic boy, his own butler, filled the pot of Jupiter, and Baechus served the rest: their drink was nectar, the wine of the gods. Vulcanus prepared supper, the Hours decked up the house with roses and other sweet flowers, the | 283 LUCIUS APULEIUS bant balsama, Musae quoque canora personabant, Apollo cantavit ad citharam, Venus suavi musicae superingressa formosa saltavit: scaena sibi sic con- cinnata, ut Musae quidem chorum canerent et tibias inflarent, Satyrus et Paniscus ad fistulam dicerent. Sic rite Psyche convenit in manum Cupidinis, et nascitur illis maturo partu filia, quam Voluptatem nominamus." 25 Sic captivae puellae delira et temulenta illa narra- bat anicula ; sed astans ego non proeul dolebam me- hercules quod pugillares et stilum non habebam, qui tam bellam fabellam praenotarem. Ecce confecto nescioquo gravi proelio latrones adveniunt onusti ; nonnulli tamen, immo promptiores, vulneratis domi relictis et plagas recurantibus, ipsi ad reliquas occul- tatas in quadam spelunca sarcinas, ut aiebant, pro- ficisci gestiunt; prandioque raptim tuburcinato, me et equum meum vectores rerum illarum futuros fusti- bus exinde tundentes producunt in viam, multisque clivis et anfractibus fatigatos prope ipsam vesperam perducunt ad quampiam speluncam, unde multis onustos rebus rursum, ne breviculo quidem tempore refectos ociter reducunt, tantaque trepidatione fes- tinabant, ut me plagis multis obtundentes propellen- tesque super lapidem propter viam positum deicerent: unde crebris aeque ingestis ictibus crure dextero et ungula sinistra me debilitatum aegre ad exsurgendum 26 compellunt, et unus “ Quousque " inquit « Ruptum istum asellum, nunc etiam claudum, frustra pasce- mus ?”’, et alius : * Quid quod et pessimo pede domum nostram accessit, nee quicquam idonei lucri exinde 284 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK VI Graces threw about balm, the Muses sang with sweet harmony, Apollo turned pleasantly to the harp, fair Venus danced finely to the music, and the entertain- ment was so ordained that while the Muses sang in quire, Satyrus and Paniscus played on their pipes: and thus Psyche was married to Cupid, and after in due time she was delivered of a child, whom we call Pleasure.”

• From Querelle (1953)

  God grant that I may envelop myself in my chilly gestures, in a chilly fashion, like some very languid Englishman in his traveling rug, an eccentric lady in her shawl. To confront men with, You have given me a gilded rapier, chevrons, medals, gestures of com- 93 I QUERELLE mand: these accessories are my salvation. They allow me to weave about me some invisible lace, of intentionally coarse design. That coarseness exhausts me, even though I find it comforting. When I grow old, I shall take refuge in t_he last resort, behind the ridiculous fa�ade of rimless steel pince-nez, celluloid collars, a stammer, and starched cuffs. Querelle told his comrades that he is a "victim" of the recruitment posters! So am I, a victim of those posters, and a victim's victim. What sudden joy/ I am all joy. My hands, mechanically at first, described, in empty space, at the height of my chesttwo female breasts, grafting them on as it were. I was happy. Now I repeat the gesture, such bliss. Such great abundance. I am overflowing. I stop: I am her, overflowing. I start over. I caress these two aerial boobs. They are beautiful. They are heavy, my palms support them . It happened when I stood leaning against the rail, at night, looking across, listening to the noises of Alexandria. I caress my breasts, my hips. I feel my buns getting rounder, more voluptuous. Egypt lies behind me now: the sands, the Sphinx, the Pharaohs, the Nile, the Arabs, the Casbah, and the wonderful adventure of being her. I would like them a little pear-shaped. Once again, I dragged the door curtains in with me, quite unwittingly. I felt how they wanted to envelop me in their folds, and I could not resist making a splendid gesture, to free myseU of them . The gesture of a swimmer parting the water. I come back in. Still thinking about the liveliness of the cigarette between the sailor's lingers. A ready-made cigarette. It burned, it went through its little motions between Querelle's 94 I JEAN GENET almost immobile fingers, and he had no idea of the life he was imbuing that little tobacco stick with. I was no more able to take my eyes oH his fingers than oH the object they were animating. Animated by such grace, such elegant, delicate, scintillating movements! Querelle stood listening to one of his buddies talking about the girls in the brothels. "I have never seen myself.'' Do I have charms another could fall for? \Vho else, besides myself, is subject to Querelle's charms? How could I tum into him? Could I bring myself to graft onto my body his best features: his hair, his balls? Even his hands?

• From Escape (2007)

  The other wives would discuss whether or not they thought I was really suffering or just seeking attention. I was accused of putting on a show to gain more status for myself. Producing large numbers of faithful children was a way for a woman to gain favor not only with her husband but with God. It wasn’t uncommon for a woman in the community to have as many as sixteen children, and most had at least twelve. My worst enemies in Merril’s family were, more often than not, his other wives. They had no tolerance for a woman who did not fit the perfect little polygamist mold. A woman who does not accept her powerlessness and complete submission to her husband’s will is targeted by the other wives as a troublemaker. She’s treated with disdain, often verbally abused, and assigned the grunt work in the household. Even in the deeply repressed fundamentalist culture, sexual status determines class and power. A woman who refuses her husband sexually is seen as rebellious. Word gets around and the other wives treat her with scorn, but it can work the other way, too. If a husband spends a lot of time at night with one wife, the other wives become jealous because she’s now more powerful. Pregnancy is also a status symbol because it is a sign that your husband considers you worthy to father his children. It’s common in these plural marriages for a man to favor some wives to the exclusion of others. The rejected women are consigned to a life of emptiness and disgrace. The rejected wives also become an example to the others of what can happen if they displease their husband. Even though my pregnancy was making me miserable, I was determined to finish the two years I needed to graduate. I was majoring in education with a minor in business and reading. I had taken the summer off from school and just managed to finish the fall quarter before giving birth. Arthur was born on December 20, 1987, after only six hours of labor, which impressed the other wives. Aunt Lydia, the elderly midwife who had delivered both my mother and me, brought Arthur into the world. I fell in love with him the moment I saw him. He was a beautiful baby and gave my life a purpose it had never had before. I mattered because Arthur mattered. My future was important because he was now part of it; I wanted the best for him. I never felt alone again after Arthur was born. Marriage had separated me from my younger siblings, which filled me with acute loneliness and longing. My roots felt like they’d been yanked out of the ground. But with Arthur I forged a new connection to life. Merril drove back from Salt Lake City the day he was born and was excited when he first saw him.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  [image file=image_rsrcA5N.jpg] NOW EAGER to search within and around the divine forest dense and verdant, which to mine eyes was tempering the new day, without waiting more I left the mountain-side, crossing the plain with lingering step, over the ground which gives forth fragrance on every side. A sweet breeze, itself invariable, was striking on my brow with no greater force than a gentle wind, before which the branches, responsively trembling, were all bending toward that quarter, where the holy mount casts its first shadow;1 yet not so far bent aside from their erect state, that the little birds in the tops ceased to practise their very art; but, singing, with full gladness they welcomed the first breezes within the leaves, which were murmuring the burden to their songs; even such as from bough to bough is gathered through the pine wood on Chiassi’s shore, when Æolus looses Sirocco forth.2 Already my slow steps had carried me on so far within the ancient wood, that I could not see whence I had entered; and lo, a stream took from me further passage which, toward the left with its little waves, bent the grass which sprang forth on its bank. All the waters which here are purest, would seem to have some mixture in them, compared with that, which hideth nought; albeit full darkly it flows beneath the everlasting shade, which never lets sun, nor moon, beam there. With feet I halted and with mine eyes did pass beyond the rivulet, to gaze upon the great diversity of the tender blossoms; and there to me appeared, even as on a sudden something appears which, through amazement, sets all other thought astray, a lady3 solitary, who went along singing, and culling flower after flower, wherewith all her path was painted. “Pray, fair lady, who at love’s beams dost warm thee, if I may believe outward looks, which are wont to be a witness of the heart, may it please thee to draw forward,” said I to her, “towards this stream, so far that I may understand what thou singest. Thou makest me to remember, where and what Proserpine was in the time her mother lost her, and she lost the spring.”4 As a lady who is dancing turns her round with feet close to the ground and to each other, and hardly putteth foot before foot, she turned toward me upon the red and upon the yellow flowerets, not otherwise than a virgin that droppeth her modest eyes; and made my prayers satisfied, drawing so near that the sweet sound reached me with its meaning. Soon as she was there, where the grass is already bathed by the waves of the fair river, she vouchsafed to raise her eyes to me. I do not believe that so bright a light shone forth under the eyelids of Venus, pierced by her son, against all his wont.5

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  One woman rises to speak: “Close your eyes and pretend you are living with a woman—how would you divide the housework?” There is a long pause. “Now, don’t lower your standards.” There are cheers of approval. • On another campus, some women tell me about men who leave their underwear on the floor and don’t feel compelled to pick it up—or even notice. By now, the shouts and laughter have become quite rowdy, and I’ve begun to worry about a silent young Japanese woman near the front. Perhaps we are offending her. As if summoned by my thought, she stands and turns to face all five hundred or so women. “When my husband leaves his underwear on the floor,” she says quietly, “I find it quite useful to nail it to the floor.” Amid laughter and cheers, this shy young woman seems surprised to find herself laughing, too. She tells the group this is the first time she has ever said anything in public. • In a discussion of the advantages of having younger men as husbands and lovers—because they’re more likely to treat women as equals—one woman rises to say, “Of course they understand better. We were their mothers!” Once again I worry about a much older and ladylike woman in a front row who looks disapproving. When I ask if we are offending her, she rises, turns to the audience, and says, “When you are having an affair with a younger man”—I notice she doesn’t say if, but when —“try never to get on top. You look like a bulldog.” This remark coming from an unlikely woman—but one who had clearly been there—brought down the house. —IF THERE IS ONE thing that these campus visits have affirmed for me, it’s that the miraculous but impersonal Internet is not enough. As in the abolitionist and suffragist era, when there were only six hundred or so colleges with a hundred students each—and itinerant organizers like the Grimké sisters, Frederick Douglass, and Sojourner Truth traveled to speak in town halls, granges, churches, and campgrounds—nothing can replace being in the same space. That’s exactly why we need to keep creating the temporary worlds of meetings, small and large, on campuses and everywhere else. In them, we discover we’re not alone, we learn from one another, and so we keep going toward shared goals. Individual organizers in the civil rights movement had a network of black churches, not just phones and mimeograph machines, and veterans speaking against the war in Vietnam had coffeehouses and rock concerts. Now that there are at least four thousand campuses with more than fifteen million students—not yet diverse enough, but more diverse than ever before—they are the mainstay for wandering organizers like me. I recommend trying this kind of grassroots organizing for a week or a year, a month or a lifetime—working for whatever change you want to see in the world.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Nothing but the ironing board is between me and being trampled by the horses behind us. Then suddenly horse, driver, and I are in a capsule by ourselves. A blur of light and wind surrounds us. We are isolated for what could be minutes or hours, as one with this powerful horse. I think: Racing a car may be about ego, but racing a horse is about trust. As we begin to slow down, the blur sharpens back into trees, stadium, fence, people. My driver turns to me, smiles, and says, We won! We parade in front of the huge, noisy stadium. An amplified male voice booms out, “Ms. beat M*A*S*H !” He doesn’t say that a mare beat a gelding, or that an old black driver beat a young white one, but I hear Loretta saying to a reporter with delight: The outs beat the ins! Like Alice in Wonderland, I feel as if I’ve fallen into another universe. I was horse crazy as a child. Now I remember why I loved these smart, sleek creatures that deign to let us travel with them. Our share of the gate turns out to be disappointing—under $5,000 each. We even forgot to bet on ourselves. Each of us could have raised more money in less time and with way less danger. However, now whenever I pass the Laurel sign on the way to and from Washington, I have a sense memory of speed and blur, a proud driver, a beautiful mare, a moment of altered reality. V.It’s 1967, and I’m sitting in a diner in rural Virginia, preparing for an interview nearby. Public schools have been ordered to integrate racially, and most white parents have put their kids into newly created, all-white “private” schools that are actually funded with tax dollars by a racist state legislature. My interview is with a sixth-grade white girl who is a prodigy of organizing. She is buzzing around the halls, welcoming black students into this newly desegregated public school. She has her parents’ permission, but this was her idea. If I write about her story, I think she might inspire more students to take the lead, but so far I can’t even get past editors. Newspapers say it’s apolitical “soft news” and women’s magazines say it’s political “hard news.”5 Next to me at the counter are three young white guys who are also talking about school integration or, in their words, “race mixing.” They seem oblivious to the older black waitress who is serving us, and her face is inscrutable. These guys start arguing about Vietnam, and whether black GIs will follow orders from white officers. “I hope not,” says a solitary older white man sitting down at the counter. “We’re on the wrong side in this war.” Silence. I wonder if combat will start right here. The older man has interrupted the younger ones, at a minimum, and at a maximum, he’s talking treason.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  1. The same problem is referred to in the De Monarchia, ii. 8, as one which the human reason cannot solve unaided, but to the solution of which it can rise by the aid of faith. There is no indication in the De Monarchia of the mental anguish which throbs through the appeal in this present passage.2. Both Lucifer and Adam and Eve sinned not by desiring knowledge that was to be permanently withheld, but by desiring it before the appointed time. “He therefore [the devil] desired something which he had not, and which he ought not to have desired at that time; just as Eve desired to be like the deities before God desired that she should” (Anselm).3. our. Cf. Cantos xx and xxi. Another reading is your (vostra), which seems more germane to the immediate object of the appeal. But our effects the transition from “the summit of all creation” to the mind of earthly man, and beautifully associates the spirits in heaven with those on earth in dependence upon God.4. darkness, shadow of ignorance, poison of vice.5. The context and the comparison of De Monarchia, ii. 3, sufficiently explain this passage. Conformity with the will of God is the ultimate test of justice.6. Persians, representing all non-Christians, like the Ethiopian just above.7. The following indiscriminate condemnation of contemporary monarchs is far from being justified in all its details by history. Compare with this passage the parallel in Purg. vii. The accompanying tables, which might be united into one connected whole, will serve to identify the monarchs referred to.8. The translation personifies Albert’s invasion of Bohemia in 1304, but the Italian may equally well be translated: “set the pen (viz., of the Recording Angel) in motion.” On Albert, cf Purg. vi.9. Philip the Fair. Compare Purg. vii and xx, and numerous references to his relations with Clement in the Comedy and in the Epistles. He debased the coinage to one third of its value, in order to meet the expenses of his Flemish campaigns in 1302. This is one of several passages in which we see the horror of tampering with the coinage entertained by Dante, the citizen of the greatest commercial city of Europe. As the symbol of greed the Florin was the “accursed flower” (of Canto ix), but as the foundation of all commercial relations it was worthy of such reverence that he who tampered with it was to be ranked with him who falsified the very personality of human beings, the ultimate basis of human intercourse. See Inf. xxix. (Compare the story told in Villani, vi. 53.)10. Cf. Canto ix, note 1. One good quality to a thousand bad ones.11. Anchises died at Drepanum in Sicily (the Isle of fire, because of Mount Etna). On Frederick, compare Purg. iii and De Vulgari Eloquentia, i. 12. There was a tradition in Boccaccio’s time that Dante had originally intended to dedicate the Purgatorio to him, but modern scholars treat it with contempt.