Loneliness

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 The Art of Seduction (2001)

  You will recog- nize them by how responsive they are to their environment, how they cannot stand a room without sunlight, are depressed by certain colors, or excited by certain smells. They happen to live in a culture that deempha- sizes sensual experience (except perhaps for the sense of sight). And so what the Sensualist lacks is precisely enough sensual experiences to appre- ciate and relish. The key to seducing them is to aim for their senses, to take them to beautiful places, pay attention to detail, envelop them in spectacle, and of course use plenty of physical lures. Sensualists, like animals, can be baited with colors and smells. Appeal to as many senses as possible, keeping your targets distracted and weak. Seductions of Sensualists are often easy and quick, and you can use the same tactics again and again to keep them inter- ested, although it is wise to vary your sensual appeals somewhat, in kind if not in quality. That is how Cleopatra worked on Mark Antony, an inveter- ate Sensualist. These types make superb victims because they are relatively docile if you give them what they want. The Lonely Leader. Powerful people are not necessarily different from everyone else, but they are treated differently, and this has a big effect on their personalities. Everyone around them tends to be fawning and courtierlike, to have an angle, to want something from them. This makes them suspicious and distrustful, and a little hard around the edges, but do not mistake the appearance for the reality: Lonely Leaders long to be se- duced, to have someone break through their isolation and overwhelm them. The problem is that most people are too intimidated to try, or use the kind of tactics—flattery, charm—that they see through and despise. To seduce such types, it is better to act like their equal or even their superior— the kind of treatment they never get. If you are blunt with them you will seem genuine, and they will be touched—you care enough to be honest, even perhaps at some risk. (Being blunt with the powerful can be danger- ous.) Lonely Leaders can be made emotional by inflicting some pain, fol- lowed by tenderness. This is one of the hardest types to seduce, not only because they are suspicious but because their minds are burdened with cares and responsi- bilities. They have less mental space for a seduction. You will have to be pa- tient and clever, slowly filling their minds with thoughts of you.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  The Professor. These types cannot get out of the trap of analyzing and criticizing everything that crosses their path. Their minds are overdevel-oped and overstimulated. Even when they talk about love or sex, it is with great thought and analysis. Having developed their minds at the expense of their bodies, many of them feel physically inferior and compensate by lord-ing their mental superiority over others. Their conversation is often wry or ironic—you never quite know what they are saying, but you sense them looking down on you. They would like to escape their mental prisons, they would like pure physicality, without any analysis, but they cannot get there on their own. Professor types sometimes engage in relationships with other professor types, or with people they can treat as inferiors. But deep down they long to be overwhelmed by someone with physical presence—a Rake or a Siren, for instance. Professors can make excellent victims, for underneath their intellectual strength lie gnawing insecurities. Make them feel like Don Juans or Sirens, to even the slightest degree, and they are your slaves. Many of them have a masochistic streak that will come out once you stir their dormant senses. You are offering an escape from the mind, so make it as complete as possible: if you have intellectual tendencies yourself, hide them. They will only 156 • The Art of Seduction stir your target's competitive juices and get their minds turning. Let your Professors keep their sense of mental superiority; let them judge you. You will know what they will try to hide: that you are the one in control, for you are giving them what no one else can give them—physical stimulation. The Beauty. From early on in life, the Beauty is gazed at by others. Their desire to look at her is the source of her power, but also the source of much unhappiness: she constantly worries that her powers are waning, that she is no longer attracting attention. If she is honest with herself, she also senses that being worshiped only for one's appearance is monotonous and unsatisfying—and lonely. Many men are intimidated by beauty and prefer to worship it from afar; others are drawn in, but not for the purpose of conversation. The Beauty suffers from isolation.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  When I’d first moved to the neighborhood, they’d been flirty, even annoyingly so. But once I’d begun shuffling in with eye boogers and scum at the corners of my mouth at odd hours, they quit trying to win my affection. “You have something,” the man behind the counter said one morning, gesturing to his chin with long brown fingers. I just waved my hand. There was toothpaste crusted all over my face, I discovered later. After a few months of sloppy, half-asleep patronage, the Egyptians started calling me “boss” and readily accepted my fifty cents when I asked for a loosie, which I did often. I could have gone to any number of places for coffee, but I liked the bodega. It was close, and the coffee was consistently bad, and I didn’t have to confront anyone ordering a brioche bun or no-foam latte. No children with runny noses or Swedish au pairs. No sterilized professionals, no people on dates. The bodega coffee was working-class coffee—coffee for doormen and deliverymen and handymen and busboys and housekeepers. The air in there was heavy with the perfume of cheap cleaning detergents and mildew. I could rely on the clouded freezer full of ice cream and popsicles and plastic cups of ice. The clear Plexiglas compartments above the counter were filled with gum and candy. Nothing ever changed: cigarettes in neat rows, rolls of scratch tickets, twelve different brands of bottled water, beer, sandwich bread, a case of meats and cheeses nobody ever bought, a tray of stale Portuguese rolls, a basket of plastic-wrapped fruit, a whole wall of magazines that I avoided. I didn’t want to read more than newspaper headlines. I steered clear of anything that might pique my intellect or make me envious or anxious. I kept my head down. Reva would show up at my apartment with a bottle of wine from time to time and insist on keeping me company. Her mother was dying of cancer. That, among many other things, made me not want to see her. “You forgot I was coming over?” Reva would ask, pushing her way past me into the living room and flipping on the lights. “We talked last night, remember?” I liked to call Reva just as the Ambien was kicking in, or the Solfoton, or whatever. According to her, I only ever wanted to talk about Harrison Ford or Whoopi Goldberg, which she said was fine. “Last night you recounted the entire plot of Frantic. And you did the scene where they’re driving in the car, with the cocaine. You went on and on.” “Emmanuelle Seigner is amazing in that movie.” “That’s exactly what you said last night.” I was both relieved and irritated when Reva showed up, the way you’d feel if someone interrupted you in the middle of suicide. Not that what I was doing was suicide. In fact, it was the opposite of suicide.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  lives, people spend a lot of their time daydreaming, imagining a future full of adventure, success, and romance. If you can create the illusion that through you they can live out their dreams, you will have them at your mercy. It is important to start slowly, gaining their trust, and gradually constructing the fantasy that matches their desires. Aim at secret wishes that have been thwarted or repressed, stirring up uncontrollable emotions, clouding their powers of reason. The perfect illusion is one that does not depart too much from reality, but has a touch of the unreal to it, like a waking dream, head the seduced to a point of confusion in which they can no longer tell the difference between illusion and reality. Fantasy in the Flesh In 1964, a twenty-year-old Frenchman named Bernard Bouriscout arrived in Beijing, China, to work as an accountant in the French embassy. His first weeks there were not what he had expected. Bouriscout had grown up in the French provinces, dreaming of travel and adventure. When he had been assigned to come to China, images of the Forbidden City, and of the gambling dens of Macao, had danced in his mind. But this Lovers and madmen have was Communist China, and contact between Westerners and Chinese was such seething brains, \ Such almost impossible at the time. Bouriscout had to socialize with the other shaping fantasies, that Europeans stationed in the city, and what a boring and cliquish lot they apprehend \ More than cool reason ever comprehends. were. He grew lonely, regretted taking the assignment, and began making plans to leave. — W I L L I A M SHAKESPEARE, A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S Then, at a Christmas party that year, Bouriscout's eyes were drawn to a DREAM young Chinese man in a corner of the room. He had never seen anyone Chinese at any of these affairs. The man was intriguing: he was slender and short, a bit reserved, but he had an attractive presence. Bouriscout went up He was not a sex person. and introduced himself. The man, Shi Pei Pu, proved to be a writer of He was like . . . somebody Chinese-opera librettos who also taught Chinese to members of the who had come down from the clouds. He was not French embassy. Aged twenty-six, he spoke perfect French. Everything human. You could not say about him fascinated Bouriscout; his voice was like music, soft and whis- he was a man friend or a pery, and he left you wanting to know more about him. Bouriscout, al- woman friend; he was somebody different though usually shy, insisted on exchanging telephone numbers. Perhaps Pei anyway. . . . You feel he Pu could be his Chinese tutor. was only a friend who was They met a few days later in a restaurant. Bouriscout was the only coming from another planet and so nice also, so

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Idly I glanced at the tray. On a yolk-stained plate there was a crumpled envelope. It had contained something, since one edge was torn, but there was no address on it—nothing at all, save a phony armorial design with “Ponderosa Lodge” in green letters; thereupon I performed a chassé-croisé with Mary, who was in the act of bustling out again—wonderful how fast they move and how little they do, those rumpy young nurses. She glowered at the envelope I had put back, uncrumpled. “You better not touch,” she said, nodding directionally. “Could burn your fingers. ” Below my dignity to rejoin. All I said was: “ Je croyais que c’était un bill—not a billet doux .” Then, entering the sunny room, to Lolita: “ Bonjour, mon petit .” “Dolores,” said Mary Lore, entering with me, past me, through me, the plump whore, and blinking, and starting to fold very rapidly a white flannel blanket as she blinked: “Dolores, your pappy thinks you are getting letters from my boy friend. It’s me (smugly tapping herself on the small gilt cross she wore) gets them. And my pappy can parlay-voo as well as yours.” She left the room. Dolores, so rosy and russet, lips freshly painted, hair brilliantly brushed, bare arms straightened out on neat coverlet, lay innocently beaming at me or nothing. On the bed table, next to a paper napkin and a pencil, her topaz ring burned in the sun. “What gruesome funeral flowers,” she said. “Thanks all the same. But do you mind very much cutting out the French? It annoys everybody.” Back at the usual rush came the ripe young hussy, reeking of urine and garlic, with the Deseret News , which her fair patient eagerly accepted, ignoring the sumptuously illustrated volumes I had brought. “My sister Ann,” said Mary (topping information with after-thought), “works at the Ponderosa place.” Poor Bluebeard. Those brutal brothers. Est-ce que tu ne m’aimes plus, ma Carmen ? She never had. At the moment I knew my love was as hopeless as ever—and I also knew the two girls were conspirators, plotting in Basque, or Zemfirian, against my hopeless love. I shall go further and say that Lo was playing a double game since she was also fooling sentimental Mary whom she had told, I suppose, that she wanted to dwell with her fun-loving young uncle and not with cruel melancholy me.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  Life was fragile and fleeting and one had to be cautious, sure, but I would risk death if it meant I could sleep all day and become a whole new person. And I figured I was smart enough to know in advance if the pills were going to kill me. I’d start having premonition nightmares before that happened, before my heart failed or my brain exploded or hemorrhaged or pushed me out my seventh- story window. I trusted that everything was going to work out fine as long as I could sleep all day. • • • I’D MOVED INTO MY apartment on East Eighty-fourth Street in 1996, a year after I graduated from Columbia. By summer 2000, I still hadn’t had a single conversation with any of my neighbors—almost four years of complete silence in the elevator, each awkward ride a performance of hypnotized spaceout. My neighbors were mostly fortysomething married people without children. Everyone was well-groomed, professional. A lot of camel-hair coats and black leather briefcases. Burberry scarves and pearl earrings. There were a few loudmouthed single women my age I saw from time to time gabbing on their cell phones and walking their teacup poodles. They reminded me of Reva, but they had more money and less self- loathing, I would guess. This was Yorkville, the Upper East Side. People were uptight. When I shuffled through the lobby in my pajamas and slippers on my way to the bodega, I felt like I was committing a crime, but I didn’t care. The only other slovenly people around were elderly Jews with rent- controlled apartments. But I was tall and thin and blond and pretty and young. Even at my worst, I knew I still looked good. My building was eight stories high, concrete with burgundy awnings, an anonymous facade on a block otherwise lined with pristine town houses, each with its own placard warning people not to let their dogs piss on their stoops because it would damage the brownstone. “Let us honor those who came before us, as well as those who will follow,” one sign read. Men took hired cars to work downtown, and women got Botox and boob jobs and vaginal “cinches” to keep their pussies tight for their husbands and personal trainers, or so Reva told me. I had thought the Upper East Side could shield me from the beauty pageants and cockfights of the art scene in which I’d “worked” in Chelsea.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  "Why are you avoiding because I like it," or, "I love soup." The critics went wild with their interme?" But all he heard pretations: "An art like Warhol's is necessarily parasitic upon the myths of were his own words echoed its time," one wrote; another, "The decision not to decide is a paradox that back. Still he persisted, deceived by what he took to is equal to an idea which expresses nothing but then gives it dimension." be another's voice, and The show was a huge success, establishing Warhol as a leading figure in a said, "Come here, and let new movement, pop art. us meet!" Echo answered: "Let us meet!" Never In 1963, Warhol rented a large Manhattan loft space that he called the again would she reply more Factory, and that soon became the hub of a large entourage—hangers-on, willingly to any sound. To actors, aspiring artists. Here, particularly at night, Warhol would simply make good her words she came out of the wood and wander about, or stand in a corner. People would gather around him, fight made to throw her arms for his attention, throw questions at him, and he would answer, in his non-round the neck she loved: committal way. But no one could get close to him, physically or mentally; but he fled from her, crying he would not allow it. At the same time, if he walked by you without givas he did so, " A w a y with these embraces! I would die ing you his usual "Oh, hi," you were devastated. He hadn't noticed you; before I would have you perhaps you were on the way out. touch me!" . . . Thus Increasingly interested in filmmaking, Warhol cast his friends in his scorned, she concealed herself in the woods, hiding movies. In effect he was offering them a kind of instant celebrity (their her shamed face in the "fifteen minutes of fame"—the phrase is Warhol's). Soon people were shelter of the leaves, and competing for roles. He groomed women in particular for stardom: Edie ever since that day she dwells in lonely caves. Yet Sedgwick, Viva, Nico. Just being around him offered a kind of celebrity by still her love remained association. The Factory became the place to be seen, and stars like Judy firmly rooted in her heart, Garland and Tennessee Williams would go to parties there, rubbing elbows and was increased by the with Sedgwick, Viva, and the bohemian lower echelons whom Warhol had pain of having been rejected. . . . • Narcissus befriended. People began sending limos to bring him to parties of their had played with her own; his presence alone was enough to turn a social evening into a scene— affections, treating her as he even though he would pass through in near silence, keeping to himself and had previously treated other spirits of the waters and leaving early. the woods, and his male

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Umbrella points dripping into their shoes. They couldn’t move backward or forward. A mob of people stuck there, clogging the aisles. Paix dans le monde , said a high, electronically amplified voice. There is nothing worse than the smell of wet fur. He’s home in Washington Heights. His father has died. He feels nothing. It’s funny that he feels nothing. When people die you are not supposed to feel nothing. I told you I felt nothing, why do you keep asking? Because I have to know you. You never lost anyone. You never had anyone die. Is that why you hate me? We were on relief. You were on Central Park West when we were on relief. Is that my fault? Do you know that Chinese funeral home on Pell Street? When people die they go back to their own. Racists in death. He never believed in God. He never went to church. They said the prayers in Chinese. And I thought: my God, I don’t understand a word. The coffin was open. That’s important. Otherwise you don’t want to believe in death. Psychologically sound. Seems gruesome, though. Then the relatives came and took the last of our money. The business will provide, they said, but the business folded. I was a junior in high school. I could go to work when I graduated, the welfare lady said. But I thought: then I’ll wind up a waiter. And I can’t even be a waiter in a Chinese restaurant because I don’t know Chinese. I’ll be a tool, I thought, a poor slob. I have to go to college. Meanwhile you were on Central Park West. And you were in Cambridge for weekends. In medical school I was feeding laboratory animals. Christmas night. Everyone went out. I was in the lab feeding the goddamn rats. She is lying beside him very still. She touches herself to prove she’s not dead. She thinks of the first two weeks of her broken leg. She used to masturbate constantly then to convince herself that she could feel something besides pain. Pain was a religion then. A total commitment. She runs her hands down her belly. Her right forefinger touches the clitoris while the left forefinger goes deep inside her, pretending to be a penis. What does a penis feel, surrounded by those soft, collapsing caves of flesh? Her finger is too small. She puts in two and spreads them. But her nails are too long. They scratch. What if he wakes up? Maybe she wants him to wake up and see how lonely she is. Lonely, lonely, lonely. She moves her fingers to that rhythm, feeling the two inside get creamy and the clitoris get hard and red. Can you feel colors in your fingertips? This is what red feels like. The inner cave feels purple.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  his sash. • Presently he forced to return home and she had had to stay on alone for some while be-raises the lattice, and the fore she could join him. Now she was lonely, and had little money, and was two lovers stand together by depressed by her squalid circumstances—after all, she had been raised as a the side door while he tells her how he dreads the lady. She answered the ad. coining day, which will The gentleman turned out to be Casanova, and what a gentleman he keep them apart; then he was. The room he offered was nice, and the rent was low; he asked only for slips away. The lady watches him go, and this occasional companionship. Miss Pauline moved in. They played chess, went moment of parting will riding, discussed literature. He was so well-bred, polite, and generous. A se-remain among her most rious and high-minded girl, she came to depend on their friendship; here charming memories. • was a man she could talk to for hours. Then one day Casanova seemed Indeed, one's attachment to a man depends largely on changed, upset, excited: he confessed that he was in love with her. She was the elegance of his leave-going back to Portugal soon, to rejoin her lover, and this was not what she taking. When he jumps wanted to hear. She told him he should go riding to calm down. out of bed, scurries about the room, tightly fastens Later that evening she received news: he had fallen from his horse. Feel-his trouser sash, rolls up ing responsible for his accident, she rushed to him, found him in bed, and the sleeves of his court fell into his arms, unable to control herself. The two became lovers that cloak, overrobe, or hunting costume, stuffs his night, and remained so for the rest of Miss Pauline's stay in London. Yet belongings into the breast when it came time for her to leave for Portugal, he did not try to stop her; of his robe and then briskly instead, he comforted her, reasoning that each of them had offered the secures the outer sash— one other the perfect, temporary antidote to their loneliness, and that they really begins to hate him. would be friends for life. — THE PILLOW BOOK OF SEI SHONAGON, TRANSLATED AND Some years later, in a small Spanish town, a young and beautiful girl EDITED BY IVAN M O R R I S

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  He was not in fact very handsome, and his wealth was more than offset by sheltered from the swells \ his bad reputation. His success was strategic: he isolated his victims, work-There in the still canals \ Those drowsy ships that ing so slowly and subtly that they did not notice it. The intensity of his at- dream of sailing forth; \ It tention made a woman feel that in his eyes, at that moment, she was the is to satisfy \ Your least only woman in the world. This isolation was experienced as pleasure; the desire, they ply \ Hither through all the waters of woman did not notice her growing dependence, how the way he filled up the earth. \ The sun at her mind with his attention slowly isolated her from her friends and her close of day \ Clothes the milieu. Her natural suspicions of the man were drowned out by his intoxi- fields of hay, \ Then the cating effect on her ego. Aly Khan almost always capped off his seductions canals, at last the town entire \ In hyacinth and by taking the woman to some enchanted place on the globe—a place that gold: \ Slowly the land is he knew well, but where the woman felt lost. rolled \ Sleepward under a Do not give your targets the time or space to worry about, suspect, or sea of gentle fire. \ There, there is nothing else but resist you. Flood them with the kind of attention that crowds out all other grace and measure, \ thoughts, concerns, and problems. Remember—people secretly yearn to be Richness, quietness, and led astray by someone who knows where they are going. It can be a plea- pleasure. sure to let go, and even to feel isolated and weak, if the seduction is done —CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, slowly and gracefully. "INVITATION TO THE VOYAGE," THE FLOWERS OF EVIL, TRANSLATED BY RICHARD Put them in a spot where they have no place to go, and WILBUR they will die before fleeing. —SUN-TZU Keys to Seduction The people around you may seem strong, and more or less in control of their lives, but that is merely a facade. Underneath, people are more brittle than they let on. What lets them seem strong is the series of nests and safety nets they envelop themselves in—their friends, their families, their daily routines, which give them a feeling of continuity, safety, and control. Suddenly pull the rug out from under them, drop them alone into some foreign place where the familiar signposts are gone or scrambled, and you will see a very different person.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  class list of Ramsdale School: it is most notable for the way it mirrors the artist who created it (see her class at … school ff.), and for “Flashman, Irving,” who suffers quietly, the only Jew in a class of Gentiles (see Irving). “waterproof”: When Jean Farlow notices that H.H. has gone swimming with his watch on, Charlotte reassures her, and dreamily relishes a miracle of modern technology: “ ‘Waterproof,’ said Charlotte softly, making a fish mouth.”. The word is also the clue H.H. uses to torment the reader who strains to learn the identity of Lolita’s abductor (see Waterproof), and one is thus reminded that Lolita is a very special kind of detective story (see Lo-lee-ta). in slow motion … Humbert’s gifts: Lolita is remembered as an illusory creature in a dream, rather than as the object of H.H.’s lust (see here), and the allusion to his gifts recalls his desperate bribery as well as its results. the pictures … of Gaston Godin: furtive love is invoked; like the artists whose portraits dominate his garret, Gaston is clearly homosexual. See large photographs. the Kasbeam barber: he talks of his son, dead for thirty years, as though he were still alive (see here). Lolita playing tennis: if ever H.H. succeeds in “fix[ing] once for all the perilous magic of nymphets,” it is in this scene. the hospital at Elphinstone … irretrievable Dolly Schiller dying in Gray Star: Nabokov is referring to Lolita by her married name. Twin deaths are recorded: Lolita “dies” for H.H. when Quilty steals her from the hospital (here) and “dies” for Nabokov when the book is completed, and her image is irretrievable. But Lolita does not die in the book; as H.H. says, “I wish this memoir to be published only when Lolita is no longer alive.” Her creator points beyond the novel’s fictive time into the future, for he would agree with H.H.’s closing statement that art “is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.” It is important to note that none of these “secret points” is exclusively sexual. Rather, the images and characters all formulate varying states of isolation, loss, obsession, and ecstasy which generalize H.H.’s consuming passion; the concluding “co-ordinate,” after all, places in their midst the author, butterfly net firmly in hand.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  And then I felt desperately lonely. So I stuck my arm out and I grasped onto someone—maybe it was Ping Xi, maybe it was a wakefulness outside myself—and that other hand steadied me somehow as I fell past whole galaxies, mercurial waves of light strobing through my body, blinding me over and over, my brain throbbing from the pressure, my eyes leaking as though each teardrop shed a vision of my past. I felt the wetness trickle down my neck. I was crying. I knew that. I could hear myself gasp and whimper. I focused on the sound and then the universe narrowed into a fine line, and that felt better because there was a clearer trajectory, so I traveled more peacefully through outer space, listening to the rhythm of my respiration, each breath an echo of the breath before, softer and softer, until I was far enough away that there was no sound, there was no movement. There was no need for reassurance or directionality because I was nowhere, doing nothing. I was nothing. I was gone. • • • ON JUNE 1, 2001, I came to in a cross-legged seated position on the living room floor. Sunlight was needling through the blinds, illuminating crisscrossed planes of yellow dust that blurred and waned as I squinted. I heard a bird chirp. I was alive. • • • AS I’D REQUESTED BACK in January, Ping Xi had laid out a set of clothes for me on the dining table: sneakers, track pants, T-shirt, zip-up hoodie. My credit cards and driver’s license, passport, birth certificate, and a thousand dollars cash were in the envelope I’d sealed and given him to hold. There was a bottle of Evian, an apple in a plastic bag from the grocery store, and a sample-size tube of Neutrogena sunscreen—a thoughtful touch. The table had been cleared of all the Post-it notes, which I appreciated, but then I found the cluster in the trash, like a tossed-out bouquet of daisies. I picked one up and read it: “Don’t forget: clothes, shoes, the envelope, keys. Buy me some sunscreen, please.” And then on another one, “Thanks, good luck.” A smiley face. My old white fur coat hung on the hook by the front door. A Post-it note stuck to the wall read: “When I bought this for you, it was simply because I wanted you to have it. I’ll really miss working with you. PX.” The door was unlocked. I got dressed, put the coat on, went out and down the elevator to the lobby and made my way dizzily toward the light exploding through the glass doors onto the street. “Miss?” I heard the doorman say. “Can you hear me?” Then the stiff rustle of his uniform pants as he squatted down and cradled my head in his hands.

• From Querelle (1953)

  That severe, at times almost suspicious look, a look that seems to pass judgment, with which the pederast appraises every young man he encounters, is really a brief, but intense meditation on his own loneliness. That instant (the duration of the glance) is filled with a concentrated and constant despair, with its own jagged frequency, sheathed in the fear of rebuff. "It would be so great ... ,"he thinks. Or, if he isn't thinking, it expresses itseU in his frown, in that black, condemning look. Whenever some part of his body happens to be naked, He (that is Quere11e, whose name the officer never writes downthis not merely for the sake of prudence as regards his fellow offi· cers and superiors, since in theii eyes the contents of his diary would be quite sufficient to damn him) starts examining it. He looks for blackheads, split nails, red pimples. Irritated when he can't find any, he invents some. As soon as he has nothing better to do, he becomes engrossed in this game. Tonight he is exam· ining his legs: their black, strong hairs are quite soft in spite of theii vigorous growth, and thus they create a kind of mist from foot to groin, which softens the roughness and abruptness, one might almost say, the stoniness of his muscles. It amazes me how such a virile trait can envelop his legs with such great sweetness. He amuses himself by applying a burning cigarette to his hairs and then bends over them to savor the scorched smell. He is not smiling any more than usual. His own body in repose is his great passion-a morose, nEJt an exultant passion. Bent over his body, he sees himself there. He examines it with an imaginary magni· lying glass. He observes its minuscule irregularities with the scm· to I JEAN GENET pulous attention of an entomologist studying the habits of insects. But as soon as He moves, what dazzling revenge his entire body takes, in the glory of its motionl He (Querelle)is never absent-minded, always attentive to what he is doing. Every moment of his life he rejects the dream. He is forever present. He never answers: "I was thinking of something else." And yet the childishness of his obvious preoccupations astonishes me. Hands in pockets, �ly, I would say to him, "Give me a little shove, just to knock the ash oil my cigarette," and he would let By and punch me on the shoulder. I shrug it oil. I should have been able to keep my sea legs or hang on to the gunwale, the ship wasn't rolling that hard, but quickly, and with pleasure, I took advantage of the ship's motion to sway and to allow myseH to be shifted along, always in his direction. I even managed to brush against his elbow. ·

• From Querelle (1953)

  Lysiane went on down. Robert rose. Lysiane again, and then Robert, finally decisive, imperious and urgent, took hold of her shoulders and pushed her down. She took his whole cock in her mouth and swallowed the jism. Robert made no sound : he was a man, he didn't '1et himself go." By the time her face had reappeared above the covers, the light of dawn came trickling in through the curtains that had not been drawn quite shut. She looked at Robert. He was calm, indifferent. Through the strands of hair falling over her face she smiled at him, such a sad smile that Robert kissed her to console her (she understood that, and it made her feel quite desperate ) . Then he got up. And then she knew, full force, that everything had changed : for the first time in her life, after making love-after making a male happy-she did not hasten to wash herself, to get' up with her lover and to use the bidet. The strangeness of such a situation houbled her: there she was, lying on the bed-having the bed all to herself-while Robert went to wash. Besides, what would she have had to wash? To rinse her mouth, to gargle, would have seemed ridiculous, after swallowing the spunk. She felt dirty. She watched Robert performing his ablutions, lathering 191 I QUERELLE his cock so its tip vanished from sight, then rinsing it, carefully drying it. A bizarre idea flashed into her mind, but did not amuse her overmuch : "He's afraid of getting poisoned by my mouth. It's he who spurts venom, and it's me who poisons him." She felt lonely, old. Robert went on washing himself at the porcelain hand basin. His muscles were in motion, jumping about in his shoulders, arms, calves. The daylight grew brighter. Madame Lysiane tried to visualize Querelle's body; she had only seen him in his sailor's uniform. '•It's the same . . . but that isn't possible, surely there's some part . . . maybe his prick is different . . . " (and we shall see the development of that symptom ) . She was very much alone and tired. Robert turned around, calm, solid, centered in his brother, centered in himself. She said : "\Vhy don't you open the curtains." It had been her intention to add the word "darling," but was prevented from it by a kind of humility arising out of her feeling of uncleanliness : she did not want to blemish this man, so radiant, so dear by virtue of the night's revelations and the gentling effect of sexual satisfaction, by any insulting intimacy.

• From Querelle (1953)

  All through the day they have toiled (servicemen, soldiers or sailors, never have that feeling of having toiled), blending their actions in a network of common endeavor, for the purposes of an achieved work like a visible, tightly drawn knot, and now they are returning. A shadowy friendship-shadowy to themunites them, and also a quiet hatred. Few of them are married, and the wives of those live some distance away. Toward six o'clock in the evening it is when the workmen pass through the iron gates of the Arsenal and leave the dockyard. They walk up in the direction of the railroad station where the canteens are, or do\vn the road to Recouvrance where they have their furnished rooms in cheap hotels. Most of them are Italians and Spaniards, though there are some North Africans and Frenchmen as well. It is in the midst of such a surfeit of fatigue, heavy muscles, virile lassitude, that Sublieutenant Seblon of the Vengeur loves to take his evening walk. They used to have this cannon permanently trained upon the penitentiary. Today the same cannon (its barrel only) stands a I JEAN GENET mounted upright in the middle of the same courtyard where once the convicts were mustered for the galleys. It is astonishing that turning criminals into sailors used to be regarded as a form of punishment. Went past La Feria. Saw nothing. Never any luck. Over in Recouvrance I caught a glimpse of an accordion-a sight I frequently see on board, yet never tire of watching-· . folding, unfolding on a sailor's thigh. Se brester, to brace oneself. Derives, no doubt, from bretteur, fighter: and so, relates to se quereller, to pick a fight. When I learn-if only from the newspaper-that some scandal is breaking, or when I'm just afraid that it may break upon the world, I make preparations to get away: I always believe that I shall be suspected of being the prime mover. I regard myself as a demon-ridden creature, merely because I have imagined certain subjects for scandal. As for the hoodlums I hold in my arms, tenderly kissing and caressing their faces before gently covering them up again in my sheets, they are no more than a kind of passing thrill and experiment combined. Mter having been so overwhelmed by the loneliness to which my inversion condemns me, is it really possible that I may some day hold naked in my arms, and continue to hold, pressed close to my body, those young men whose courage and hardness place them so high in my esteem that I long to throw myself at their feet and grovel before them? I dare hardly believe this, and tears well up in my eyes, to thank God for grant- 9 I QUERELLE ing me such happiness. My tears make me feel soft. I melt. My own cheeks still wet with tears, I revel in, and overflow with tenderness for, the Bat, hard cheekbones of those boys.

• From Querelle (1953)

  whom he could talk shop. A guy similar to him, his height, his build-well, his brother, as he sometimes wished, but only for a few seconds : his brother was too much of · a mirror imagehaving to his credit crimes different from those Querelle himself had comn1itted, but equally beautiful, as grave, as reprehensible. He did not exactly know how he could have recognized such a man in the street, by what outward signs, and sometimes his loneliness grew so great that he dreamed (but hardly, and very fleetingly) of giving himself up in order to be sent to prison, where he could meet some of the murderers that had been \vrittel) up in the newspapers. But he abandoned that notion quickly. Those murderers were of no interest-they had been stripped of their secrets. The yearning for such a miraculous friend was partly due to his close resemblance to his brother. Looking at Robert he asked himself whether he wasn't a criminal, too. He was afraid of that, and he wished it �ere true. He would have liked to be part of such a miracle in this world. But he feared it because he would then have lost his superiority over Robert. But now, in the abandoned prison, he was to meet a young fellow who had killed. The thought of it made h im feel tender. This assassin. was just an awkward kid, a murderer for nothing. An idiot. But thanks to Querelle he would be credited with a true murder as well, because the authorities assumed that the murdered sailor had been robbed as well. Even before seeing Gil again Querelle felt almost paternal toward him. He was going to entrust him with one of his murders. In any case Gil was just a dumb kid, he couldn't be the hoped-for buddy. These thoughts ( not in the definitive state we are reporting them in, but surging about formlessly) , rapid and shifting, self-destructing, one being reborn out of the other, were milling around in his body and limbs rather than in h is head. He was. walking along, elevated and buffeted by this gale of shapeless notions, none of which really stuck in his mind but left there a feeling of discomfort, insecurity and fear. But Querelle did not relinquish 166 I JEAN GENET his smile which kept him down to earth. Now Roger stopped, turned : "Wait here. I'll be back." Thus the kid departed on his diplomatic mission from an emperor to his own. lord, in order to make sure that all was prepared for this meeting between two great ones. Querelle's musings took a new tum. He had not expected this precautionary measure. He could not see an entrance to any cavern there. The path simply turned and disappeared behind a small mound. The trees were no denser nor less dense than before.

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  The model garage is mounted on a table Mr. F built. The entire display, including the table and model, is about five-and-a-half feet high. The roof of the scale model is about half laid, so that the pattern of rafters can be seen. Mr. F put a Ken doll on the model scaffold to show how the roofers worked. Ken is holding a tiny hammer. 24 Daily life here has an inertia that people believe in. In the city’s most recent opinion survey, 92 percent of the residents believe this suburb is a desirable place in which to live. Such is the attraction of suburbs. You look out your kitchen window to the bedroom window of your neighbor precisely fifteen feet away. 25 The distance between my house and yours is a separation the suburb’s designers carefully planned. It is one of the principal factors in determining the number of houses per acre in a subdivision. The number of houses per acre is the subdivision’s yield. This is a measure of its profitability, which is not the number of houses that can be sold, but the subdivision’s population density. Density is what developers sell to the builders of shopping centers. 26 The average number of houses per acre in prewar subdivisions had been about five. In the suburb where I live, begun in 1950, the number of houses per acre is eight. The houses were designed by an architect named Paul Duncan. 27 You leave the space between the houses uncrossed. You rarely go across the street, which is forty feet wide. You are grateful for the distance. It is as if each house on your block stood on its own enchanted island, fifty feet wide by one hundred feet long. People come and go from it, your parents mostly and your friends. Your parents arrive like pilgrims. But the island is remote. You occasionally hear the sounds of anger. You almost never hear the sounds of love. You hear, always at night, the shifting of the uprights, the sagging of ceiling joists, and the unpredictable ticking of the gas heater. 28 What is beautiful here? The calling of a mourning dove, and others answering from yard to yard. Perhaps this is the only thing beautiful here. 29 What more can you expect of me than the stories I am now telling? 30 In 1954, in the local newspaper: “The nearby areas are among the best protected in the United States against the damaging effects of atom and hydrogen bombs. This was brought out in reports yesterday from the Mutual Aid District, which has a protective arm around the newest city in America. There is a trained army of damage control people ready to leap to duty. Our speaker said, “We used to have about an hour to get ready from the time of the first alert until the time bombs would fall, then the time was 15 minutes or less.

• From Querelle (1953)

  Querelle was wandering about amongst the brambles. He could hear the delicate sound of the wind rustling through the tips of the grasses, familiar from the previous evening, after the murder. He felt no fear, no remorse either, and this will be less of a surprise once one realizes that Querelle had already accepted the fact that he carried the crime in · him-not that he was part of the crime. This calls for a brief explanation. If Querelle had suddenly found himself, with his �abitual responses to normal situations, in a transformed universe, he would have experienced a certain sense of loneliness, a certain fear: the awareness of being an alien. But, as he accepted it, the idea of the murder was more than familiar to him, it was merely an exhalation from his body, and he drenched the whole world with it. His actions were not without an echo. Thus Querelle felt a different sense of loneliness : that of his creative singularity. Let us emphasize, however, that we are describing a mechanism our hero used without being fully aware of it himself. He 131 I QUERELLE

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  The model garage is mounted on a table Mr. F built. The entire display, including the table and model, is about five-and-a-half feet high. The roof of the scale model is about half laid, so that the pattern of rafters can be seen. Mr. F put a Ken doll on the model scaffold to show how the roofers worked. Ken is holding a tiny hammer. 24 Daily life here has an inertia that people believe in. In the city’s most recent opinion survey, 92 percent of the residents believe this suburb is a desirable place in which to live. Such is the attraction of suburbs. You look out your kitchen window to the bedroom window of your neighbor precisely fifteen feet away. 25 The distance between my house and yours is a separation the suburb’s designers carefully planned. It is one of the principal factors in determining the number of houses per acre in a subdivision. The number of houses per acre is the subdivision’s yield. This is a measure of its profitability, which is not the number of houses that can be sold, but the subdivision’s population density. Density is what developers sell to the builders of shopping centers. 26 The average number of houses per acre in prewar subdivisions had been about five. In the suburb where I live, begun in 1950, the number of houses per acre is eight. The houses were designed by an architect named Paul Duncan. 27 You leave the space between the houses uncrossed. You rarely go across the street, which is forty feet wide. You are grateful for the distance. It is as if each house on your block stood on its own enchanted island, fifty feet wide by one hundred feet long. People come and go from it, your parents mostly and your friends. Your parents arrive like pilgrims. But the island is remote. You occasionally hear the sounds of anger. You almost never hear the sounds of love. You hear, always at night, the shifting of the uprights, the sagging of ceiling joists, and the unpredictable ticking of the gas heater. 28 What is beautiful here? The calling of a mourning dove, and others answering from yard to yard. Perhaps this is the only thing beautiful here. 29 What more can you expect of me than the stories I am now telling? 30 In 1954, in the local newspaper: “The nearby areas are among the best protected in the United States against the damaging effects of atom and hydrogen bombs. This was brought out in reports yesterday from the Mutual Aid District, which has a protective arm around the newest city in America. There is a trained army of damage control people ready to leap to duty. Our speaker said, “We used to have about an hour to get ready from the time of the first alert until the time bombs would fall, then the time was 15 minutes or less.

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  The woman has no one to saw her tree in two. She is advised, gently, to ask a neighbor. But she won’t. She says she no longer knows her neighbors well enough. 163 The developers subdivided the ten square miles they bought into forty individual tracts. Most were 157 acres. A few tracts were as small as 20 acres. The biggest tracts had 640 houses each. The families that moved into them averaged 4.2 persons, higher than the national average of 3.2 in 1953. That accounted for mom and dad and 2.2 children. The biggest tracts had a population of 2,400 as soon as the moving vans pulled away from the curb. 164 Families moved in at the rate of thirty-five a day. Life magazine recorded their arrival in a photo story. Don Rochlen, the publicist for the developers, staged the principal photograph. He offered local movers the chance to have one of their trucks pictured in Life . The companies provided more than a dozen moving vans. Rochlen positioned a van in the driveway of nearly every house along a block. He invited the homeowners who wanted to be in Life to recreate their moving day. Some brought a few chairs out of the house and set them below the tailgate of the moving van in their driveway. The Life photographer took the picture standing on top of one of the vans. The street, the moving vans, and the dwindling figures of parents and children recede into the distance. The enormous vans, their company names and telephone numbers painted on their sides, fill the foreground. When you call the picture service for Time and Life and mention the name of my city, the archivist will ask if you want to purchase the staged photograph of the moving vans. [image "Image" file=Image00013.jpg] 165 The Life story calculated the cost of moving into the new suburb. The writer chose an average couple. He said they paid $10,290 for their house, including options. He said they spent another $6,860 for furnishings and a new car. 166 The engineering plan estimated that the completed development would have a population of about seventy thousand. That was larger than the population of Tampa, Savannah, or South Bend. 167 At first, it wasn’t a city at all. The developers called it a “$250,000,000 planned community.” According to the engineering drawings, it was 105 acres of concrete sidewalks and 133 miles of paved streets lined with 5,000 concrete light poles. These were paid for by the three developers. It was the service roads that paralleled the major streets, to keep traffic out of residential neighborhoods. According to the sales brochure, it was two coats of paint on the interior walls and wallpaper above the chair rail in the dining room. It was a garbage disposal in every kitchen.