Longing

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 Annotated Lolita (1991)

  She took the resilient and cold paper cup in her shadowy hand and gulped down its contents gratefully, her long eyelashes pointing cupward, and then, with an infantile gesture that carried more charm than any carnal caress, little Lolita wiped her lips against my shoulder. She fell back on her pillow (I had subtracted mine while she drank) and was instantly asleep again. I had not dared offer her a second helping of the drug, and had not abandoned hope that the first might still consolidate her sleep. I started to move toward her, ready for any disappointment, knowing I had better wait but incapable of waiting. My pillow smelled of her hair. I moved toward my glimmering darling, stopping or retreating every time I thought she stirred or was about to stir. A breeze from wonderland had begun to affect my thoughts, and now they seemed couched in italics, as if the surface reflecting them were wrinkled by the phantasm of that breeze. Time and again my consciousness folded the wrong way, my shuffling body entered the sphere of sleep, shuffled out again, and once or twice I caught myself drifting into a melancholy snore. Mists of tenderness enfolded mountains of longing. Now and then it seemed to me that the enchanted prey was about to meet halfway the enchanted hunter, that her haunch was working its way toward me under the soft sand of a remote and fabulous beach; and then her dimpled dimness would stir, and I would know she was farther away from me than ever. If I dwell at some length on the tremors and gropings of that distant night, it is because I insist upon proving that I am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel. The gentle and dreamy regions through which I crept were the patrimonies of poets— not crime’s prowling ground. Had I reached my goal, my ecstasy would have been all softness, a case of internal combustion of which she would hardly have felt the heat, even if she were wide awake. But I still hoped she might gradually be engulfed in a completeness of stupor that would allow me to taste more than a glimmer of her. And so, in between tentative approximations, with a confusion of perception metamorphosing her into eyespots of moonlight or a fluffy flowering bush, I would dream I regained consciousness, dream I lay in wait. In the first antemeridian hours there was a lull in the restless hotel night.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Again, the devil again,” Vronsky said, taking the hand she had laid on the table and kissing it. “Yes; but I can’t help it. You don’t know what I have suffered waiting for you. I believe I’m not jealous. I’m not jealous: I believe you when you’re here; but when you’re away somewhere leading your life, so incomprehensible to me....” She turned away from him, pulled the hook at last out of the crochet work, and rapidly, with the help of her forefinger, began working loop after loop of the wool that was dazzling white in the lamplight, while the slender wrist moved swiftly, nervously in the embroidered cuff. “How was it, then? Where did you meet Alexey Alexandrovitch?” Her voice sounded in an unnatural and jarring tone. “We ran up against each other in the doorway.” “And he bowed to you like this?” She drew a long face, and half-closing her eyes, quickly transformed her expression, folded her hands, and Vronsky suddenly saw in her beautiful face the very expression with which Alexey Alexandrovitch had bowed to him. He smiled, while she laughed gaily, with that sweet, deep laugh, which was one of her greatest charms. “I don’t understand him in the least,” said Vronsky. “If after your avowal to him at your country house he had broken with you, if he had called me out—but this I can’t understand. How can he put up with such a position? He feels it, that’s evident.” “He?” she said sneeringly. “He’s perfectly satisfied.” “What are we all miserable for, when everything might be so happy?” “Only not he. Don’t I know him, the falsity in which he’s utterly steeped?... Could one, with any feeling, live as he is living with me? He understands nothing, and feels nothing. Could a man of any feeling live in the same house with his unfaithful wife? Could he talk to her, call her ‘my dear’?” And again she could not help mimicking him: “‘Anna, _ma chère_; Anna, dear!’” “He’s not a man, not a human being—he’s a doll! No one knows him; but I know him. Oh, if I’d been in his place, I’d long ago have killed, have torn to pieces a wife like me. I wouldn’t have said, ‘Anna, _ma chère_’! He’s not a man, he’s an official machine. He doesn’t understand that I’m your wife, that he’s outside, that he’s superfluous.... Don’t let’s talk of him!...” “You’re unfair, very unfair, dearest,” said Vronsky, trying to soothe her. “But never mind, don’t let’s talk of him. Tell me what you’ve been doing? What is the matter? What has been wrong with you, and what did the doctor say?” She looked at him with mocking amusement. Evidently she had hit on other absurd and grotesque aspects in her husband and was awaiting the moment to give expression to them. But he went on: “I imagine that it’s not illness, but your condition. When will it be?”

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  His body was hot and pulsing; she could feel the beating of his heart, and without meaning to, she reached out to clasp his hips with her hands. The Prince kicked Prince Alexi's legs wide apart and taking Beauty's head roughly in his left hand so that he might kiss her, he drove his organ into Prince Alexi's anus. Prince Alexi moaned at the roughness and swiftness of the thrusts. Beauty felt the pressure against her as Prince Alexi was driven ever more quickly by it. The Prince had let her go, and she was crying. She held tight to Prince Alexi, and then the Prince gave his final thrust with a moan, his hands pressed to Prince Alexi's back, and he stood still letting his pleasure course through him. Beauty tried to keep herself quiet. Prince Alexi let her go, but not without a secret little kiss between her legs right on the crest of her pubic hair, and just as he was being drawn away, again, his dark eyes narrowed in a secret smile for her. "Mount him in the passage," said the Prince to the Squire. "And see no one satisfies him. Keep him in torment. Every quarter of the hour remind him of his duty to his Prince, but do not satisfy him." Prince Alexi was taken away. Beauty sat staring at the open door. But it was not over. The Prince reached out and taking her by the hair, told her to follow him. "On your hands and knees, my dear. That is always the way you will move through the castle," he said, "unless told otherwise." She hurried along, following him out and to the edge of the stairway. Halfway down was a broad landing from which one might see directly into the Great Hall. And on the landing was a stone statue that frightened Beauty. It was a pagan god of some sort with an erect phallus. It was onto this phallus that Prince Alexi was now thrust, his legs bound apart on the pedestal of the statue. His head was laid back on the statue's shoulder. He gave another moan as the phallus impaled him and then he lay still as Squire Felix bound his hands behind his back. The statue's right arm was upraised, the stone fingers of the hand forming a circle as if they had once clasped a knife or some other instrument. And now the Squire carefully positioned Prince Alexi's head on the shoulder of the statue beneath that hand. And through the clasped hand, he placed a leather phallus, anchoring it so that it fit into Prince Alexi's mouth.

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

  One beneath our tires, the other, above our heads.This symbol emerged from the script when I wrote: “Following the power lines to my friend, Kathryn, who lived in Woodstock, just off Route 28, where Sawkill Road turns into Zena Road.” Of course Pink Floyd’s pigs could feature as a symbol, or cars in general, or certain kinds of trees. Also, the enormous power poles that run through landscapes, that connect one community to another… . ABSTRACT ANTAGONIST In trying to visualize an abstract antagonist, I think I need to research what my antagonist is. What am I fighting in trying to relocate Kathryn? I love her, yes, and I miss her, but it’s more like I want to believe that my youth existed. Did these conversations even happen? My mind was so open as a teen, but the person I shared it with doesn’t seem to exist. Is my youth decaying, like that chair? Am I just going to become part of the forest floor—logs and branches and fungus and mulch? Is my time reaching for the skies like the forest canopy over? Who was I? And what is at this missed connection? I think of these huge telephone and electric wires moving across giant landscapes. Certainly these giant monsters should be able to help me find her? I’m not going to sketch this now, but I think I will plan to use these thoughts in my story.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  The Menninger Foundation, a psychiatric clinic, just for the heck of it. A patch of beautifully eroded clay; and yucca blossoms, so pure, so waxy, but lousy with creeping white flies. Independence, Missouri, the starting point of the Old Oregon Trail; and Abilene, Kansas, the home of the Wild Bill Something Rodeo. Distant mountains. Near mountains. More mountains; bluish beauties never attainable, or ever turning into inhabited hill after hill; south-eastern ranges, altitudinal failures as alps go; heart and sky-piercing snow-veined gray colossi of stone, relentless peaks appearing from nowhere at a turn of the highway; timbered enormities, with a system of neatly overlapping dark firs, interrupted in places by pale puffs of aspen; pink and lilac formations, Pharaonic, phallic, “too prehistoric for words” (blasé Lo); buttes of black lava; early spring mountains with youngelephant lanugo along their spines; end-of-the-summer mountains, all hunched up, their heavy Egyptian limbs folded under folds of tawny moth-eaten plush; oatmeal hills, flecked with green round oaks; a last rufous mountain with a rich rug of lucerne at its foot. Moreover, we inspected: Little Iceberg Lake, somewhere in Colorado, and the snow banks, and the cushionets of tiny alpine flowers, and more snow; down which Lo in red-peaked cap tried to slide, and squealed, and was snowballed by some youngsters, and retaliated in kind comme on dit . Skeletons of burned aspens, patches of spired blue flowers. The various items of a scenic drive. Hundreds of scenic drives, thousands of Bear Creeks, Soda Springs, Painted Canyons. Texas, a drought-struck plain. Crystal Chamber in the longest cave in the world, children under 12 free, Lo a young captive. A collection of a local lady’s homemade sculptures, closed on a miserable Monday morning, dust, wind, witherland. Conception Park, in a town on the Mexican border which I dared not cross. There and elsewhere, hundreds of gray hummingbirds in the dusk, probing the throats of dim flowers. Shakespeare, a ghost town in New Mexico, where bad man Russian Bill was colorfully hanged seventy years ago. Fish hatcheries. Cliff dwellings. The mummy of a child ( Florentine Bea’s Indian contemporary). Our twentieth Hell’s Canyon. Our fiftieth Gateway to something or other fide that tour book, the cover of which had been lost by that time. A tick in my groin. Always the same three old men, in hats and suspenders, idling away the summer afternoon under the trees near the public fountain. A hazy blue view beyond railings on a mountain pass, and the backs of a family enjoying it (with Lo, in a hot, happy, wild, intense, hopeful, hopeless whisper—“Look, the McCrystals, please, let’s talk to them, please”—let’s talk to them, reader!—“please! I’ll do anything you want, oh, please …”). Indian ceremonial dances, strictly commercial. ART: American Refrigerator Transit Company. Obvious Arizona, pueblo dwellings, aboriginal pictographs, a dinosaur track in a desert canyon, printed there thirty million years ago, when I was a child.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Having lived his life in the belief that something great could be just around every corner, did he realize for the first time that no more corners could be turned? Did he regret having raised a traveling daughter? —IN MY CHILDHOOD, I think my father and I often felt as if we were alone on our journey. My mother was lying down in the trailer behind us, and my sister was often away at school. As the captain of a very fragile ship, he looked to me for companionship, just as he had when I helped him wrap and unwrap antiques. Yet I wasn’t with him in the end. Was this a fate created by his choices? By mine? By both? I am left without answers. There are only questions I must answer for myself. What is the balance between home and the road? Hearth and horizon? Between what is and what could be? I only know that I can’t imagine my father living any other life. When I see him in my mind’s eye, he is always the traveler, eating in a diner instead of a dining room, taking his clothes out of a suitcase instead of a closet, looking for motel VACANCY signs instead of a home, making puns instead of plans, choosing spontaneity over certainty. Even his argument for persuading my mother to marry him was “It will only take a minute.” Going to a movie wasn’t planned. Instead of checking newspaper listings, he got in his car and drove around to look at every theater marquee within miles. It was years before I learned that other people didn’t just walk into a movie and stay until the story reached the same point again. I remember him choosing the fastest highway, not the scenic route my mother was always arguing for. When he swung through a state where he had friends, he never called in advance; he just dropped in. He didn’t even make plans for the poker and chess games he loved so much, but found them by happenstance. He took comfort in not knowing about the future. As he always said, “If I don’t know what will happen tomorrow, it could be wonderful!” When I imagine the sound of his voice on the phone, it’s only after I hear the words of a long-distance operator saying, “Please deposit…,” and the sound of coins dropping. He was a sailor, not a sailmaker. He wouldn’t stay behind in a port or an oasis while ships or caravans passed by. He was always moving on. I was twenty-seven when he died. I had lived and traveled in other countries, but hadn’t yet made traveling in this country my own. I think he knew that I was still regretting our wanderings.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  They were full up. They had one bathless basement room with four beds which they thought I would not want. Their note paper was headed: T HE E NCHANTED H UNTERS NEAR CHURCHES NO DOGS All legal beverages I wondered if the last statement was true. All? Did they have for instance sidewalk grenadine? I also wondered if a hunter, enchanted or otherwise, would not need a pointer more than a pew, and with a spasm of pain I recalled a scene worthy of a great artist: petite nymphe accroupie ; but that silky cocker spaniel had perhaps been a baptized one. No—I felt I could not endure the throes of revisiting that lobby. There was a much better possibility of retrievable time elsewhere in soft, richcolored, autumnal Briceland. Leaving Rita in a bar, I made for the town library. A twittering spinster was only too glad to help me disinter mid-August 1947 from the bound Briceland Gazette , and presently, in a secluded nook under a naked light, I was turning the enormous and fragile pages of a coffin-black volume almost as big as Lolita. Reader! Bruder! What a foolish Hamburg that Hamburg was! Since his supersensitive system was loath to face the actual scene, he thought he could at least enjoy a secret part of it—which reminds one of the tenth or twentieth soldier in the raping queue who throws the girl’s black shawl over her white face so as not to see those impossible eyes while taking his military pleasure in the sad, sacked village. What I lusted to get was the printed picture that had chanced to absorb my trespassing image while the Gazette’s photographer was concentrating on Dr. Braddock and his group. Passionately I hoped to find preserved the portrait of the artist as a younger brute. An innocent camera catching me on my dark way to Lolita’s bed—what a magnet for Mnemosyne! I cannot well explain the true nature of that urge of mine. It was allied, I suppose, to that swooning curiosity which impels one to examine with a magnifying glass bleak little figures—still life practically, and everybody about to throw up—at an early morning execution, and the patient’s expression impossible to make out in the print. Anyway, I was literally gasping for breath, and one corner of the book of doom kept stabbing me in the stomach while I scanned and skimmed … Brute Force and Possessed were coming on Sunday, the 24th, to both theatres. Mr. Purdom, independent tobacco auctioneer, said that ever since 1925 he had been an Omen Faustum smoker. Husky Hank and his petite bride were to be the guests of Mr. and Mrs. Reginald G. Gore, 58 Inchkeith Ave. The size of certain parasites is one sixth of the host. Dunkerque was fortified in the tenth century.

• From Querelle (1953)

  The Lieutenant watched him dusting the desk and folding away clothes. He was looking for a pretext for a chilling remark that would forestall any burgeoning of intimacy. The evening before he had gone to the forward sleeping quarters, ostensibly looking for Querelle to send him on some errand. He was hoping to see him come in or go out in his blue bell-bottoms and peacoat. There were only five men in the quarters, and they rose to their feet as he entered. "My steward isn't here?'' "No, sir. He's ashore." 208 I JEAN GENET "\Vhere does he sleep?" They pointed out his hammock, and like a wind-up toy Seblon walked stiffly over to it, as if to leave a letter or a note; mechanically, he fluffed up the pillow, as if wanting to take care of the dear absent creature's resting place. With that gesture, as unobtrusive and light as a dandelion seed in the wind, his tender feelings evaporated, and he went out again, feeling more upset than before. So that was where he used to sleep, who was never to lie by his side. He ascended to the bridge and lean t on the railing. Surrounded by the fog, facing the city, he was alone here and able to indulge in a reverie about Querelle on his evening out, drunk, laughing, singing with the girls, with other boys-colonial troops or dock workers he had met a quarter of an hour ago. Now and again he maybe walked out of the smokefilled cafe and went up to the old fortifications. That was where he soiled the bottoms of his trousers. In his imagination, the Lieutenant witnessed the scene. One day in passing a bunch of crewmen, one of whom was pointing out those stains to Querelle, the Lieutenant had heard him counter that remark by saying, with a devil-may-care air: "Those, those are my medals!" "His medals," indeed, presumably his spew. Querelle's face and body faded away. He disappeared, walking with long strides, proud of his frayed bell-bottoms with their stains at calf-height, gloriously impudent. He went back into the cafe, drank some more red wine, sang a couple of songs, laughed an'd shouted and went out again. Several times, at other ports of call as well as at Brest, the Lieutenant had gone ashore to prowl about the districts frequented by sailors, in hopes of somehow participating in the mysteries of shore leave, of catching a glimpse, somewhere in that noisy smoky crowd, of Querelle's shining face. But he owed it to his braid to walk along very quickly, and not to linger and look around except with the quickest of glances. Thus, he saw nothing; the bar and cafe windows were steamed up to the poi-nt of opaqueness, but what he guessed to be going on behind them was all the more exciting. 209 I QUERELLE 0 0 0

• From On Beauty (2005)

  lot easier to miss your deadline when Daddy’s the teacher J I read your one-liner query and then like a fool I searched for a further attachment (like, say, a letter???), but I guess you’re too busy/mad/ etc. to write. Well, I’m not. How’s the book going? Mom said you were having trouble getting going. Have you found a way to prove Rembrandt was no good yet? J The Kippses continue to grow on me. On Tuesday we all went to the theatre (the whole clan is home now) and saw a South African dance troupe, and then, going back on the ‘tube’, we started to hum one of the tunes from the show, and this became full-blown singing,  On Beauty with Carlene leading (she’s got a terrific voice) and even Monty joined in, because he’s not really the ‘self-hating psychotic’ you think he is. It was really kind of lovely, the singing and the train coming above ground and then walking through the wet back to this beautiful house and a curried chicken home-cooked meal. But I can see your face as I type this, so I’ll stop. Other news: Monty has honed in on the great Belsey lack: logic. He’s trying to teach me chess, and today was the first time in a week when I wasn’t beaten in under six moves, though I was still beaten of course. All the Kippses think I’m muddle-headed and poetic – I don’t know what they would say if they knew that among Belseys I’m practically Wittgenstein. I think I amuse them, though – and Carlene likes to have me around the kitchen, where my cleanliness is seen as a positive thing, rather than as some kind of anal-retentive syndrome . . . I have to admit, though, I do find it a little eerie in the mornings to wake up to this peaceful silence (people whisper in the hallways so as not to wake up other people) and a small part of my backside misses Levi’s rolled-up wet towel, just as a small part of my ear doesn’t know what to do with itself now Zora’s no longer screaming in it. Mom mailed me to tell me that Levi has upped the headwear to four (skullcap, baseball cap, hoodie, duffel hood) with earphones on – so that you can only see a tiny, tiny bit of his face around the eyes. Please kiss him there for me. And kiss Mom for me too, and remember that it’s her birthday a week from tomorrow. Kiss Zora and ask her to read Matthew 24. I know how she just loves a bit of Scripture every day. Love and peace in abundance, Jerome xxxxx

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  That is, everything suspenseful and mutable about the society of lovers had been eliminated in favor of an embrace as simple and unvarying (as eternal) as it had necessarily to be cold. Or perhaps I worried that if I had a real, living lover I’d wound him, subject him to all the rage I’d been saving up. Yes, I spent my days thinking about male bodies, each of which was as varied, as sequential as a long Chinese scroll through which the minuscule pilgrim travels in his straw hat, followed by a servant and a horse, now standing back from the steaming falls, now meditating cross-legged under a grass roof held up by bamboo poles as he surveys the valley filling up with mist or as he throws his head back in wild spiritual hilarity in response to the grandeur of the mountain or here, down here, where he’s picking at his rice in the company of monks in the long, narrow hall opened up to the sweet, gasped Oh! of the full moon and the long exhaled Ah-h-h of its reflection in the pond. If I could have lain in a bed beside any of these boys I jostled past every day, whose feet I had to sit on while they did sit-ups or whom I sat beside, shoulder to shoulder, during chapel, I would have explored him just as the Chinese pilgrim traversed that majestic, intimidating terrain to whose rhythm he hoped to adjust himself and from which he expected to take a wisdom not quite tenable. At night I’d pull the covers up to my chin in the cold and listen to the momentary gust of laughter outside as a master and his wife bade farewell to another couple after a late dinner (“Thanks, Rachel.” “So long, Hal”). Car doors slammed. A cold motor struggled to turn over. Success. Lights on. Motor in gear. Final farewells. Then a handkerchief of brightness was drawn across my ceiling, next the magician pulled a beige out of the white, a gray out of the beige, finally black from gray. On that ultimate cloth I tossed the dice: I began to meditate. I threw back the blankets, took off my pajama top and, shivering but determined to master mere flesh, sat cross-legged on my cot. I knew nothing of bonafide Oriental procedures, but I made up my own from scraps of information I’d gathered here and there, overheard table talk at the banquet of bliss. Not limber enough to hook my feet over my thighs, I contented myself with a drooping lotus and pressed my hands together in my lap, thumb tip to thumb tip, second joints of my fingers united (the “people” inside the “church” of a more Christian childhood game).

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  His rough breeches were against her sex, and she found herself pressing against him only to have him guide her gently back as if silently reproving her. "Kiss me," he said, and such a shock of pleasure went through her at the closing of his open mouth over hers that she was almost unable to stand, letting her weight fall against him. He turned her toward the bed. "That's enough for tonight," he said softly. "We have a hard journey tomorrow." And he told her to lie down. It occurred to her suddenly that he was not going to take her. She heard him moving to the door, and this pleasure between her legs became suddenly an agony. But all she could do was cry softly into the pillow. She tried to keep her sex from touching the sheets because she feared that if it did she could not resist some undulating movement. And she felt sure he was watching her. Of course he'd meant her to feel pleasure. But without his permission? She lay rigid, afraid, crying. A moment later she heard voices behind her. "Bathe her and put a soothing ointment on her buttocks," the Prince was saying, "and you may talk to the Princess if you like, and she to you. You are to treat her with the utmost respect," said the Prince and then she heard his steps dying away. She lay too afraid to look behind her. The door was closed again. She heard steps. She heard the cloth in the basin of water. "It's me, dearest Princess," said a woman's voice, and she realized it was a young woman, a woman her own age, and could only be the Innkeeper's daughter. She buried her face in the pillow. "This is unbearable," she thought, and suddenly with all her heart she hated the Prince, but she was far too humiliated to think of it. She felt the girl's weight on the bed beside her, and just the rough cloth of her apron brushing against Beauty's buttocks caused the sore and stinging flesh to ache more keenly. She felt as if her buttocks must be enormous, though she knew they were not, or giving off some terrible light with all their redness. The girl would feel their heat; this girl, of all girls, who had tried so hard to please the Prince by spanking her far harder than the Prince had realized. The wet cloth stroked her shoulders, her arms, her neck. It stroked her back and then her thighs and legs and feet, the girl carefully avoiding her sex and the soreness. But then after the girl had wrung out the cloth, she touched the buttocks lightly. "O, I know it hurts, dearest Princess," she confided. "I'm so sorry, but what could I do when the Prince commanded me?"

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  The women, all singing, began to come close to Levin, and he felt as though a storm were swooping down upon him with a thunder of merriment. The storm swooped down, enveloped him and the haycock on which he was lying, and the other haycocks, and the wagon-loads, and the whole meadow and distant fields all seemed to be shaking and singing to the measures of this wild merry song with its shouts and whistles and clapping. Levin felt envious of this health and mirthfulness; he longed to take part in the expression of this joy of life. But he could do nothing, and had to lie and look on and listen. When the peasants, with their singing, had vanished out of sight and hearing, a weary feeling of despondency at his own isolation, his physical inactivity, his alienation from this world, came over Levin. Some of the very peasants who had been most active in wrangling with him over the hay, some whom he had treated with contumely, and who had tried to cheat him, those very peasants had greeted him good-humoredly, and evidently had not, were incapable of having any feeling of rancor against him, any regret, any recollection even of having tried to deceive him. All that was drowned in a sea of merry common labor. God gave the day, God gave the strength. And the day and the strength were consecrated to labor, and that labor was its own reward. For whom the labor? What would be its fruits? These were idle considerations—beside the point. Often Levin had admired this life, often he had a sense of envy of the men who led this life; but today for the first time, especially under the influence of what he had seen in the attitude of Ivan Parmenov to his young wife, the idea presented itself definitely to his mind that it was in his power to exchange the dreary, artificial, idle, and individualistic life he was leading for this laborious, pure, and socially delightful life. The old man who had been sitting beside him had long ago gone home; the people had all separated. Those who lived near had gone home, while those who came from far were gathered into a group for supper, and to spend the night in the meadow. Levin, unobserved by the peasants, still lay on the haycock, and still looked on and listened and mused. The peasants who remained for the night in the meadow scarcely slept all the short summer night. At first there was the sound of merry talk and laughing all together over the supper, then singing again and laughter.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  After taking leave of her guests, Anna did not sit down, but began walking up and down the room. She had unconsciously the whole evening done her utmost to arouse in Levin a feeling of love—as of late she had fallen into doing with all young men—and she knew she had attained her aim, as far as was possible in one evening, with a married and conscientious man. She liked him indeed extremely, and, in spite of the striking difference, from the masculine point of view, between Vronsky and Levin, as a woman she saw something they had in common, which had made Kitty able to love both. Yet as soon as he was out of the room, she ceased to think of him. One thought, and one only, pursued her in different forms, and refused to be shaken off. “If I have so much effect on others, on this man, who loves his home and his wife, why is it _he_ is so cold to me?... not cold exactly, he loves me, I know that! But something new is drawing us apart now. Why wasn’t he here all the evening? He told Stiva to say he could not leave Yashvin, and must watch over his play. Is Yashvin a child? But supposing it’s true. He never tells a lie. But there’s something else in it if it’s true. He is glad of an opportunity of showing me that he has other duties; I know that, I submit to that. But why prove that to me? He wants to show me that his love for me is not to interfere with his freedom. But I need no proofs, I need love. He ought to understand all the bitterness of this life for me here in Moscow. Is this life? I am not living, but waiting for an event, which is continually put off and put off. No answer again! And Stiva says he cannot go to Alexey Alexandrovitch. And I can’t write again. I can do nothing, can begin nothing, can alter nothing; I hold myself in, I wait, inventing amusements for myself—the English family, writing, reading—but it’s all nothing but a sham, it’s all the same as morphine. He ought to feel for me,” she said, feeling tears of self-pity coming into her eyes. She heard Vronsky’s abrupt ring and hurriedly dried her tears—not only dried her tears, but sat down by a lamp and opened a book, affecting composure. She wanted to show him that she was displeased that he had not come home as he had promised—displeased only, and not on any account to let him see her distress, and least of all, her self-pity. She might pity herself, but he must not pity her. She did not want strife, she blamed him for wanting to quarrel, but unconsciously put herself into an attitude of antagonism. “Well, you’ve not been dull?” he said, eagerly and good-humoredly, going up to her. “What a terrible passion it is—gambling!”

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  The rosy baby with her black eyebrows and hair, her sturdy red little body with tight goose-flesh skin, delighted Darya Alexandrovna in spite of the cross expression with which she stared at the stranger. She positively envied the baby’s healthy appearance. She was delighted, too, at the baby’s crawling. Not one of her own children had crawled like that. When the baby was put on the carpet and its little dress tucked up behind, it was wonderfully charming. Looking round like some little wild animal at the grown-up big people with her bright black eyes, she smiled, unmistakably pleased at their admiring her, and holding her legs sideways, she pressed vigorously on her arms, and rapidly drew her whole back up after, and then made another step forward with her little arms. But the whole atmosphere of the nursery, and especially the English nurse, Darya Alexandrovna did not like at all. It was only on the supposition that no good nurse would have entered so irregular a household as Anna’s that Darya Alexandrovna could explain to herself how Anna with her insight into people could take such an unprepossessing, disreputable-looking woman as nurse to her child. Besides, from a few words that were dropped, Darya Alexandrovna saw at once that Anna, the two nurses, and the child had no common existence, and that the mother’s visit was something exceptional. Anna wanted to get the baby her plaything, and could not find it. Most amazing of all was the fact that on being asked how many teeth the baby had, Anna answered wrong, and knew nothing about the two last teeth. “I sometimes feel sorry I’m so superfluous here,” said Anna, going out of the nursery and holding up her skirt so as to escape the plaything standing in the doorway. “It was very different with my first child.” “I expected it to be the other way,” said Darya Alexandrovna shyly. “Oh, no! By the way, do you know I saw Seryozha?” said Anna, screwing up her eyes, as though looking at something far away. “But we’ll talk about that later. You wouldn’t believe it, I’m like a hungry beggar woman when a full dinner is set before her, and she does not know what to begin on first. The dinner is you, and the talks I have before me with you, which I could never have with anyone else; and I don’t know which subject to begin upon first. _Mais je ne vous ferai grâce de rien_. I must have everything out with you.”

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  She had now been two days in Petersburg. The thought of her son never left her for a single instant, but she had not yet seen him. To go straight to the house, where she might meet Alexey Alexandrovitch, that she felt she had no right to do. She might be refused admittance and insulted. To write and so enter into relations with her husband—that it made her miserable to think of doing; she could only be at peace when she did not think of her husband. To get a glimpse of her son out walking, finding out where and when he went out, was not enough for her; she had so looked forward to this meeting, she had so much she must say to him, she so longed to embrace him, to kiss him. Seryozha’s old nurse might be a help to her and show her what to do. But the nurse was not now living in Alexey Alexandrovitch’s house. In this uncertainty, and in efforts to find the nurse, two days had slipped by. Hearing of the close intimacy between Alexey Alexandrovitch and Countess Lidia Ivanovna, Anna decided on the third day to write to her a letter, which cost her great pains, and in which she intentionally said that permission to see her son must depend on her husband’s generosity. She knew that if the letter were shown to her husband, he would keep up his character of magnanimity, and would not refuse her request.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Years later, I saw a movie about a prostituted woman in Paris who saves money to take her young daughter on a vacation by the sea. As their train full of workers rounds a cliff, the shining limitless waters spread out beneath them—and suddenly all the passengers begin to laugh, throw open the windows, and toss out cigarettes, coins, lipstick: everything they thought they needed a moment before. This was the joy I felt as a wandering child. Whenever the road presents me with its greatest gift—a moment of unity with everything around me—I still do. —ANOTHER TRUTH OF MY EARLY WANDERINGS is harder to admit: I longed for a home. It wasn’t a specific place but a mythical neat house with conventional parents, a school I could walk to, and friends who lived nearby. My dream bore a suspicious resemblance to the life I saw in movies, but my longing for it was like a constant low-level fever. I never stopped to think that children in neat houses and conventional schools might envy me. When I was ten or so, my parents separated. My sister was devastated, but I had never understood why two such different people were married in the first place. My mother often worried her way into depression, and my father’s habit of mortgaging the house, or otherwise going into debt without telling her, didn’t help. Also, wartime gas rationing had forced Ocean Beach Pier to close, and my father was on the road nearly full time, buying and selling jewelry and small antiques to make a living. He felt he could no longer look after my sometimes-incapacitated mother. Also, she wanted to live near my sister, who was finishing college in Massachusetts, and now I was old enough to be her companion. We rented a house in a small town, and spent most of one school year there. It was the most conventional life we would ever lead. After my sister graduated and left for her first grown-up job, my mother and I moved to East Toledo and an ancient farmhouse where her family had once lived. As with all inferior things, this part of the city was given an adjective while the rest stole the noun. What once had been countryside was crowded with the small houses of factory workers. They surrounded our condemned and barely habitable house on three sides, with a major highway undercutting its front porch and trucks that rattled our windows. Inside this remnant of her childhood, my mother disappeared more and more into her unseen and unhappy world. I was always worried that she might wander into the streets, or forget that I was in school and call the police to find me—all of which sometimes happened. Still, I thought I was concealing all this from my new friends.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  Its parts most living and exalted are so uniform that I know not to tell which Beatrice chose for my position. But she, who saw my longing, smiling began—so glad that God seemed joying in her counterance— “The nature of the universe which stilleth the centre and moveth all the rest around, hence doth begin as from its starting point. 13 And this heaven hath no other where than the divine mind wherein is kindled the love which rolleth it and the power which it sheddeth. Light and love grasp it in one circle, as doth it the others, and this engirdment he only who doth gird it understandeth. Its movement by no other is marked out; but by it all the rest are measured, as ten by half and fifth. And how Time in this same vessel hath its roots, and in the rest its leaves, may now be manifest to thee. O greed, who so dost abase mortals below thee, that not one hath power to draw his eyes forth from thy waves! ’Tis true the will in men hath vigour yet; but the continuous drench turneth true plum fruits into cankered tubers. Faith and innocence are found only in little children; then each of them fleeth away before the cheeks are covered. Many a still lisping child observeth fast, who after, when his tongue is free, devoureth every food in every month; and many a lisping child loveth and hearkeneth to his mother, who after, when his speech is full, longeth to see her buried. So blackeneth at the first aspect the white skin of his fair daughter who bringeth morn and leaveth evening. 14 And thou, lest thou make marvel at it, reflect that there is none to govern upon earth, wherefore the human household so strayeth from the path. But, ere that January be all unwintered by that hundredth part neglected upon earth, 15 so shall these upper circles roar that the fated season so long awaited shall turn round the poops where are the prows, so that the fleet shall have straight course; and true fruit shall follow on the flower.” 1. Changed from white to red. 2. The charge of usurpation and the declaration that the Papacy is vacant doubtless bear a specific reference to the measures which Boniface took to force his predecessor Celestine V (cf. Inf. iii) to resign. See Villani, viii. 5. But Dante does not consistently regard Boniface as a no-pope. Cf. Purg. xx. 3. A selection of the Popes of the first three centuries. 4. Refers to the Papal hostility to the adherents of the Empire. 5. Perhaps a specific reference to the struggle of Boniface with the Colonna family. Cf. Inf. xxvii. Villani, viii. 23. 6. Clement V (1305-1314) was a Gascon, and John XXII (1316-1334) a native of Cahors. 7. Cf. Canto vi, note 7, and Conv. iv. 5. 8. The Sun is in Capricorn in parts of December and January. 9.

• From Querelle (1953)

  Does it mean that love is a murderer's lair? And could it mean that "He" is leading me on? And ''for that"? At the point of my going under, "in Querelle," will I still be able to reach the alarm siren? (\Vhile the other characters are incapable of lyricism which we are using in order to recreate them more vividly within you, Lieutenant Seblon himself is solely responsible for what flows from his pen.) I would love it-oh, ! deeply wish for it!-if, under his regal garb, "He" were simply a hoodlum! To throw myself at his feet/ To kiss his toesl In order to find "Him" again, and counting on absence and the emotions aroused by returning to give me courage to address "Him" by his first name, I pretended to be leaving on a long furlough. But I wasn't able to resist. I come back. I see "Him" again, and I give "Him" my orders, almost vindictively. He could get away with anything. Spit m e in the face, call me by my first name. "You're getting overly familiar/" I'd say to "Him." The blow he would strike m e with his fist, right in the mouth, 24 I JEAN GENET would make my ears ring with this oboe murmur: "My vulgarity is regal, and it accords me every right." By giving the ship's barber a curt order to clip his hair very short, Lieutenant Seblon hoped to achieve a he-mannish ap-pearance-not so much to save face as to be able to move more freely among the handsome lads. He did not know, then, that he caused them to shrink back from him. He was a well-built man, wide-shouldered, but he felt within himself the presence of his own femininity, sometimes contained in a chickadee's egg, the size of a pale blue or pink sugared almond, but sometimes brimming over to flood his entire body with its milk. He knew this so well that he himself believed in this quality of weakness, this frailty of an enormous, unripe nut, whose pale white interior consisted of the stuff children call milk. The Lieutenant knew to his great chagrin that this core of femininity could erupt in an instant and manifest itself in his face, his eyes, his fingertips, and mark every gesture of his by rendering it too gentle. He took care never to be caught counting the stitches of any imaginary needlework, scratching his head with an imaginary knitting needle. Nevertheless he betrayed himself in the eyes of all men whenever he gave the order to pick up arms, for he pronounced the word "arms" with such grace that his whole person seemed to be kneeling at the grave of some beautiful lover. He never smiled. His fellow officers considered him stem and somewhat puritanical, but they also believed they were able to· discern a quality of stupendous refinement underneath that hard shell, and the belief rested on the way in which, despite himself, he pronounced certain words.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  When she was parted from him, and all this latter time when she had been feeling a fresh rush of love for him, she had pictured him as he was at four years old, when she had loved him most of all. Now he was not even the same as when she had left him; he was still further from the four-year-old baby, more grown and thinner. How thin his face was, how short his hair was! What long hands! How he had changed since she left him! But it was he with his head, his lips, his soft neck and broad little shoulders. “Seryozha!” she repeated just in the child’s ear. He raised himself again on his elbow, turned his tangled head from side to side as though looking for something, and opened his eyes. Slowly and inquiringly he looked for several seconds at his mother standing motionless before him, then all at once he smiled a blissful smile, and shutting his eyes, rolled not backwards but towards her into her arms. “Seryozha! my darling boy!” she said, breathing hard and putting her arms round his plump little body. “Mother!” he said, wriggling about in her arms so as to touch her hands with different parts of him. Smiling sleepily still with closed eyes, he flung fat little arms round her shoulders, rolled towards her, with the delicious sleepy warmth and fragrance that is only found in children, and began rubbing his face against her neck and shoulders. “I know,” he said, opening his eyes; “it’s my birthday today. I knew you’d come. I’ll get up directly.” And saying that he dropped asleep. Anna looked at him hungrily; she saw how he had grown and changed in her absence. She knew, and did not know, the bare legs so long now, that were thrust out below the quilt, those short-cropped curls on his neck in which she had so often kissed him. She touched all this and could say nothing; tears choked her. “What are you crying for, mother?” he said, waking completely up. “Mother, what are you crying for?” he cried in a tearful voice. “I won’t cry ... I’m crying for joy. It’s so long since I’ve seen you. I won’t, I won’t,” she said, gulping down her tears and turning away. “Come, it’s time for you to dress now,” she added, after a pause, and, never letting go his hands, she sat down by his bedside on the chair, where his clothes were put ready for him. “How do you dress without me? How....” she tried to begin talking simply and cheerfully, but she could not, and again she turned away. “I don’t have a cold bath, papa didn’t order it. And you’ve not seen Vassily Lukitch? He’ll come in soon. Why, you’re sitting on my clothes!” And Seryozha went off into a peal of laughter. She looked at him and smiled.