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.

Page 29 of 170 · 20 per page

• 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.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  As intensely as Anna had longed to see her son, and long as she had been thinking of it and preparing herself for it, she had not in the least expected that seeing him would affect her so deeply. On getting back to her lonely rooms in the hotel she could not for a long while understand why she was there. “Yes, it’s all over, and I am again alone,” she said to herself, and without taking off her hat she sat down in a low chair by the hearth. Fixing her eyes on a bronze clock standing on a table between the windows, she tried to think. The French maid brought from abroad came in to suggest she should dress. She gazed at her wonderingly and said, “Presently.” A footman offered her coffee. “Later on,” she said. The Italian nurse, after having taken the baby out in her best, came in with her, and brought her to Anna. The plump, well-fed little baby, on seeing her mother, as she always did, held out her fat little hands, and with a smile on her toothless mouth, began, like a fish with a float, bobbing her fingers up and down the starched folds of her embroidered skirt, making them rustle. It was impossible not to smile, not to kiss the baby, impossible not to hold out a finger for her to clutch, crowing and prancing all over; impossible not to offer her a lip which she sucked into her little mouth by way of a kiss. And all this Anna did, and took her in her arms and made her dance, and kissed her fresh little cheek and bare little elbows; but at the sight of this child it was plainer than ever to her that the feeling she had for her could not be called love in comparison with what she felt for Seryozha. Everything in this baby was charming, but for some reason all this did not go deep to her heart. On her first child, though the child of an unloved father, had been concentrated all the love that had never found satisfaction. Her baby girl had been born in the most painful circumstances and had not had a hundredth part of the care and thought which had been concentrated on her first child. Besides, in the little girl everything was still in the future, while Seryozha was by now almost a personality, and a personality dearly loved. In him there was a conflict of thought and feeling; he understood her, he loved her, he judged her, she thought, recalling his words and his eyes. And she was forever—not physically only but spiritually—divided from him, and it was impossible to set this right.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  His father and his teacher were both displeased with Seryozha, and he certainly did learn his lessons very badly. But still it could not be said he was a stupid boy. On the contrary, he was far cleverer than the boys his teacher held up as examples to Seryozha. In his father’s opinion, he did not want to learn what he was taught. In reality he could not learn that. He could not, because the claims of his own soul were more binding on him than those claims his father and his teacher made upon him. Those claims were in opposition, and he was in direct conflict with his education. He was nine years old; he was a child; but he knew his own soul, it was precious to him, he guarded it as the eyelid guards the eye, and without the key of love he let no one into his soul. His teachers complained that he would not learn, while his soul was brimming over with thirst for knowledge. And he learned from Kapitonitch, from his nurse, from Nadinka, from Vassily Lukitch, but not from his teachers. The spring his father and his teachers reckoned upon to turn their mill-wheels had long dried up at the source, but its waters did their work in another channel. His father punished Seryozha by not letting him go to see Nadinka, Lidia Ivanovna’s niece; but this punishment turned out happily for Seryozha. Vassily Lukitch was in a good humor, and showed him how to make windmills. The whole evening passed over this work and in dreaming how to make a windmill on which he could turn himself—clutching at the sails or tying himself on and whirling round. Of his mother Seryozha did not think all the evening, but when he had gone to bed, he suddenly remembered her, and prayed in his own words that his mother tomorrow for his birthday might leave off hiding herself and come to him. “Vassily Lukitch, do you know what I prayed for tonight extra besides the regular things?” “That you might learn your lessons better?” “No.” “Toys?” “No. You’ll never guess. A splendid thing; but it’s a secret! When it comes to pass I’ll tell you. Can’t you guess!” “No, I can’t guess. You tell me,” said Vassily Lukitch with a smile, which was rare with him. “Come, lie down, I’m putting out the candle.” “Without the candle I can see better what I see and what I prayed for. There! I was almost telling the secret!” said Seryozha, laughing gaily. When the candle was taken away, Seryozha heard and felt his mother. She stood over him, and with loving eyes caressed him. But then came windmills, a knife, everything began to be mixed up, and he fell asleep. Chapter 28

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  And when he had advanced so far ahead of us, that mine eyes made such pursuit of him, as my mind did of his words, the laden and green boughs of another tree 11 appeared to me, and not very far away, for I was but then come round thither. I saw people beneath it lifting up their hands, and crying out something towards the foliage, like spoilt and greedy children, who beg, and he of whom they beg, answers not, but to make their longing full keen, holds what they desire on high, and hides it not. Then they departed as though undeceived; and now we came to the great tree which mocks so many prayers and tears. “Pass onward without drawing nigh to it; higher up is a tree which was eaten of by Eve, and this plant was raised from it.” Thus amid the branches some one spake; wherefore Virgil and Statius and I, close together, went forward by the side which rises. “Remember,” he said, “the accursed ones 12 formed in the clouds, who when gorged, fought Theseus with their double breasts; and the Hebrews who showed themselves soft at the drinking, wherefore Gideon would have them not for comrades when he came down the hills to Midian.” 13 Thus we passed close against one of the two margins, hearing sins of gluttony, once followed by woeful gains. Then, spread out along the solitary way, full a thousand paces and more bore us onward, each in contemplation without a word. “What go ye thus pondering on, ye lone three,” a sudden voice did say; wherefore I startled as frightened and timid beasts do. I raised my head to see who it was, and never in a furnace were glasses or metals seen so glowing and red, as I saw one who said: “If it please you to mount upward, here must a turn be given; hence goeth he who desires to go for peace.” His countenance had bereft me of sight; wherefore I turned me back to my Teachers, like one who goeth according as he listens. And as the May breeze, herald of the dawn, stirs and breathes forth sweetness, all impregnate with grass and with flowers, such a wind felt I give on the middle of my brow, and right well I felt the pinions move which wafted ambrosial fragrance to my senses; and I heard say: “Blessed are they who are illumined by so much grace, that the love of taste kindleth not too great desire in their breasts, and who hunger always so far as is just.” 14 1. For Piccarda, see Par. iii. 2. Bonagiunta Orbicciani degli Overardi, a Lucchese poet, who was still living in 1296. See note 9. 3. Simon de Brie was Pope, as Martin IV, from 1281 till 1285.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  Within itself the eternal pearl received us, as water doth receive a ray of light, though still itself uncleft. If I was body, 2 —and if here we conceive not how one dimension could support another, which must be, if body into body creep,— The more should longing enkindle us to see that Essence wherein we behold how our own nature and God unified themselves. There what we hold by faith shall be beheld, not demonstrated, but self-known in fashion of the initial truth which man believeth. 3 I answered: “Lady, devoutly as I most may, do I thank him who hath removed me from the mortal world. But tell me what those dusky marks upon this body, which down there on earth make folk to tell the tale of Cain?” 4 She smiled a little, and then: “And if,” she said, “the opinion of mortals goeth wrong, where the key of sense doth not unlock, truly the shafts of wonder should no longer pierce thee; since even when the senses give the lead thou see’st reason hath wings too short. But tell me what thou, of thyself, thinkest concerning it?” And I: “That which to us appeareth diverse in this high region, I hold to be produced by bodies rare and dense.” 5 And she: “Verily, thou shalt see thy thought plunged deep in falsity, if well thou hearken to the argument which I shall make against it. The eighth sphere revealeth many lights to you, the which in quality, as eke in quantity, may be observed of diverse countenance. If rare and dense alone produced this thing, one only virtue, more or less or equally distributed, were in them all. Diverse virtues must needs be fruits of formal principles, the which, save only one, would have no leave to be, upon thy reasoning. 6 Again, were rarity cause of that duskiness whereof thou makest question, either in some certain part, right through, thus stinted of its matter were this planet; or, like as a body doth dispose the fat and lean, would it alternate pages in its volume, Were the first true, ’twould be revealed in the eclipses of the sun, by the light shining through it, as it doth when hurled on aught else rare. 7 This is not; wherefore we have to see what of the other case, and if it chance that I make vain this also, thy thought will be refuted. If it be that this rare matter goeth not throughout, needs must there be a limit, from which its contrary doth intercept its passing on; and thence that other’s ray were so cast back, as colour doth return from glass which hideth lead behind it. Now thou wilt urge that the ray here is darkened rather than in other parts, because here it is recast from further back. From this plea experiment may disentangle thee, (if thou wilt make the proof) which ever is the spring of the rivers of your arts.

• From Querelle (1953)

  Roger went to see Gil every day. He brought him bread, butter, cheese, things he bought in a distant dairy close to the church of Saint-ivfartin, in a quarter where nobody knew him. Gil became more and more demanding. He knew that he was wealthy. His fortune, hidden close by, gave him sufficient authority to tyrannize Roger. He had finally become accustomed to his recluse existence, made himself comfortable in it, moved within its limits with total confidence. The day after his attack on the Lieutenant he tried to find out from Roger what the newspapers were saying. Querelle, however, had told him not to tell the young kid anything about these jobs. Not being able to tell him, nor to get anything out of him, Gil grew furious with Roger. Then he realized that the boy was withdrawing from him. "I've got to go now." ''Sure, sure. Now you're just dropping me!" "I am not dropping you, Gil. I come here every single day. But my old lady gives me a rough time whenever I come home 232 I JEAN GENET late. It wouldn't be so great if she decided to lock me up in the house." "Yeah, yeah, that's just bullshit. You know what I have to say about all that . . . But get me a liter of red wine tomorrow, all right?" "All right, I'll try." "I wasn't telling you to try. I told you to bring me a liter of the red." Roger did not feel in the least hurt by all this bullying. Like the pestiferous air in the cave, the bad temper emanating from Gil grew thicker every day, so that Roger was unable to distinguish the progression of its density. Had he still been in love, he would no doubt have found a vantage point from which to assess the changes in his friend's attitude, but now he just arrived there every evening like an automaton, obeying some kind of rite whose profound and imperious meaning has been forgotten. He did not even think of breaking out of this drudgery, he only thought about Robert's and ·Querelle's double countenance. He lived in the hope of one day encountering the brothers together. "I've seen Jo. He tells you not to worry. He said everything's hunky-dory. He'll come and. see you the next two or three days." "Where did you meet him?" "He was coming out of La Feria." "What the hell are you hanging out there for?" "I wasn't, I was just passing by . . . " "You've got no business there, it ain't even on your way. Maybe you're thinking of getting in with the tough guys, eh? That's no place for a little shitter like you, La Feria ain't." "I told you I just happened to walk past it, Gil." "Tell that to the Marines."

• From Querelle (1953)

  Belt and cartridge case of leather. Leggings. Bayonet in its scabbard. A palm tree. A tent. The face was hard, scornful. Scorning death. At eighteen! "To gently order these strong, proud boys to advance to their deaths! The torpedoed ship sinking slowly, with only myselfperhaps supported by this one Marine who cannot die without me next to him-standing in the prow, watching these beautiful boys c1Iown !" In French, the sinking of a ship is sombrer. Somberly. Are the other officers aware of my state, my emotional turmoil? I'm afraid of some of it seeping through even during my fulfilment of my duties, my contacts with them. This morning, my mind was literally haunted by notions such as young boys have, there were robbers, warriors of savage tribes, tough pimps, grinning and blood-spattered looters, and so forth. I didn't really visualize them so much as sensing them within me. All of a sudden they arranged themselves in tableaux that faded away again vezy quickly. These were, as I've said, young boys' fantasies, invading my mind for a second or two. To have him spread his thighs so that I can sit down between them, resting my arms on them as in a comfortable chair! 0 - 0 0 - 143 I QUERELLE A Navy Officer. As an adolescen t, even as an Ensign, I didn't realize what a perfect alibi a Navy career would give me. Remaining a bachelor seems so perfectly understandable. \Vomen don't ever ask you why you aren't married. They pity you for only knowing those brief affairs, never the durable fire. The sea. The solitude. "A woman in every port." No one bothers to enquire whether I have a fiancee. Not my fellow officers, nor my mother. We are traveling men. From the time I fell in love with Querelle I have become less of a disciplinarian. My love makes me more pliable. The more I love Querelle, the more the woman in me defines and refines herself and grieves over her lack of fulfilment. Faced with anything that has no bearing on my relationship with Querelle, my own misery, my secret frustrations cause m e just to stare at it and say: "What's the use of that?" Saw Admiral A . . . again. It seems he is a widower, has been so for more than twenty years. The big guy who fo11ows him around (it is his chauffeur, not an orderly ) is the glorious resurrection of his flesh. I come back from a ten-day mission. My meeting with Querene gave me a shock-I felt it even around m e, in the sunny air -a delicately tragic trauma. The entire day revolves, floats around a cen ter of luminous vapor: the gravity of this re-turn.

• From Querelle (1953)

  t4l I JEAN GENET 0 0 0 The Sailor is the one love of my life. One poster was so wonderful: a Marine, in white uniform. Belt and cartridge case of leather. Leggings. Bayonet in its scab bard. A palm tree. A tent . The face was hard, scornful. Scorning death . At eighteen! "To gently order these strong, proud boys to advance to their deaths! The torpedoed ship sinking slowly, with only myself perhaps supported by this one Marine who cannot die without me next to him-standing in the prow, watching these beautiful boys c1I own !" In French, the sinking of a ship is sombrer. Somberly. Are the other officers aware of my state, my emotional tur mo il? I'm afraid of some of it seeping through even during my fu lfilmen t of my duties, my contacts with them. This morning, my mind was literally haunted by notions such as young boys have, there were robbers, warriors of savage tri bes, tough pimps, grinning and blood-spattered looters, and so forth. I didn't really visualize them so much as sensing them within me. All of a sud den they arranged themselves in ta bleaux tha t fa ded away again vezy quickly. These were, as I 've said, young boys' fa ntasies, in vading my mind for a second or two. To have him spread his thighs so that I can sit down between th em, resting my arms on them as in a comfortable chair! 0- 0 0-

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  She gave the baby back to the nurse, let her go, and opened the locket in which there was Seryozha’s portrait when he was almost of the same age as the girl. She got up, and, taking off her hat, took up from a little table an album in which there were photographs of her son at different ages. She wanted to compare them, and began taking them out of the album. She took them all out except one, the latest and best photograph. In it he was in a white smock, sitting astride a chair, with frowning eyes and smiling lips. It was his best, most characteristic expression. With her little supple hands, her white, delicate fingers, that moved with a peculiar intensity today, she pulled at a corner of the photograph, but the photograph had caught somewhere, and she could not get it out. There was no paper-knife on the table, and so, pulling out the photograph that was next to her son’s (it was a photograph of Vronsky taken at Rome in a round hat and with long hair), she used it to push out her son’s photograph. “Oh, here is he!” she said, glancing at the portrait of Vronsky, and she suddenly recalled that he was the cause of her present misery. She had not once thought of him all the morning. But now, coming all at once upon that manly, noble face, so familiar and so dear to her, she felt a sudden rush of love for him. “But where is he? How is it he leaves me alone in my misery?” she thought all at once with a feeling of reproach, forgetting she had herself kept from him everything concerning her son. She sent to ask him to come to her immediately; with a throbbing heart she awaited him, rehearsing to herself the words in which she would tell him all, and the expressions of love with which he would console her. The messenger returned with the answer that he had a visitor with him, but that he would come immediately, and that he asked whether she would let him bring with him Prince Yashvin, who had just arrived in Petersburg. “He’s not coming alone, and since dinner yesterday he has not seen me,” she thought; “he’s not coming so that I could tell him everything, but coming with Yashvin.” And all at once a strange idea came to her: what if he had ceased to love her? And going over the events of the last few days, it seemed to her that she saw in everything a confirmation of this terrible idea. The fact that he had not dined at home yesterday, and the fact that he had insisted on their taking separate sets of rooms in Petersburg, and that even now he was not coming to her alone, as though he were trying to avoid meeting her face to face.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Seryozha looked intently at the teacher, at his scanty beard, at his spectacles, which had slipped down below the ridge on his nose, and fell into so deep a reverie that he heard nothing of what the teacher was explaining to him. He knew that the teacher did not think what he said; he felt it from the tone in which it was said. “But why have they all agreed to speak just in the same manner always the dreariest and most useless stuff? Why does he keep me off; why doesn’t he love me?” he asked himself mournfully, and could not think of an answer. Chapter 27 After the lesson with the grammar teacher came his father’s lesson. While waiting for his father, Seryozha sat at the table playing with a penknife, and fell to dreaming. Among Seryozha’s favorite occupations was searching for his mother during his walks. He did not believe in death generally, and in her death in particular, in spite of what Lidia Ivanovna had told him and his father had confirmed, and it was just because of that, and after he had been told she was dead, that he had begun looking for her when out for a walk. Every woman of full, graceful figure with dark hair was his mother. At the sight of such a woman such a feeling of tenderness was stirred within him that his breath failed him, and tears came into his eyes. And he was on the tiptoe of expectation that she would come up to him, would lift her veil. All her face would be visible, she would smile, she would hug him, he would sniff her fragrance, feel the softness of her arms, and cry with happiness, just as he had one evening lain on her lap while she tickled him, and he laughed and bit her white, ring-covered fingers. Later, when he accidentally learned from his old nurse that his mother was not dead, and his father and Lidia Ivanovna had explained to him that she was dead to him because she was wicked (which he could not possibly believe, because he loved her), he went on seeking her and expecting her in the same way. That day in the public gardens there had been a lady in a lilac veil, whom he had watched with a throbbing heart, believing it to be she as she came towards them along the path. The lady had not come up to them, but had disappeared somewhere. That day, more intensely than ever, Seryozha felt a rush of love for her, and now, waiting for his father, he forgot everything, and cut all round the edge of the table with his penknife, staring straight before him with sparkling eyes and dreaming of her. “Here is your papa!” said Vassily Lukitch, rousing him.

• From Querelle (1953)

  260 I JEAN GENET 0 0 0 The Lieutenant had never worried about Querelle's ever blackmailing him for money. True, the crewman was a sarcastic fellow, but he seemed devoid of that kind of cynicism: No more was Seblon able to replace the gun-toting false sailor's image with Querelle:s, much as he would have loved it. He would have met him and joined him in a battle, and in the midst of the struggle, in the time it takes to take hold and then let go again, they would have reached an understanding that would have enabled them to be better adversaries in the future. In moments of solitude the Lieutenant constructed a heroic dia logue they might have spoken then: it would have conveyed his inmost beauty to Querelle, made it visible to the young man's dazzled eyes. It was a short, harsh exchange, reduced to essen tials. Sovereign calm in his voice, the officer would have said: "Geo, you are mad. Put the revolver away. I wo n't tell any one about this." ''Just hand over the dough and you'll be all right." "No." "I'll shoot you." "Go ahead." Nights, the Lieutenant took long solitary walks on deck, avoiding his fellow officers, haunted by this dialogue and by his inability to continue and finish it. "Cowed by me, he throws the gun away. But then my heroism r e mains unknown. Or, still cowed, nevertheless he fires the gun, exactly out of respect for me, and trying to match my stature. But if he kills me, I just die a stupid death by the roadside. " After mulling it over for a long time, the Lieutenant chose this ending: "Querelle pulls the trigger, but in his excitement he misses, only wounding me." He would then return to the ship, but would not provide a description of Querelle (as he had given one of Gil). Thus he would have shown his superior strength to Querelle, and Querelle would have loved him for it.

• From Querelle (1953)

  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 smoke filled 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 dis tricts frequented by sailors, in hopes of somehow participating in the mysteries of shore leave, of catching a glimpse, some where 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.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Instead of either/or, I discovered a whole world of and. Long before all these divisions opened between home and the road, between a woman’s place and a man’s world, humans followed the crops, the seasons, traveling with their families, our companions, our animals, our tents. We built campfires and moved from place to place. This way of traveling is still in our cellular memory. Living things have evolved as travelers. Even migrating birds know that nature doesn’t demand a choice between nesting and flight. On journeys as long as twelve thousand miles, birds tuck their beaks under wings and rest on anything from ice floes to the decks of ships at sea. Then, once they arrive at their destination, they build a nest and select each twig with care. I wish the road had spared my father long enough to show him the possibilities of and instead of either/or. If he’d been around when I finally created a home, I might have had something to teach him, as well as time to thank him for the lessons he taught me. I wish my mother hadn’t lived an even more polarized life of either/or. Like so many women before her—and so many even now—she never had a journey of her own. With all my heart, I wish she could have followed a path she loved. I pause for a moment as I write these words. My hand, long-fingered like my father’s, rests on my desk where I do work I love, in rooms that were my first home—and probably will be my last. I’m surrounded by images of friends and chosen objects that knew someone’s touch before mine—and will know others after I am gone. I notice that my middle finger lifts and falls involuntarily, exactly as my father’s did. I recognize in myself, as I did in him, a tap of restlessness. It’s time to leave—there is so much out there to do and say and listen to. I can go on the road—because I can come home. I come home—because I’m free to leave. Each way of being is more valued in the presence of the other. This balance between making camp and following the seasons is both very ancient and very new. We all need both. My father did not have to trade dying alone for the joys of the road. My mother did not have to give up a journey of her own to have a home. Neither do I. Neither do you.

• From Querelle (1953)

  233 I QUERELLE might tum out to be more exciting than his own. In any case, not being attached to Gil any longer, Roger could move about unscathed and participate in festivities from which he, Gil, was excluded, in the rooms of the brothel where the two brothers came and went, from one room to another (whose arrangement and furnishings he mistakenly visualized as corresponding to the dilapidated fa�de of the building), looking for each other, finding each other (and their meeting would give rise to a command) only to part again, to lose themselves and look for each other in the great to-and-fro of women dressed in veils and lace. Gil managed to see the two brothers. standing there, holding hands and smiling at the boy. They had the same smile. They extended an ann to reach for the boy, who came along willingly, and held him between themselves for a moment. At home, Roger could never n1ention the two brothers, couldn't talk about a pimp and a thief. One word about such people and his sister would have reported it to his mother. His infatuation, however, created such violent pressure inside him that he was running the risk of giving himself away at any moment. In any case, he thought about them in such awkward and childlike terms; one day he exclaimed : "The Gallant Knights!", But he found it hard to imagine himself involved in numer ous deeds of derring-do in their company. Only certain images formed in his mind, and in these he saw himself offering the re united brothers something-he did not know what it was, only that it belonged to the most precious part of himself. He even had the notion of transmitting a double image of his own face and body to Jo and Robert, on a mission to make them accept this friendship the unique and essential person, who remained in his room all the wh ile, was offering them. Querelle returned one evening when he knew Roger would not be there. "Well, old hoss, \ve're all set. Everything's ready. I got you a ticket to Bordeaux. The only thing is, you have to catch that train at Quimper."

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Night had fallen by then, and the world was a smooth black sheet. Across the road and across the fields, they could make out the yellow-orange light in a house as narrow as Simon’s. The yard was patchy with snow and ice. The goats had bedded down in their pen in the back, though sometimes their calls lifted up and swept overhead like the softening static at the start of a radio station. More distantly, Hartjes could hear whining, baying, and felt a flurry of homesickness. When he had lived with his grandparents during the murky middle years of his childhood, he had raised three dogs into brilliant hunters, Gristle, Bone, and Marrow. He had run his hand along their spines, teaching them to be still, to be quiet, to wait. He’d felt their hearts beating, slowing, growing inured to the length of time it took for the world to show its belly. They had been mutts when he found them, three butterscotch pups clinging to life, drenched in ants and beetles. But he’d rinsed them clean and loved on them the way nobody had loved on him. He had taught them to hunt, to be keen and swift as they stalked and waited. He’d taught them to fetch at first with dolls and dummies filled with clay and rocks, realistic weights, and later they’d brought him the real thing, ducks wet and warm with blood. Pheasant. Squirrel. Whatever Hartjes trained his rifle on, they pinned and cornered and stalled. They could tree anything, the three of them, even turkeys, frothing with rage, bodies humming, ready to take flight. But the dogs calling in the distance were not his dogs. The dogs baying in the distance slept inside and ran from their shadows. Gristle, Bone, and Marrow would have eaten those dogs alive, because Hartjes had loved them enough to teach them how to fight, how to maim, how to kill, and the people here, in this place, let their dogs sleep in their beds, as though that were love. They ate slowly because the venison was hot. Hartjes dug his spoon into the soft potatoes and the carrots. A light dangled overhead, and in the surface of the broth he saw their shadowed, inverted selves. Hartjes had on his flannel coat, and Simon had wrapped himself in a green wool blanket. The heater, on its lowest setting, droned like cicadas. There was just enough heat to remind them how cold it was. Simon’s spoon clacked against the side of his bowl. He coughed into his shoulder. Hartjes studied the flaking skin along his jaw, the rosettes of sores spotting his cheeks and the primitive cliff of his forehead. “Do you ever get lonely out here?” “You ask that every time.” “Because you never answer,” Hartjes said. “Sometimes.

• 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 My Life on the Road (2015)

  Besides horizontal travel across the country, you will find two other kinds: vertical travel into the past of this North American continent that you and I are walking around on, and cultural travel between and among very different people and places. Because this book is all about stories, I hope some here might lead you to tell your own and also to get hooked on the revolutionary act of listening to others. I wish I could imitate the Chinese women letter writers of at least a thousand years ago. Because they were forbidden to go to school like their brothers, they invented their own script—called nushu, or “women’s writing”—though the punishment for creating a secret language was death.5 They wrote underground letters and poems of friendship to each other, quite consciously protesting the restrictions of their lives. As one wrote, “Men leave home to brave life in the outside world. But we women are no less courageous. We can create a language they cannot understand.” This correspondence was so precious to them that some women were buried with their letters of friendship, yet enough survive for us to see that they wrote in a slender column down the center of each page, leaving wide margins as spaces for a correspondent to add her own words. “There have been great societies that did not use the wheel,” as Ursula Le Guin wrote, “but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.” If I could, I would leave an open space for your story on every page. [image "My father, Leo Steinem, in his favorite photograph, 1949. From Gloria Steinem’s personal collection" file=Image00007.jpg] MY FATHER, LEO STEINEM, IN HIS FAVORITE PHOTOGRAPH, 1949. FROM GLORIA STEINEM’S PERSONAL COLLECTION [image "I." file=Image00008.jpg] My Father’s FootstepsI come by my road habits honestly. There were only a few months each year when my father seemed content with a house-dwelling life. Every summer, we stayed in the small house he had built across the road from a lake in rural Michigan, where he ran a dance pavilion on a pier over the water. Though there was no ocean within hundreds of miles, he had named it Ocean Beach Pier, and given it the grandiose slogan “Dancing Over the Water and Under the Stars.” On weeknights, people came from nearby farms and summer cottages to dance to a jukebox. My father dreamed up such attractions as a living chess game, inspired by his own love of chess, with costumed teenagers moving across the squares of the dance floor. On weekends, he booked the big dance bands of the 1930s and 1940s into this remote spot. People might come from as far away as Toledo or Detroit to dance to this live music on warm moonlit nights. Of course, paying the likes of Guy Lombardo or Duke Ellington or the Andrews Sisters meant that one rainy weekend could wipe out a whole summer’s profits, so there was always a sense of gambling.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  They put their heads down over their blue books. There were five rows of five desks each, and the boys had spread out across the room in a weird sequence. One row was filled entirely, then the next left empty, and then a couple in the third and fourth rows, and the last row also filled. It was like a riddle or SAT question: 5, 0, 2, 3, 5. Out of habit, Lionel shifted the numbers around, first in increasing order, then decreasing order. He calculated the sum, the average, the sum of squares, the sum of cubes, the standard deviation. He leaned against the table at the front of the room, running the numbers through a string of permutations. It made him homesick for math—for the library where he’d worked through his first-year coursework in the graduate program, going through two or three legal pads of calculations a week, checking his work against WolframAlpha, graphing ridiculous functions and sending screenshots to the friend who had hosted the potluck last night. He missed the cramped TA office the math department had provided to him and the others who taught Calc I, and if they were unlucky, remedial algebra—those sullen, unhappy faces of the probationary students who didn’t know even the most basic of things. Lionel longed for that period of his life, when he made grilled cheeses and sat in the back patio of his building, trying to solve the problems that were sometimes pinned to the bulletin board in the department office. That smell like burning coffee when someone had left the machine on in the shared kitchen, the hum of the big printer and scanner. He missed the long talks with his advisor, Dr. Lauk, who had taken Lionel in after that summer program because Lionel was also interested in complex differential geometry, though Lionel didn’t like analysis and had struggled through his analytic geometry class. He even missed the mean, brutal hours of Dr. Nonan’s seminar on geometric isoforms and topology, the one class where he had gotten the minimum required B. Lionel remembered staring at the grade with great incredulity. No one in grad school got Bs unless something had gone wildly wrong. He remembered being summoned when that fall semester’s grade posted, and hearing Dr. Lauk say, with kindness that verged on condescension, “He can be a challenging instructor. You’ll do better next time.” The implication being that Lionel must retake the course and get an A because the subject matter intersected so deeply with his advisor’s specialty. There were moments in the spring semester when Lionel wondered if it was for his own benefit that he was retaking the class or if it was because he was being moved around a chessboard he couldn’t see, his graduate education a pawn passed between two egos. But even that he missed—the messy, ridiculous departmental politics, the rituals, all of it. But in his second year, Lionel had tried to kill himself. And now that was over.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  “You might run a vacuum over it if you’ve got one, but I think you’ll live.” Charles leaned down to kiss Lionel then, gripped the backs of his thighs and lifted him easily. “Your knee,” Lionel said. “You’re not a physio.” Lionel wrapped his legs around Charles and let himself be carried back to bed. Charles stomped in the boots. “Stay,” Lionel said later, when Charles was getting dressed. “Can’t,” Charles said. “I have to go.” “Stay.” “I’ll be back,” Charles said. He kissed Lionel’s forehead and then his mouth and he was gone out the door. Lionel drew his blanket around himself and lay down. “I have to go anyway,” Lionel said, and the only answer was the quiet of his apartment, the soft rattle of snow striking the kitchen sink. LITTLE BEAST Sylvia has blown up her life. She slices potatoes into screaming hot water and chants, “Take it back, take it back, take it back.” Out in the living room: regular thudding. She has agreed to let the twins have fries for lunch if they are quiet and good while they color. The boy’s whine trails each of the thuds. She’s been played. Sylvia drains the hot water, and then plunges the sliced potatoes into an ice bath. The water numbs her fingers and wrists. Starch turns the water hazy, and the potatoes go slick like something hauled out of the sea. When her hands turn white, she pours off the cold water and blots the potatoes dry. Then she rubs them down with salt and garlic butter she made herself. And into the oven. She feels productive, virtuous. Her reward is to close her eyes for just a moment. She dips into the brief dark of her eyelids, feels that woozy elation like holding her breath and letting it go. She drifts, sways. She considers, not for the first time this week, Hammond, the breakup. The doomed trip they took up to see her mother last month, how they’d they fought all the way there and back. The farm had done nothing to ease their splintering. All they’d done was move the location of the argument, not defuse the argument itself. Then she’d left him and that was that. But now, standing in the kitchen, she considers the permanence of that choice and how easy it had been to make in the end. So swift. Like a bolt of lightning. There and gone, but behind it an acrid, burning trail.